“This is organization,” she says about the company now. She says it was his determination, maturity and frank nature that set into motion their love story and her most committed self-improvement mission to date.Īnd with Isaacs by her side laying vocals (“We did ‘We Ride’ in our studio in the house, with her in the booth in her nightgown,” he says), and being lead manager and partner in Mary Jane Productions, Inc., Blige has completely revamped her approach to her career. Isaacs’s expressiveness was the very blessing Blige’s burned-out spirit was yearning for. The unabashed willingness of a Black man to communicate is a rarity, and a turn-on, especially to a woman like Blige. Yeah, we going to California! Like, I’m going to hang out with Janet Jackson.” As he talks on and on about neighborhood Crips, mowing the lawn, young New York friends not understanding the West Coast culture, Blige smiles. “I was born and raised in Brooklyn, but I moved out here with my folks when I was 16 years old,” he shares. Isaacs casually slides into “his” chair and jumps right into the conversation-no hesitation. When I first came from New York to L.A., I hated this place. It’s just, you gotta know when to change your environment in order to help you to grow and do what you need to do. “If you’re trying to get in shape mentally, spiritually and physically, this is the place. “Quality of life here is so much nicer,” she says softly, taking in the rolling valley beneath her. If everybody’s asking why Mary ain’t mad no more, one check of the view makes it plain. “Oh, that’s Kendu’s seat,” she says matter-of-factly, making sure no one else sits at the head of the table.
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Through huge glass walls, the California afternoon sun pours in on Mary’s bare face and caramel-colored ponytail. She’s just chillin’ at the table before a beautiful summery salad topped with a champagne vinaigrette, dressed comfortably in a bold, striped rust-and-cream silk sweater, ivory shorts and flip-flops. No, she’s not cooking-Chef Brian in the Top Chef coat is doing that. MJB is finally ready to let the world witness the other side, the side beyond the walls.īlige looks too cute in her own kitchen.
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What are you going to do now?’ What the hell do you mean, ‘going to do now?’ This is a whole ‘nother level,” she says about her intention to keep climbing to a higher place. “People are saying, ‘Okay, Mary, you broke through. Last year her Grammy-winning smash CD The Breakthrough announced her arrival at the doorway of healthy love. Today Blige is the consummate role model for any woman serious about changing her life. Over the past six years she’s experienced a personal transformation, and in that time become what she never imagined-a wife. They wanted my career, they wanted money from me-something.”īut look at her now. “All my life I’ve been in a bunch of junk where men were jealous of me. As a fatherless woman in the wilderness of shady music-industry men, the girl who sang mostly about love never had a clue what it really was. Relationships left her broken and, sometimes, literally beat down. In time, her self-esteem, virtually nonexistent since girlhood, bottomed out. She has admitted that weed and wine, cocaine and carelessness, clouded her mind. For far too long, Blige was not only a musical maverick but she was also a tortured soul. The reality, however, was that the walls-those huge, impenetrable, emotional walls-were always up. The illusion was that there were no barriers between her and us. Today you would be hard-pressed to find a Black woman in America who hasn’t indulged in at least one good runny-nosed, MJB-invoked cry, impossible when you consider classic Blige heartbreakers like, well, “Not Gon’ Cry.” In the summer of 1992, when the boutique music label Uptown/MCA released Blige’s debut, What’s the 411?, the streets were unequivocally turned out.
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Who but the High Priestess of Keeping It Real could inject once safe and smoothed-out R&B with the energy of raw, jagged-edged hip-hop, and singlehandedly change the future of Black music? And yet, Blige has always told it like it was from day one, she was that project girl turned powerhouse known to keep it right in your face. For most of the 15 intense years of her career (which includes seven multiplatinum hit albums), it seems that walls have been up all around her. It’s something to be invited inside the walls of the place Mary Jane Blige calls home. Oh, really now? Well, in all fairness he is married to the woman otherwise known as the Queen of Hip-hop Soul.
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Smack dab across his crisp white XXXL tee is the word ROYALTY. Kendu Isaacs pulls back the deceptively small security door to the grounds of the new Hollywood Hills home he shares with his wife, Mary J.