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Album Review
by Doc Funkerstein
25-8-2003
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| Mary J. Blige: Queen of Hip Hop Soul? |
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Mary J. Blige: 'Love & Life'
(Geffen)
Mary J Blige: the Queen of Rap’s time management
Just when one’s had a chance to readjust hormones after the sizzling onslaught of Blu Cantrell, another ‘hot’ dame gets back to (re)claiming the crown of ‘The Queen of Hip Hop Soul’. She is the able-bodied Mary J. Blige whose ‘Love & Life’ marks reunion with her original producer, P.Diddy (but to her still AFKAPD – Artist formerly known as Puff Daddy, the man behind the controls on her debut ‘What’s The 411’ all those years ago), who provides one of the best tracks on the album, a future single surely, ‘Ooh!’.
Dr Dre is behind another jewel on the record, ‘Not Today’ but it is not a match to the ‘Family Affair’ the two ‘dunked’ a couple of basketball seasons ago. There are perhaps another three cuts that stand out – diva’s co-written all-but-one track on the album – and the rest is of the lesser juncture. MJB has a strong, roughish and ready, sweet and clear voice that is often let down by the material, with some of the lyrics so trite that even she has a problem to deliver passionately.
A list of guests is impressive, from 50 Cent to Eve and Jay-Z, for a set that is a “lovingly constructed slice from the Blige book of life”, claims the PR blurb. It sounds rather ghetto-fabuloustic to these refined ears. A solid collection that suffers due to its duration. A question artists and the industry should seriously address.
As much as music in general appears to be getting more mediocre, album timings regularly exhaust Compact Disc’s capacity. Pre 1984, in the long-playing vinyl days, it meant forty minutes; CDs double music amount– a recent disc had 80 minutes and 04 seconds of tones! – meaning a double album in the old coinage. There are/will ever be only a handful of acts who can deliver quality of that length.
Alas, industrial attempts to arrest serious drop in profits, if not volume due to slide in actual sales prices, are mistaken to believe that quantity is a replacement for quality, aptly demonstrated by MJB whose ‘Love & Life’ is, at best, patchy and in parts inured to clichés. It concentrates on shaking your booty or gettin’ down to horizontal acrobatics which, probably, is what the world needs right now… There is no other way to explain Blu Cantrell single’s reign of four weeks but shag-effect, is there?
Visuals aside, MJB’s disc could have benefited from certain brevity… 15 Songs, three interludes and two “UK bonus tracks”? A disc enervated by its volume.
7/10
Doc Funkerstein
25-8-2003
Mary J. Blige’s album ‘Love & Life’ is released on 25 August 2003 by Geffen
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