Album of the Week
Ray Charles once told me that the secret to his music was this: If his band was rock-steady, he could do whatever and go wherever he wanted. The same is true of Mary J. Blige, even if her band is a stack of machines rather than a line of horns and a semi-circle of rhythm players. Her machines, in fact, have the advantage of being more precise and more powerful than even Charles' famously disciplined musicians, but in that precision lies the danger of predictability. She avoids that hazard better than anyone, but even she is not immune to its snares.
Blige is the greatest soul singer of the post-Whitney generation, and Blige's new album, Stronger With Each Tear, demonstrates how soul music can thrive in the hip-hop era--but also how it can stumble. There's more thriving than stumbling here, but the disc is awkwardly programmed so its weakest tracks come first and its best songs last.
"A thousand years from now they'll talk about you and me," she sings on "Hood Love." I don't know about her husband, but record collectors may still be discussing Blige in the next millennium, for she has one of those timeless soul sopranos--schooled in church, seasoned by the street, tender on the verses and brassy on the choruses, smooth on the glide and biting on the turnaround.
Just listen to her wordless wailing over the strings and acoustic guitar on the intro to "Hood Love"; it never sounds like the show-offy diva move you'd get from Mariah Carey or countless contestants on "American Idol," but rather like the reluctant moaning of a troubled woman alone. Just listen to Blige's romantic pledge on the verse, the way she locks into the rhythm loop of snare, brush and hi-hat only to veer off on her own tangent before locking in again at exactly the right moment. Just listen how thin and watery her guest singer Trey Songz sounds next to her full-chested belting on the bridge. Just listen to her Aretha-like coda, where Blige improvises random words and moans at surprising intervals over the steady backing of her multi-tracked vocals--as Charles would over his horns.
When Blige establishes this tension between the steadiness of the grooves and the unpredictability of her own voice, she's as exciting an artist as the Billboard charts can contain today. But sometimes she allows one of her rotating producers to rein in that uncertainty principle and her voice becomes just one more microchip pattern in a mixmaster's puzzle.
That happens on the opening track, "Tonight," where the Runners, the producing team, brag about themselves, bury Blige under sludge-like echo and electronically slice up her vocal into snippets they can manipulate. It also happens on the next song, "The One," where producer Rodney Jerkins runs Blige's voice through an auto-tuner, a sacrilege akin to reprinting a Matisse painting with color-correction. It happens again on "I Love U (Yes I Du)," where producer Polow da Don makes the lead vocal part of the mechanical programming instead of a contrast to it.
Those first two songs were collaborations with the young stars Akon and Drake respectively and seem a foolish concession to their formulas. By contrast, when T.I., the king of auto-tune, guests on "Good Love," he wisely adjusts to her. Here is a terrific synthesis of vintage soul and modern hip-hop: the catchy horn charts were arranged by Earth, Wind & Fire's Jerry Hey, but the seriously syncopated deep, fat bass line is obviously programmed. Electronic hand claps from a cyber-church bridge the old and new, and Blige celebrates a new infatuation with whoops, shouts and percussive consonants, playing with the groove as she snuggles close to it and then scampers away.
Stronger With Each Tear finishes with three of the best performances of Blige's career--why they were buried at the back of the album is a question for the geniuses at Geffen. "Kitchen" is one of the most retro tracks Blige has ever done; it sounds like an old Motown number by Mary Wells or the Marvelettes remixed by a 21st century DJ. Most of the so-called hooks you hear on the radio today aren't as catchy as this verse tune, and the chorus melody is even better than that. A bouncy acoustic piano recalls the ‘60s, while the booming synth bass recalls the ‘00s. Blige calls up a romantic rival in the middle of the night and tells her, "Trying to take my man is like trying to take my money, and trying to take my money just ain't happenin'." She doesn't sound vicious, just confident. After all, who could compete with a voice like that?
"In the Morning" is a 6/8 R&B ballad about a marriage that has hit the doldrums: "When this all began," Blige sings, "we said that love would never end. Some time has passed; we settled in, and now the shadow of darkness is hoverin'. Tell me what happened?" Jerry Hey's horns and Ron Fair's strings support her firmly but tastefully as she transforms the tune into a slow blues. In an era when so much black pop is aimed at adolescent relationships, promising that hot sex and true love are easily grasped, Blige is the anomalous figure singing about adult relationships and the knowledge that love is never easy.
Best of all is the final track, "I Can See in Color," which wound up on the soundtrack for "Precious." Raphael Saadiq, leader of the terrific neo-soul group Toni Tony Tone, not only wrote the song but also produced and played most of the instruments. Charles Jones adds a swirling B-3 organ that reinforces the church-like feel of this personal-redemption hymn. Blige is so eager to share her escape from black-and-white depression into multi-colored optimism that you can hear her pushing against the restraints of the funeral-march rhythm and the confines of the patient melody. When she finally breaks loose musically on the bridge, it's as if she's recreating her personal breakthrough.
From Ray Charles through Mary J. Blige, soul music has always been about the tension between the groove and improvisation, between fate and free will, and only when that tension is knottiest does it produce the greatest catharsis. As it does here.
