Blige redrew the map in the 90s, combining hip-hop and soul, before her life and chart fortunes took a tumble. But after the Super Bowl and a creative return-to-form, she’s back on top
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In 2015, Mary J Blige performed at Glastonbury. She appeared on the Friday afternoon during a rainstorm so relentless that the TV coverage was frequently blurred by water on the camera lens, innocuously sandwiched between Alabama Shakes and a wheezy-sounding Motörhead on their last legs. It was a relatively lowly billing for an artist with 100m sales to their name, but the sight of an R&B artist on the Pyramid stage still carried the tang of novelty – it was the year someone got up a petition protesting Kanye West’s headlining appearance as “an insult to rock music” – and, moreover, Blige’s career was, by her standards at least, on its uppers.
The imperial phase that had begun with the release of her 1992 debut What’s the 411? had drawn to a close as the 00s turned into the 2010s. The previous year, she had released The London Sessions, a game attempt to pair her up with a series of UK artists: Disclosure, Sam Smith, Emeli Sandé, Naughty Boy. The results were OK, but the concept smacked of an artist casting around for a new direction – and the fact that the British artists got billing on the album cover seemed to say something about Blige’s diminished stature: it was being marketed as much on their presence as hers. It proved the lowest-selling album of her career.