For three decades, music superstar Mary J. Blige has worn the crown as the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul. She first burst onto the scene in the early 1990s with her instantly-iconic albums What’s the 411? and My Life, and since then, she’s proven that not only can she hop between genres and blend them together with ease, but she can keep up with the trends of the day and hold her own among singers who have come after her.
In February 2022, just days before her headlining performance at the Super Bowl LVI halftime show, Blige released her fourteenth album, Good Morning Gorgeous. While Blige paid tribute to her classics during the Super Bowl, Good Morning Gorgeous stands as a symbol of Blige’s strong continuing artistry today.
‘Good Morning Gorgeous’ is Mary J. Blige’s first album in 5 years
Blige’s last album was released in 2017 in the midst of her high-profile divorce from record producer Kendu Isaacs. Fittingly titled Strength of a Woman, it came during a time that Blige admitted was a personal “hell.”
But Blige soon rose from the ashes like a phoenix, racking up two Academy Award nominations and going on to star in hit TV shows and movies including Power Book II: Ghost, The Umbrella Academy, and the Aretha Franklin biopic Respect.
Blige hasn’t gone more than a few years between albums since she first debuted in 1992. But the gap between Strength of a Woman and Good Morning Gorgeous is the longest time yet that Blige has gone without releasing an album.
‘Good Morning Gorgeous’ is a positive affirmation that came from a dark place
The title Good Morning Gorgeous doesn’t come from Blige being self-absorbed with her looks. It was a mantra and that helped her get through difficult times in the past several years.
She opened up about the process behind the album in a post-Super Bowl interview on GMA. “It’s a positive affirmation,” she said of the album’s title. “I had to speak over myself when I was in a really dark situation. I had to learn how to love myself out of a negative place. And I learned that speaking positive words over yourself, you manifest positive things in your life. And I started to do it, and it started to work. And before you knew it I was all the way out of that negative situation, and Good Morning Gorgeous is here.”
The album contains moments from her life in the past 5 years
Blige always puts all her emotions into her music, and Good Morning Gorgeous is no different. Throughout the album’s nearly 40-minute runtime, Blige shares vignettes of various situations or feelings she’s experienced over the past few years — the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Blige explained in an interview with Angie Martinez on iHeartRadio’s The Box that the single “Rent Money,” for example, was written about being financially insecure during that time. “’Rent Money’ is [about] when I first got divorced,” she revealed. “I had to give up all this alimony, and I didn’t have no more money to give because he had spent it all. I had to go on tour and make all the money back to pay the alimony.”
Subject-wise, however, the album largely sees Blige being her biggest cheerleader. From the DJ Khaled collab “Amazing” and the soothing title track to album cuts “Come See About Me” and Fivio Foreign collab “On Top,” Blige celebrates just how much she loves herself as a person and as a performer. On songs like “Love Without the Heartbreak,” Anderson .Paak collab “Here With Me,” and Usher collab “Need Love,” Blige dreams about someday being with someone who dedicates themself completely to her and will never betray her trust.
Mary J. Blige showed her musical versatility on the album
Blige first became known to the world as the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, able to blend the two seemingly disparate genres into her own unique sound. But in the years since then, she’s shown that she’s an in-touch artist with her finger on the pulse of what’s hot in music.
Good Morning Gorgeous shows that three decades into her career, Blige can still capture the current moment with her music. She incorporates hip-hop trends and tropes from the past few years into the album seamlessly, and proved that she can stand alongside newer artists not as an elder stateswoman, but as a contemporary.
A follow-up to ‘Good Morning Gorgeous’ is already coming
Even though Good Morning Gorgeous was five years in the making, fans of Blige may be getting a follow-up project sooner than they think. She revealed to The Breakfast Club that she and Dr. Dre began discussing creating a new album together in the lead-up to the Super Bowl. And now, the project is on its way.
“That was something I always wanted to do: to do a produced album by Dr. Dre, because everything he does, you know you’re going to smashes and you know it’s going to be excellent,” she said honestly. “I was like, ‘Yo, this is a dream come true for me. I want you to produce an album for me.’ And he was like ‘Oh my God, it’s a dream come true for me!’ And then boom, here we are. It’s really happening.”
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