Mary J. Blige was too much last night.
She sang too many songs (four) from her latest album, 2024’s Gratitude, which, if it is her last, as she’s suggested, will be a brief footnote to the career that’s preceded it—though I do like “Don’t Fuck Up” (“I’m in love/I’m in love/I’m in love/But don’t fuck up”).
She sang too many songs period—31 in all, many squished together, and that’s not counting those we heard during the set’s several video montages or the five-minute interlude from her DJ.
She cut short too many of these songs, many of them bona fide classics—the playlist I made of her setlist runs over two hours, and she ripped through the whole set in a tight 90.
The blare of her live band would have drowned out a less ferocious singer. Where Blige never shies away from understatement on her recordings, occasionally riding something like a Quiet Storm groove, her music is forever in the red live. I’d love to see her with a little jazzy combo in a small room someday.
She left the stage too often, resulting in awkward pauses that threw off the rhythm of the show and suggested that the 54-year-old star frequently needed a breather (which, yes, this 55-year-old critic completely understands). During that DJ set I already mentioned, which came about 20 minutes from the finale, one woman near me thought the show had ended.
The show’s pacing remained choppy till the end, with the unnecessarily myth-stoking career lookback “MJB tha MVP” undercutting the bouncy affirmations of “Just Fine,” an uncharacteristically buoyant Blige dance track. And while I’ll scream “MUSTARD!” as loud as any fool, why was there an extended snippet of Kendrick’s “TV Off” after that instead of rolling straight into “Family Affair,” Mary’s timeless protest song against hateration and holleration?
And you know what? I didn’t really care, and neither did anyone else Sunday night at St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center. Not much, anyway. There’s a reason Blige led with “Take Me As I Am,” which isn’t a snit of diva petulance but a shrugged matter-of-fact statement. Mary’s a little rough around the edges—as a performer, as a singer, as a woman—and that’s why we love her. This show was who she is.
After crisscrossing spotlights alerted us to her arrival, Blige emerged from a smaller stage at the far end of the arena, enveloped in a shaggy turquoise fur for a look you could call “Monsters, Inc. fabulous.” Her first two songs—“Take Me As I Am” followed by a cover of DeBarge’s “A Dream”—formed more of a prelude than an opening. During the latter she climbed aboard a giant tiara and passed over the crowd to the main stage, then disappeared.
When Blige re-emerged it was in front of two massive hands, with veins of gold running through them, holding aloft a crown emblazoned “MJB.” She’d ditched her coat, the better to flaunt a periwinkle many-spangled jumpsuit and matching boots. The boots were the highlight of each of the evening’s four outfits. In fact, the Jumbotron instructed the audience to click pics of their own footwear for something called “BootCam” that I regrettably missed if it happened at all.
This portion of the show featured songs from two first albums, What’s the 411? and My Life, with the faithful “Love No Limit” leading into the flirtatious “Mary Jane (All Night Long)” and the wistful “You Remind Me.” It was good to recall that before Blige was a rugged survivor, her early appeal was in how she expressed sweetness alongside grit, and how human-scaled her gifts felt in the age of Whitney and Mariah; with its limited but sufficient elasticity, her melisma was aspirational rather than superhuman.
Even for those of us who lived through the era, it can be hard to remember when (or why) R&B and hip-hop were at odds with each other. The seeming inevitability of Mary J. Blige is one reason we forget. Blige bridged that gap because she was too young to recognize one—as a round-the-way girl who listened to rap as well as R&B because why wouldn’t she? With help, it must unfortunately be acknowledged, from Sean “Puffy” Combs, she pioneered the soon-to-be cliche pattern of giving a rapper a guest feature on an R&B song, and let me assure there was a time when that felt necessary.
The R&B past that she drew from was also much on display last night. In addition to DeBarge, there was “Everything,” which quotes both the Stylistics and A Taste of Honey, the music of her childhood. And both of the covers that helped make her a star were high points: Chaka Khan’s jazzy, effervescent “Sweet Thing,” and Rose Royce’s swinging “I’m Going Down,” which Blige handed over the audience, literally holding the mic to a fan for an entire verse.
