Mary J. Blige Talks All about HER while SLAYING For New York Magazine!
The Queen of Hip Hop Soul Mary J. Blige is off to a strong start this year. She received critical acclaim for her role in the Netflix hit, Mudbound and recently received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The songstress keeps the steam going by being on the latest cover of New York Magazine.
Mary totally served old Hollywood glamour, in this all black Quentin Veron gown, showing off her toned melanin thigh in the high cut slit. The shoulders and waist were accented with black shiny feathers while the stunning Bulgari necklace added societal class to her look. Gorgeous!
Talking about her recent ups and downs with the magazine, it was her role as sharecropper Florence Jackson in Mudbound that made her reflect on who she is in terms of beauty and strength. She told New York Magazine, “I wear wigs, I wear bob wigs, and I had to completely strip down to my own natural hair texture, which I’ve always been afraid of. Dee stripped me down all the way to what I truly am, and people were complimenting me. People were saying how beautiful I was. I didn’t know I was that beautiful for real. You understand what I’m saying? I didn’t know that.”
Well, with that knowledge comes power. And Mary continues to carry both her beauty and power gracefully. She states, “I learned that I’m a really powerful woman. I mean, other than just being Mary J. Blige, the superstar, I learned that I’m powerful because I don’t have to say much to be heard.”
Mary also speaks on her beginning in the music industry. She talks about the style she created with her first producer, the then-19-year-old Sean “Puffy” Combs: “What I loved about Puff is he immediately saw — I mean, instead of a tight dress, he put a baggy Armani suit on me with some Teflon boots. I wore a miniskirt sometimes, a pleated miniskirt, but I wore boots with it. But I hated skirts, I hated dresses, because I sit like this” — she leaned forward in the interview, elbows on knees, legs spread. “I can’t sit like that with a miniskirt on.”
Blige says that her tomboy look was also about “survival.” “I worked with a lot of men and grew up around a lot of men. I didn’t want them to look at me like that,” Eventually her look evolved to become more glamorous: “It took me a long time. I didn’t want to wear lipstick and all this stuff,” she says. “I’d fight not to wear these little shorts [in videos], and I’d end up wearing them and the video would be great. And you’d be like, Okay, that’s not bad, and you start to grow.”
When success came — and it came quickly, starting with her debut, What’s the 411?, in 1992 — Blige didn’t know how to handle it, or herself. “I had money, and I had access to all the things that I used to tear my life down,” she says. “I went crazy. I could get any drug, anything, at any moment.” She embarked on a volatile relationship with Cedric “K-Ci” Hailey, of the group Jodeci — they even toured together, with Blige being none too pleased by the attention young women gave him. It didn’t last.
She would late meet Kendu Isaacs in 2003 and later married him. She credited him with saving her from being a “slumbucket alcoholic” and declared that, thanks to him, she “felt safe for the first time. I had never felt truly loved.”
Fast-forward five years to when that relationship ended in a blaze of infidelity — Blige has called the other woman “my Becky with the good hair” — and financial mismanagement, at least according to the singer’s side of the story. According to a TMZ report last fall, Blige, as part of her divorce negotiations, asserted that she was deeply in debt and owed millions of dollars to the IRS. Isaacs, for his part, has contended that he’s been left traumatized and unemployable. From all the hurt and pain of that marriage last year she released ‘Strength of a Woman’ Through all of that she found her voice. “The neighborhood was really tough,” she remembers.
“Everything we saw, we couldn’t say — so that was in me. My mother said whatever she wanted, but my grandmother was just a very reserved woman, very reserved but very powerful. Because you can end up in trouble if you said too much. I mean, Dee saw that. That’s my personality.”
And that is why we love Mary J Blige! The Queen of Hip Hop Soul and now Oscar Nominee!
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