Mary J. Blige has been talking about prayer, PMS and where she comes from, all of which are pertinent to her new record, No More Drama. She is at Nobu, a Japanese restaurant in downtown Manhattan - not at her regular place, in the front, where it gets too noisy for serious conversation, but in a semisecluded area toward the back of the room, where it's quieter and the tables are farther apart. Her hair is short and blond this evening. Wigs in various hues, textures and lengths are something of a Blige signature: Blige is nothing if not styling.

For dinner at Nobu, she is wearing a stretchy white pullover top, boat-necked in front and bare in back (Versace), tight pink jeans with a snakeskin print (Roberto Cavalli) and some delicate natural-leather thongs, with small crystals arranged in flower-shaped patterns punctuating the straps (Fortuno Valentino).

She has beautiful feet, and also beautiful hands, which she uses a lot when she talks, dividing up space, indicating the distance between the various facts and circumstances of her life, and herself, Mary. Describing her childhood, moving her hand up and down in front of her to suggest the force field that was her singing ability - always there, exerting a certain pull and provoking a certain resistance - she says, "When I was younger, I didn't know my destiny was to sing. I just felt something pulling me - Mary, do the right thing, Mary, go to school, Mary, do this, Mary, be that, Mary, Mary, Mary. And I started pulling away from it. Because in the ghetto, I didn't want to be nothing. I didn't want to be anything."

Because to be nothing is to be safe?

"Exactly! That sounds about right. Because my destiny was doing this to me, was trying to make me finish school, and the fact that I could sing was right here," she says, bringing her hand, palm inward, to about six inches in front of eye level, the fact that she could sing staring her in the face.

This is a graceful gesture that resolves for a moment - right here - and then dissolves into a posture of natural poise, her face slightly remote, her gaze directed at some point in the middle distance. Although she is an official, anointed-by-VH1 diva, there is nothing about her that the appellation usually connotes. The drama to which the record's title refers includes failed, abusive relationships, drugs and the emotional evolution of a girl from the projects who achieved unexpected fame and power from an early age. The diva-esque and the dramatic notwithstanding, she is not larger than life or excessively mannered. There has always been something a little reserved about Blige, something private, the suggestion that there's something fundamentally Mary, which in real life, rather than on records, only the people very close to her will ever know or touch.

Nevertheless, she has a powerful presence. And her charisma isn't anything as puny as magnetism. It's more like she's realer than real, a person who feels things intensely and conveys them that way, and is thus possessed of the natural force of attraction exerted by a celestial body, such as Earth, upon objects at or near its surface, i.e., gravity.

Blige is on the real, very intense and somewhat shy with strangers, but her vibe is happy.

Shy or not, Blige laughs easily, and she is laughing now, with her big sister, LaTonya Blige-DaCosta, who is also her co-manager and who has come in toward the tail end of the meal, in time for a few bites of rock shrimp and a glass of sake, with news of the first single off No More Drama, the appropriately titled "Family Affair." (Although, first things first, before talking business, the sisters, who look enough alike to just miss being twins - the same large, liquid, almond-shaped eyes, slanting up by nature in a way that can usually only be achieved by eyeliner, the same high cheekbones, the same regal, ancient-Egyptian beauty - discuss matters that have always been the immediate imperative of sisters: "LaTonya! What the hell? Is that a weave? That look nice!") "How they feeling it?" asks Mary, of the single, after sake has been ordered and hair affairs have been concluded.

"They feeling it real hard," says LaTonya. "Added to radio, an extra 200 spins. It's crazy. And that was only from the leak. That wasn't from the official release. I got a lot of stuff to tell you."

Like Mary, LaTonya, who used to sing backup for her sister, has a musical speaking voice. Both sisters have a Southern wind blowing through their sentences, the legacy of summer visits to grandparents in Georgia, although they grew up in Yonkers, New York. Their laughter is occasioned by the question of whether it is true that when she was about sixteen, Mary worked as a cashier at a department store, Alexander's, the mere mention of which has LaTonya cracking up.

"Yes," answers Mary in tones of weary resignation, as her sister laughs.

Is the weary resignation because this is a question she gets asked all the time?