Blige achieved fame at a time before you had to dance as good as you sang, and, respectfully, it showed. A half-dozen dancers in shiny suits joined her onstage, and for most songs she never quite nailed the choreo. Then again, why should she? She’s the star after all, and if she wants to dance like she’s in the club and not onstage, so did all the women in the stands.
They were Black women, mostly, of a certain age (roughly Mary’s), all of them dressed dressed, and they connected with the star the most deeply during two ballads: the massive “Be Without You,” the biggest R&B song of 2005 by a long shot, and the song she’ll never top, “Not Gon’ Cry,” about wasting e-le-ven years on a man. “He ain’t worth it, baby!” shouted a woman in the row in front of me during the latter.
That same woman had previously lectured me for working during the show. Her imitation of me? “Let me just get off one more email before she comes on.”
“I been working on myself and this self-love stuff, it ain't easy,” Blige told us at one point. “But it's necessary.” And god bless her for not saying “self care”—Mary may change with the times, but there’s a kernel of her personality that stays old school.
The night offered few onstage homiletics like that, though the clip segments that played during costume changes provided copious Maryisms like, “You don't have to be perfect to feel worthy,” and an acknowledgement that she has fans, “Because people were really suffering just like me.”
One of pop music’s gifts to us is that it rescues the everyday truths that have been worn down into useless cliches and makes them feel true again. Mary J. Blige’s genius is for revivifying self-improvement maxims I’d groan to read on a plaque in someone’s kitchen. It helps that she’s never been woo-woo about such matters, and that there’s such an urgency and earnestness to her self-bettering you could practically call it self-preservation.
When most stars claim to be just like us little people, they only reinforce the distance between them and us. But it’s different with Blige because she’s never faking humility. She is the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, after all, and she’s got the boots to prove it. She never asks us not to be fooled by the rocks that she got. What she claims to share with us is pain, and the big difference between Mary and the rest of us, as she once sang, is that she can afford therapy “two times a day.” Like all public personas, Blige’s has occasionally begun to feel like a tic over time. Until you experience her in her element.
Blige is hardly the first female singer to illustrate the truism that fame and wealth don’t bring love or security. But unlike her predecessors, she refuses to let her life play out as a tragedy. She doesn’t suffer for our sake, in the way the dumbest Billie Holiday fans believe that genius did. She introduced “Still Believe in Love” by asking, “How many of y'all still believe in love?” and was hardly discouraged in the tepid response. Her fans my be skeptical, but to be Mary J. Blige is to rise from each traumatic heartbreak eternally optimistic about “Real Love,” to use the title of a song she didn’t have time for last night.
Only recently have critics of the creaky cultural archetype of the “resilient Black woman"—critics who are mostly Black women themselves—begun publicly expressing how unhealthy such a standard of self-sufficient stoicism can be. But when she sings, Blige reminds us of the components of a healthy resilience—acknowledging pain, reaching out to a community of other women, finding strength in overcoming obstacles together.
That’s how you earn yourself fans like the lone woman outside the Xcel before the show who kept screaming like a profane pro-bono hypewoman. “Are you ready for Mary J. fuckin’ Blige?” she demanded. “Are you ready?” So tell me... are ya?
Setlist
Take Me as I Am
A Dream (DeBarge cover)
Love No Limit
Mary Jane (All Night Long)
You Remind Me
Need You More
Love Is All We Need
Still Believe in Love
You Ain't The Only One
Everyday It Rains
I Love You
Be Happy
Be Without You
Mary's Joint
Here I Am
Don’t Fuck Up
Sweet Thing (Rufus featuring Chaka Khan cover)
Good Morning Gorgeous
Everything
I'm Going Down (Rose Royce cover)
Not Gon' Cry
Share My World
My Life
No More Drama
Enough Cryin'
The One
I Can Love You
You Bring Me Joy
Just Fine
MJB da MVP
Family Affair
