We’d hate to put the whammy on Blige by saying she’s happy at last, but something has changed. Whether because of her relationship with her fiance, a record producer named Kendu–a good man at last, she says–or the attention and support she’s getting at Geffen (which absorbed her old company, MCA, last year), or the help she gets from an even higher power than Iovine, she seems to be entering a more settled and satisfying period of her life. And the good buzz for “Love & Life” can’t hurt. With guest appearances by Jay-Z, Method Man and 50 Cent, it’s a more upbeat version of Blige’s wrenching signature sound–and possibly the best thing she’s done since her blockbuster debut “What’s the 411?” which yielded four No. 1 hits. Except for the radio-friendly “Not Today,” a Dre-produced duet with the rapper Eve, “Love & Life” is mostly produced by her old mentor Puffy Combs, who masterminded “411.” The very fact that she’s working with him again suggests that Blige has found a new self-confidence. “Puffy is Puffy,” she says, “and we’ve had our differences in the past. But he knows what makes my voice work. He still likes having control of everything–but he knows now I’m only going to let that go so far this time around.”
When Combs brought Blige to MCA’s Uptown Records in the early ’90s, she was a high-school dropout from a broken home, with an edgy voice and an attitude to match. The label tried to coach her on deportment after she had some nasty run-ins with the press–she once invited a reporter to step outside to settle their differences– though it didn’t seem to have much effect. This combative front couldn’t hide her insecurity over her self-worth, appearance and talent. “I had a tight relationship with my dad when I was a kid,” Blige says, “and I wondered if I had done something wrong to make him leave. Then I started listening to the kids in my class who said I looked like a camel. I couldn’t see myself being good at anything really. No one had ever really told me I could sing or do anything good.” Combs, who’d brought such hip-hop artists as Biggie (the Notorious B.I.G.) Smalls into the pop mainstream, had taken her under his wing–“Everything, from your clothes, shoes and makeup, he was in on.” But when Combs left Uptown to form his own Bad Boy Entertainment and Blige had to stay for contractual reasons, she was on her own again. “I look at people like Beyonce and Brandy today and they always have their parents around them,” she says. “I never had that. I was always alone, looking out for myself. So when Puff got his own company and started looking for singers just like me, it really hurt me.”
Meanwhile, she was making tons of money and surrounding herself with people–not always the right ones. “I know it sounds like something everybody says–but I had to like me and I didn’t,” Blige says. “I was drinking, which was something people in my family did all my life, so I thought that was the answer. But it just blinded me to what was really going on in my life and in my career.’’ Her management, she claims, took hundreds of thousands of dollars from her accounts without consulting her. “I’m still trying to pay off bills for stuff I didn’t even know I bought,” says Blige. “It’s amazing what people will do to you when they think you’re not looking. It had probably been going on for years.” But after Blige’s reportedly abusive relationship with K-Ci of the group Jodeci, her friend Queen Latifah introduced her to Kendu, who first swept her off her feet, then lowered the boom. “He told me that the alcohol had to go or he would go,’’ Blige says. “He’s a pretty godly man, and he wanted me to live that same life. So the first thing I did was to ask God to take the people out of my life who didn’t need to be there. The people who were bringing me down and keeping me in that dark space. I realized a lot of my friends preferred the drunk Mary, the drugged Mary–the Mary who didn’t know the Lord. You don’t realize it at first. And then they don’t return your calls.”
But one of her old friends still wanted to talk. Combs thought that his early collaborations with Blige had been some of his own best work, and he reached out to her at a time when they were both looking for direction. “We had good chemistry,” Combs says, “and that didn’t need to be lost.” “Love & Life” represents a comeback, both for the man who turned hip-hop into All-American pop and for one of his great protegees. Promoting the record is going to keep Blige busy with appearances on late-night talk shows and perform- ances at both the MTV awards and the NFL season kickoff–too busy, in fact, to do much planning on that wedding. But she says there’s no rush. “I want a long engagement.” She flashes her five-carat engagement diamond. “I plan to be married forever, so we both want to take the time to work everything out to a T. I want it to be perfect. And I want it to last.” Let’s hope it does. Blige carries enough old pain to keep that soulful edge. So what’s wrong with a long and happy life?