"No. But it's still like, 'Yes.' I was miserable. I was so miserable. I stayed there for, like, three weeks." "She came home, and she had a clear plastic bag," says LaTonya, still laughing. "You could see everything she had in there, her lipstick, her everything. They make you have a clear plastic bag, so you don't steal anything, and she was like, 'I hate that job. I'm not never working for nobody in my life.'

"And Mommy was like, 'Well, you ain't gotta go to work no more,' " says Mary, also laughing now. "But you're getting the hell outta here. Because I wasn't going to school. Thank God I'm grown up."

No more drama" is a record on which Blige - through songs about prayer, PMS and where she comes from - says exactly that: Thank God I'm grown up. Unequivocally, it is the record on which the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul declares her independence from heartbreak, announces her departure from the land of anguish, draws a line in the sand over which abuse will no longer be free to step and commands you to get your ass out on the dance floor. Although there is also no such thing as an emotionally simple Mary J. Blige record, and a party record is usually emotionally simple, No More Drama is the closest thing to a party record that Blige has released since What's the 411? It is a funky record, much more on the R side of R&B than its bluesy predecessors.

The no-more-drama Blige is what LaTonya describes as "the new, happy Mary." There is no such thing as a bad Mary J. Blige record. There's even no such thing as a merely good Mary J. Blige record. Even the lesser Mary J. Blige records -What's the 411? and Share My World - bottom out at very good. But No More Drama, along with 1994's My Life and 1999's Mary, is a great Mary J. Blige record. These three records, taken in sequence, show a trilogy of Marys, progressing from cry of pain to self-examination to self-acceptance.

"She's just evolved, she's matured," says writer-producer Jimmy Jam, who with his partner, Terry Lewis, has worked with Blige since 1997 and who oversaw No More Drama's title track. "When we met her, she was a very bluesy person. She was the kind of person it seemed like would bring the pain on herself. She could be happy. But it was always happy-but-I-know- right-around-the-corner-something's-gonna-mess-up. But, you know, one of the fascinating things about Mary and one of the reasons people connect to her is because of the drama, if you will, in her life. You're watching somebody who's acknowledged the conflict, and who's tried to work through it."

"I know what's making her happier," says her mother, Cora Blige. "Now she's believing in herself. I would always say to her, 'Mary, look at Mary first. As long as you mistreating Mary, you can't treat nobody else right.' Now she's treating Mary right, and it just falls into line. That's how it go."

No More Drama is also sometimes a funny record, including, for example, what is probably the only song about PMS in the history of recorded popular music. But it's not all funny. "Where I've Been," which is dedicated to "all the youth of the world that think nobody understands," is autobiographical in a historical as well as an emotional sense, in a way that is new for Blige: "At the age of seven years old, a strange thing happened to me, before I even saw my life had flashed before me/And I got the mark to show, and it became a thing of beauty, so I've got to let you know. . . . You probably couldn't take some of the things that I've lived in my life," she sings over the flawless hook from Ruff Ryders producer Swizz Beatz.

Asked about "Where I've Been," she is vague - she talks about destiny, about her wisdom as a child and about the interruptions of adolescence: "Here go peer pressure, pulling you down, pulling you back. And guess what? When you're younger, you like the ignorance. You love the ignorance. You like the fact that, yo, I'm chillin' with my peeps. I'm smoking weed. But when I was seven, I was very smart. I had all A's. I'd sing all the time, you couldn't tell me s---. The strange thing that happened when I was seven was that I was an adult. When you're seven, you know how to love. You know how to openly trust without having fear about it, you know what I'm saying? And I had all of that, and I didn't have a fear that nobody would hurt me. And that's strange for seven years old. That's strange for anyone."

There is truth in this answer, and insufficiency, the private part of Blige that in real life, rather than on records, only the people very close to her will ever know or touch. Like the vertical scar under her left eye - a mark left on her by life that became a thing of beauty - it's just something she doesn't share. "That?" she says of her scar. "That negative part I can't discuss. That's the part that's quite strange. That I will never tell the world. And that's it."

