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COPYRIGHT 2008 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Mary J. Blige's eighth studio album, "Growing Pains," defies the conventional wisdom that aging works against female entertainers. Blige has a robust, dark voice, and she moves around melodies in a pleasingly unruly way. She can irrigate a song with pain but is judicious about adding flourishes to her performances--a decision that makes her sound more like a sixties soul singer than like a modern R. & B. star. (Her 1998 live album, "The Tour," documents how comfortable Blige is with a few flat notes, and how little they matter to the fans who track her life as if it were more important than their own.) Her commercial rival and aesthetic antipode is Mariah Carey, another R. & B. singer who is selling remarkably well deep into her career. Carey, who is the more successful, offers the inhuman power of her voice, a knack for producing hit records, and undying optimism. If Carey is "Good Morning America"--all cheer and reliability--Blige is what comes later: the daytime talk show noisy with recrimination and redemption.
Blige's songs focus on surviving heart-ache and emerging emboldened. "Growing Pains" is at least her fourth album in a row to be accompanied by a round of interviews that find her vaunting a newfound sense of self and some measure of hard-earned happiness. (In a recent interview with Vibe, she posited that if you're human "you're already crazy," which is a reassuring departure from earlier bromides.) The danger, of course, is that true happiness might be her kryptonite.
Blige grew up...
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