Text Mark Jacobs
Every hero has an origin story, and Mary J. Blige’s is proof of the life-changing power of music. When she was just 17 years old, she sang Anita Baker’s “Caught Up in the Rapture” in a recording booth at the Galleria Mall in White Plains, New York. That cassette found its way to Andre Harrell at Uptown Records, who signed her as the label’s first female artist. “If Anita Baker, one of my favorite singers ever, hadn’t had that song and that album, Rapture, that got us through so much, I would not have found something I love that I wanted to hear my voice on,” Blige says over the phone from Los Angeles. “I needed to hear that what was coming out of my mouth was real. And it was.”
A powerful, beloved, inspirational vocalist whose raw emotionality has become her signature, Blige was heralded by Sean Combs as “the queen of hip-hop soul” when she debuted in 1992 with the album What’s the 411? She has since enraptured collaborators from Method Man and the Game to Bono and Elton John, openly divulging her personal heartbreaks and addictions—a voyage summed up in her 2001 Behind the Music special, in which she testified about the one thing Chaka Khan told her that she will never forget: “Get out of your own way.” Missy Elliott, who nominated Blige for this issue, recognizes Blige as an elevated role model and generational caretaker, crediting her with “helping me to believe in me” and for “getting many women through relationships—from heartbreak to independence.”
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