But where Blige has been has never been exactly hidden. It's on the records, and on the record, that she comes from a hard place - born in the Bronx thirty years ago, she grew up in Yonkers, at first in a red-brick building on the same pleasant street as her elementary school - Martin Luther King Jr. - and later in the projects, Schlobohm Gardens, a few blocks away, with LaTonya and her mother. She had, in the normal, not-too-much-drama sense, a little bit of a rough ride through childhood. "LaTonya would love to go to school, Mary didn't," says Cora Blige. "LaTonya would get up and do, Mary lazy." Mary's baby brother, Brucey Miller, who co-wrote three and wrote one track on No More Drama, was born when she was eleven. Her younger sister, Jonquell, came along when she was sixteen, already done with Alexander's and living at home.

When she was signed, at nineteen, to Uptown Records, by a management team who later sued her and won in an action that led her to the brink of bankruptcy - "That's what I get for not reading the contracts and just signing on the washing machine in the projects. I just wanted to get out of the ghetto, like, 'Erggh, get me out!' " - she was living in the Bronx with a friend. But she signed at her family's place in Schlobohm Gardens, and in her hip-hop soul, that's where she's from, where she will always be from. "A part of me is still there," she says. "That's why my music is well-received, because I haven't left. I walked away. But I walked away well-seasoned. Because in every ghetto, hip-hop is a big deal. And I know real hip-hop when I hear it because I'm from that element, and that's all we had: block parties and DJs that never made it out."

It's a hot hot hot day in July, in Yonkers, on the steps of Martin Luther King Jr. elementary school, the kind of hot day where even the wind blows hot, a Southern wind, like in the voices of the Blige sisters, one of whom - LaTonya - is crossing Locust Hill Avenue right now, looking hot hot hot herself in tight tight tight camouflage pants, a black home-customized husband-beater - which, because she cut the neck crooked by mistake, reveals just enough purple bra to complement her purple Christian Dior shades - and black boots. She is also wearing a belt with an enormous rhinestone buckle and a Nokia on it, black boots, pav?-diamond hoop earrings, a LATONYA necklace and sterling-silver dog tags, with pav? diamonds on one side and her name engraved on the other.

The Yonkers where the Blige sisters grew up is a small town. "Everybody know your mama, what she do, how she do it, your cousins, your uncles," says Miller, who has joined the Mary J. Blige historical background tour as it leaves the King school. "Every now and then there will be somebody you don't know, and then you figure out that somewhere down the line you do know them - they're somebody's cousin."

The tour continues to a few blocks and a whole world away: Schlobohm, Building Five. "When we moved here, it wasn't so bad at first," says LaTonya. "And then it started going downhill, downhill: drugs, people. And it usually wasn't the people who lived here, it was the people who came here, and the drug-selling. I remember freebase in the early, early Eighties, maybe the late Seventies. And then suddenly people who you wouldn't think would be smoking crack, was. I remember . . . I used to smoke reefer, you know, drink my little brass monkey and smoke my little weed. Me and two of my closest girlfriends, who I hang out with still, were at a party, and everybody was smoking this new thing - crack - and we were smoking our reefer. And they was like, 'Do y'all wanna try this?' and we was like, 'Nah, no, thank you.' I remember saying, 'I'm not smoking nothing out of a glass tube.' And a couple of people that were at that party that grew up with me, they were on crack, from then to now. I will never forget that, and I have never forgotten that. And it was hard that way, growing up in the projects, wanting to have things and feeling like you wasn't going to have things. And when you're eighteen, what choices are you gonna make? Like when Mary didn't want to go to school no more, like, 'High school sucks, I just don't feel like going.' That's when drugs and stuff come into play. My temperament would be, 'Try it, but think about it, because if it's good I'm keeping it.' So it scared me to do certain things, because I knew I would be compulsive. For Mary? I might be wrong, but Mary is more like, 'OK. I'm trying it. I'm doing it. I'm still doing it. It's done. It is done.' " This philosophy, a no-more-drama motif, clearly now applies not only to cocaine, which Mary has been done with for some time now - she feels that this chapter of her life is over has been over, and is not worth dwelling on now - but to abusive relationships. "You know, I could lie about a whole bunch of stuff and make a record about being brokenhearted," she says. "But the bottom line is that my heart is not broken anymore. Because I love myself now, and I have love from the Creator. For my whole career, I been writing things that happened to me. Because, I mean, I didn't know what else to do. It was like, 'I gotta get this off my chest, it's hurting me too bad, I need to tell somebody about it.' And I ended up telling my fans. But it was such a hell, it hurt so bad. Because the hurt was deep and the hurt was within, and that's the worst hurt, because it can kill you physically."

