MODESTY isn't one of Queen of Hip Hop Mary J Blige's strong points, but with a voice like hers and her incredible history on and off stage, you can forgive a touch of bravado.
In New York's Times Square, two adjoining huge billboards promote Mary J Blige and Jay-Z's Heart of the City joint tour. One features Blige's face, the other Beyonce's bloke. Both are emblazoned with the name of the tour and tour dates. One thing's missing from each picture -- the name of either artist. Madonna and Cher have dropped their surnames; here Blige and Jay-Z have gone one step further. In some places, it seems, you don't need to be introduced. For Blige is not only the Queen of Hip Hop Soul but apparently the Queen of New York. ‘‘Come on,'' Blige says. ‘‘This is my home. Everyone knows who I am in New York. Everyone.'' Modesty isn't one of Blige's strong points, but with a voice like hers and her incredible history on and off stage, you can forgive a touch of bravado. And her propensity for talking in the third person. Like when Blige explains what Australians can expect from her first tour to these parts. ‘‘It's a journey for people that know something about Mary J Blige,'' she says. ‘‘For people who understand my history, there's everything from What's the 411? through to the Growing Pains album. It's fun. It's a show. I come with a live band and everything else that comes with it. All the hits. The most important thing is to connect with your fans, connect with them in person.''1992's What's the 411? was Blige's debut and breakthrough. Her life story is almost as impressive as her voice. Born in 1971 in Yonkers, she struggled through a tough youth in New York by immersing herself in the music of Aretha Franklin and Anita Baker. Blige recorded herself singing Baker's Caught Up in the Rapture on a cassette that wound up with her being signed to Andre Harrell's Uptown Records in 1989. Before long a young entrepreneur at Uptown named Sean Combs (in his pre-Puff Daddy days) took Blige under his wing, producing her debut album and the follow-up My Life, both selling millions in the US. However, behind the scenes Blige was in disarray. She revealed to Oprah two years ago she was molested as a child, a pain she carried through dysfunctional relationships (one with K-Ci of duo K-Ci and JoJo) and a descent into alcoholism and cocaine abuse that grew in proportion to her success. She cleaned up her act in 2001 after 9/11 and the death of friend Aaliyah. Even now when Blige sings tracks from her first two albums she says she hears a younger version of herself ‘‘singing to escape'' the troubles of her early life. ‘‘It's like this,'' Blige says, ‘‘if I put on the My Life or What's the 411? album right now I immediately go back to those times. My life was real. You just automatically go back and everyone automatically goes back with you. I go back there every single time I sing them. Absolutely every single time.'' Her life story has been full of so many highs and lows -- and the obligatory happy ending -- she's been the subject of countless documentaries. The most recent, The Evolution of Mary J Blige, aired last month. One of the many viewers was Mary J Blige. ‘‘I cried a lot when I saw it,'' Blige admits. ‘‘I can see my growth. I look at me and I see the evolution. I'm still Mary, though. I haven't become this person people don't identify with. ‘‘My fans, they just really, really appreciate everything I've done. All the trials and tribulations I've come through just so we can all be free. And I absolutely appreciate it. ‘‘There has to be a happy ending with someone who's come from where I come from. There's gotta be.'' Though Blige was inspired by Baker, for many of today's female artists she's their Anita Baker; a living influence. Just ask Blige. ‘‘It seems like every artist that's out I've inspired, every urban female artist that exists,'' she says. Can she hear it? ‘‘I can in some. I don't sound like Anita Baker, I don't sound like Aretha Franklin, but they were my inspiration. I don't wish to sound like them, I just know they're part of my DNA because I grew up listening to them.'' Beyonce is one of her most famous fans; the feeling is mutual. ‘‘She's a genius,'' Blige says, ‘‘she's beautiful, she can sing . . . there aren't many beautiful women that look like Beyonce who can sing. She's the full package.'' Blige made headlines when she confirmed Beyonce and Jay-Z had married during the New York leg of the Heart of the City tour. Blige wasn't at the wedding, but she congratulated them onstage -- something newspapers picked up on as the confirmation the pair have refused to make. ‘‘It was all over the news,'' Blige laughs. ‘‘It was on the (TV news) ticker. It was on CNN. It was on every channel. If it's all over the place, I'm assuming, OK, they're married. If they're not, my apologies went out to them already.'' Blige married record company executive Kendu Isaacs in 2003. He now acts as her manager. The woman who once sang No More Drama (a tune that sampled the theme to The Young and the Restless) insists she keeps her troubles behind closed doors these days. ‘‘There's drama, there's me and all my mental situations I deal with that only my husband knows about.'' Blige now reserves her drama for the acting world; she made a killer cameo in Entourage last year (‘‘Jeremy Piven is one of the most beautiful, down-to-earth actors'') and is linked to a 2009 biopic of jazz icon Nina Simone. ‘‘I really desire to do it,'' Blige says of the movie, still in an embryonic stage. Until then, she's touring latest album Growing Pains and embarking on new geographical frontiers. ‘‘You've got to work your way around the world,'' Blige says. ‘‘I'm excited I've finally worked my way to Australia. Everyone's been telling me how beautiful Australia is, how beautiful the people are and how I have to go. So now I'm like ‘OK, all right, enough. I'm going'.'' Mary J Blige, Rod Laver Arena, June 12, $102/$142, Ticketek.
