The paramount Mary J. Blige has it her way in Oakland and at the Grammys.

By Johnny Ray Huston

YOU MIGHT NOT know it from gazing at the wide white stripes of the Village Voice's most recent Pazz and Jop's Critic's Poll, but 2001 was the year that Mary J. Blige went pop. This month's Clive Davis – excuse me, I mean Grammy – Awards offered a bit more evidence, thanks solely to the woman herself. Nearing the end of No More Drama's title track, the show's truest talent spontaneously sang what she meant (quote: "Sick and tired of being deprived of what I've worked so hard for") and provoked the evening's only standing ovation for a performance. A derivative, younger and shallower product may have performed a cold tango and collected some industry-manufactured gold, but thus far Blige's ebony and ivory can't be found in the sound of Alicia Keys. Blige has gone triple platinum more than once before, so in stating that 2001 was the year she went pop, I mean it in the stylistic, not record-sales, sense of the term. The first clue that she was ready for a pop incarnation might have been the cartoon created for her 1999 tour: a superhero Mary, courtesy of none other than D.C.'s Stan Lee. Her latest album, No More Drama finishes the transition, placing her collection of personally modernized vintage R&B attire in the closet – temporarily, I hope – to make room for a variety of dance floor and Top 40-ready audio fashions. Truthfully, pop's modulation restricts Blige, but it also puts her talents in sharp relief; the verses of her best-selling single to date, the Dre-designed strut machine "Family Affair," feature the jazziest phrasing to hit number one in years. (Pazz and Jop, indeed.) No More Drama's title cut shows why Blige is a great pop star: even when costume-jeweled in camp artifice – a sample from the theme of The Young and the Restless – she achieves a present realness that India Arie and most of the Grammys' bluegrass contingent can only contrive. Their brand of authenticity is trapped in the past, while "No More Drama" has contemporary resonance – because Blige moves it far beyond the Oprahesque affirmations-limitations of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis's lyric, so that it becomes a far-from-complacent peace anthem. (The imagery of the song's video carries over to the Marvin Gaye-informed lyric of No More Drama's third single, "Rainy Dayz" – as "antiwar" is condemned for being "anti-American," is any other mainstream music icon making similarly overt statements?) On Grammy night Blige further widened the song's meaning so that it also became a criticism of the awards show itself. "Mary J. Blige was so good it shocked me," dedicated rock 'n' roll journalist Don Baird writes in the newest issue of the San Francisco Bay Times. "I mean, I know she's good, but I had no idea I'd be getting goose bumps and flipping out while merely watching her on television. She gave a performance that showed the little ones how to get back to Magic Mountain because they're just not big enough to go on a ride like this." The "little ones" Baird is referring to – Pink, Keys, and company – are young (as he notes, "I could likely live to see embryonic pop stars, ripped from the womb like veal, in my lifetime"), but none of them show the promise Blige did 10 years ago, when she colored "You Remind Me" like a teenager whose rough memories were most of her belongings. Blige effortlessly teased the crowd with "You Remind Me" 's soaring, searing intro when she returned to Oakland's Paramount Theater last week for the second of two sold-out shows. That was all she needed to do for the crowd to go wild. Past the Paramount's 110-foot-tall mosaic, inside the auditorium, there were many fierce Marys, and I don't mean gay men. Catty white rock feminism could learn from Blige's laid-back yet deeply rooted connection with her fans. The first time Blige joined her backup dancers, the audience cheered, "Go Mary, go Mary" without a cue. When "Your Child" inspired a woman to bring her daughter up to the stage, Blige was there as more than just a performer. The heart of the show was a cover of Eddy and Chris Amoo's "Children of the Ghetto." The best-known recorded version of the song might be by Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind, and Fire, a group whose own "Keep Your Head to the Sky" provides the thematic framework for "Keep Your Head" on Blige's 1996 Share My World. Singing the final words of "Children of the Ghetto" – "keep your head to the sky" – Blige humbly connected the creative dots even as her voice reached the Paramount's ceiling. Blige's singing strives, sometimes to exhaustion, but at the Paramount she never fell into pitch problems, as on the 1998 live recording The Tour. (At one point on that album, with characteristically honest humor, she jokes that she's "feelin' a little fat." At the Paramount she wasn't thin; she was powerful.) The Paramount concert's cover of "Children of the Ghetto" prompted me to look for the song at Amoeba Music, and apparently I wasn't alone – someone else had left The Tour in the Earth, Wind, and Fire section. Which reminds me of a recent Blige quote: "Stevie Wonder is Mary J. Blige." You can rest assured that Blige means it in the most modest sense. In her duets, her task has been to bring classic R&B into hip-hop's male arena, a supportive mission she's undertaken with steadily increasing wisdom and independence since "I'll Be There for You/You're All I Need to Get By," her landmark pairing with Wu Tang's Clan's Method Man. On Jay-Z's recent Unplugged, Blige refuses to follow Jay Z's cue at the beginning of "Can't Knock the Hustle," instead blazing her own mature path through the song; then she leads the Roots into an even more fiery fragment of "Family Affair": further proof that she could be capable of a live album as revelatory as Esther Phillips's seemingly peerless Burnin'. All she needs is the right material to burn, and the right band to burn it with.