Blige is currently in a relationship of almost a year's standing with a man she would prefer not to identify - nobody famous, just a guy she met on her last tour who makes her happy. That she has been in bad relationships, starting with K-Ci Hailey of K-Ci and JoJo at the beginning of her career, has also never been hidden. Back at Nobu, asked when she's been closest to death, Blige says, "When I was on drugs. But you know what I think? I've been closer to death with people than with drugs. I have been closer to death with people who say they love me than with drugs." Asked what she means, she says, "Exactly what I just said. A lot of people don't have good intentions, and I have been closer to death that way than with drugs. It's bad enough when you be self-destructive. But another person try it? That's f---ed up."

And just what does it mean to her, to have no more drama?

"When we say 'no more drama,' we don't mean our life is going to be clean," she says. "We mean we know how to control our emotions. But . . . when Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis brought that song to me, I was like, 'Who do y'all have following me around? Because it's my life right now.' I was going through straight-up hell. Relationship hell. Lack-of-self-love hell. You know, like the mental beat-down type of thing. And the main thing I learned from it is that, as hard as it is to admit this, there was something going on in me that was causing me not to have a relationship that lasts. It was my insecurities about myself. If you walk into a relationship thinking you're not s---, the man is going to treat you like you're not s---. That ended up making me understand that I had to believe in myself and love myself in order for anyone to love me. In order for anyone to care about me. In order for anyone to think I'm great, or even good at anything I do."

Blige's earliest memories are of singing: Singing in the mirror with a hairbrush for a microphone, singing around the house with her girlfriends. Her mother sang. Her sister sang. But Mary reallysang. "She was three years old when I recognized her gift," says Cora. "Before she was going to school or anything. She just started singing. Sesame Street was on, and she could sing all the songs, and she had a very unique voice. And I was like, 'O-oh, my God. My baby can sing.' "

Mary's father, a musician, would visit, and she would visit him. "When we was, like, nine years old," she says, "he used to come back and teach us how to spell words, and then my mother used to send us to him in Michigan. And then he just, like, disappeared. But when we did see him, he put a lot in us. He played instruments, so he taught me how to hold my own notes, without being on someone else's, when you're singing with another person. He basically taught me how to harmonize. How to listen."

Then, as she got older, fourteen, sixteen, "we were still singing in the mirror, but by then we had a reason. We had boyfriends, broken hearts, stuff like that. So that's when 'Rapture,' by Anita Baker, came in" - a karaoke version of which, recorded at a mall, was what led to Blige's first deal. "Singing to us was like eating, you know what I'm saying? We was singing anywhere we would go. It was so easy to do. But to be a singer just seemed so far-fetched. It didn't seem like a reality in the projects. It wasn't like no biggie. It was just something to do."

Blige is standing still, looking ahead into the middle distance on one of the many floors of Exit, a club in midtown Manhattan the size of a large suburban mall. She is about to shoot closeups for the "Family Affair" video, which does in fact feature her family - LaTonya, Brucey, her cousin JaMarco and others - having fun, having the kind of fun they really have, family-party fun. These shots, of a lip-syncing Blige - who is wearing a black leather fedora with a red band around the crown, a red tuxedo vest, dangerously low-cut, a gold lariat necklace, enormous tear-drop-shaped, rhinestone-studded pendant earrings and cream leather pants with a pattern of radial lines extending from the crotch - will be intercut with the dance and party action.

There are a lot of people around her - crew, makeup, hair, director, people from her label - but she looks absolutely untouched by them, alone with her dignity and her God, thinking her own private thoughts, not for you or me to know.

"People only know enough, you know what I'm saying?" she had said a few days earlier. "They don't know everything about Mary J. Blige. That's why I'm still able to stay so private. I give them just enough."

Except in her music. In her music, she gives it all.

"And I think I'm supposed to do that," said Blige. "Because if I wasn't supposed to sing about what I sing about, and give interviews about what I give interviews about? Then I wouldn't have had to have been through it all."

[From Issue 882 — November 22, 2001]