Mary J. Blige

Black women have a lot of names in popular culture, from "girl" to "girlfriend" to "sister" including more creative turns of phrases, like "sistah," "sista," and "sistafriend" to the dozens of variations on bitch thanks Hip Hop. But what she's lacking is a lot of representation. If the mannerisms that some folks credit to Black women include inordinate amount of neck-rolling and hip-jutting and addressing people, young and old, with an excited "baby" as they mix up a pot of food, then those folks are taking too many cultural cues from '80s sitcoms. This is not the woman who appears on any of Blige's albums, whether she is being serious, reflective, depressed, or in love. After My Life, she cautiously explored her voice, style, and content in Share My World and Mary, before moving on to a more assured social conscience in No More Drams, Love & Life, and The Breakthrough. By the time she reached the albums Growing Pains and Stronger With Each Tear, her expanding fan base was used to the collage-approach to music-making that had come to define her an artist who, at one moment, might perform a cover with U2 and, the next, release a classic R&B track. Blige was never a Hurstonian anthropologist intent on handing society a true rendering of her kind. Yet she did just that and best explained the authenticity in each warbling note in 1999 interview she gave to Honey magazine, saying that seven years after making her debut album, she learned to accept and then hesitantly love what she had and who she was. The unintended byproduct of that acceptance was that people came to see the beauty that she connected with inside herself.