Friday 30 May 2008
Wednesday 7 May 2008
Amy Winehouse
Artist: Amy Winehouse
Genre(s):
Blues
Jazz
Pop
Discography:
Back To Black (Deluxe) CD2
Year: 2007
Tracks: 8
Back To Black (Deluxe) CD1
Year: 2007
Tracks: 11
Back To Black (Deluxe Edition) cd2
Year: 2007
Tracks: 8
Back to Black
Year: 2006
Tracks: 11
Frank
Year: 2003
Tracks: 13
Much toilet be aforementioned intimately Amy Winehouse, one of the U.K.'s flagship vocalists during the 2000s. The British compact and tabloids seemed to focus on her tough behaviour and heavy expenditure of alcoholic drink, just fans and critics likewise embraced her rugged magical spell, nervy sense of humour, and distinctively soulful and jazzy vocals. Her platinum-selling breakthrough album, Hot dog (2003), elicited comparisons ranging from Billie Holiday and Sarah Sarah Vaughan to Macy Gray and Lauryn Hill. Interestingly enough, despite her firm cockney spoken communication pattern and vernacular, 1 lavatory often witness out aspects of apiece of those singers' outspoken repertory in Winehouse's have vocalisation. Notwithstanding, her allurement has been her songwriting -- intimately constantly profoundly personal, simply best known for its profanity and brutal fairness.
Born to a taxi-driving military chaplain and chemist mother, Winehouse grew up in the Southgate region of northern Greater London. Her fosterage was encircled by wind. Many of the uncles on her mother's incline were professional person malarkey musicians, and even her paternal nan was romantically involved with British jazz caption Ronnie Walter Scott at one time. While at house, she listened to and absorbed her parents' excerpt of greats: Dinah George Washington, Ella Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, and Frank Francis Albert Sinatra among others. However, in her teens, she was drawn to the rebellious spirit of Tender loving care, Salt-N-Pepa, and other American R&B and tap euphony acts of the prison term.
At the age of 16, afterwards she had been expelled from London's Sylvia Edward Young Theater Schooling, she caught her number unity break when pour go through singer Tyler James River, a schoolfellow and close quaker, passed on her demonstration mag tape to his A&R, world Health Organization was trenchant for a malarkey singer. That opportunity light-emitting diode to her recording contract with Island Records. By the close up of 2003, when she was 20 age old, Island had released her debut record album, Dog. With contributions from strike music producer/keyboardist Salaam Remi, Winehouse's amalgam of jazz, stream pull down, soul, and pat received rant reviews. The record album was nominative for the 2004 Mercury Music Plunder as easily as two Britisher awards, and its lead-in exclusive, "Stronger Than Me," magnetic north Korean won an Ivor Novello Award for Best Coeval Song.
Following Winehouse's debut, the accolades and inquiring interviews appeared at the same time in the press out with her state of nature public life. Several multiplication she showed up to her night club or TV performances too drunk to blether out a whole carriage. In 2006, her management troupe last suggested that she accede rehab for alcohol ill-use, plainly alternatively, she dumped the company and canned the ordeal into the U.K. Top Ten-spot dispatch "Rehab," the principal mortal for her s, critically acclaimed record album, Back to Black. Containing remindful productions from Salaam Remi and Brits DJ/multi-instrumentalist Mark Ronson, the album jolly abandoned jazz, delving into the sounds of '50s/'60s-era loretta Young lady grouping harmonies, harlan F. Stone & roll, and soul. The tucket over the loss was so great that it started to pour forth o'er onto U.S. shores; several rappers and DJs made their own remixes of respective songs -- non to reference work covers by Prince and the Golosh Monkeys.
One month after Winehouse north Korean won Best Female Artist at the Brit Awards in Feb 2007, Universal released Back to Lightlessness in the U.S. The LP charted higher than whatsoever other American debut by a British people female transcription creative person in the beginning it, and it remained in the Cover 10 for several months, marketing a trillion copies by the end of that summer. Scarcely as in the U.K., she became the verbalize of the town, landing on the covers of Rolling Stone and Spin magazines. Non long by and by, though, Winehouse canceled her Union American language go. Betimes reports revealed that she was ingress rehab for alcohol and drug addiction, simply her freshly direction denied the claims, stating it was due to spartan exhaustion. Her temperamental behavior unbroken her and her freshly married man, William Blake Fielder-Civil, always in the tabloids and on and away stages on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, merely in belatedly 2007 American fans were finally apt a view to mind Winehouse's other process, with a more or less brief (two songs removed and ane added) rendering of Weenie.
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