MARY'S NEW WORLD

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Mary J. Blige is looking as fine as she wants to be. The "queen of hip-hop soul" isn't known for upscale glamour; she earned her rep for her edge, her streetiness, her willingness to keep it real. On the cover photo of her 1992 debut album What's the 411?, her face is shrouded in shadow, gangsta-girl tough. Blige, back then, was all about combat boots and leather jackets; she could drink with the best of them, curse with the worst of them. But at a recent photo shoot in a studio in New York City, Blige traded haughtiness for haute couture--her hair was up, her makeup was Cover Girl flawless, and she was wearing a black ankle-length Christina Perrin dress that left one golden-brown shoulder bare.

Blige is ready to step out. Over the past year, she's split from her original producer and mentor, Sean ("Puffy") Combs; left her old record label, Uptown; and re-dedicated herself to spirituality. Her third album, Share My World (MCA), comes out this week, and it's a winner. The 25-year-old singer-songwriter's groundbreaking first album sold 2 million copies; her second, the spottily brilliant My Life, sold 3 million; both spawned countless sound-alikes. The bold but ultimately mercenary ghetto-sex-bomb posturing of rappers Foxy Brown and Lil' Kim, the emotionally blunt crooning of talented teen singer Aaliyah and even the admirably artsy neo-soul stylings of Erykah Badu all have roots in Blige's success. But Blige was the original round-the-way diva; her hard, up-from-the-projects exterior made her raw vocals that much more affecting. Says producer Jimmy Jam, who worked with Blige on World: "People can copy her, but no one can match her emotion."

Share My World shows that Blige deserves a place among pop's premiere female vocalists--Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Toni Braxton. Blige's previous CDs had some charming cuts, including the bighearted Real Love and her show-stopping remake of I'm Goin' Down. Those albums, however, were tailored for hip-hop audiences; Share My World, seems designed to appeal to lovers of the Wu-Tang Clan and Lisa Stansfield alike. The first song, I Can Love You, draws its melody in part from Lil' Kim's crass but compelling song Queen Bitch, but Blige, employing nimble vocals and all-new G-rated lyrics, transforms it into something mellow and moving. The ubiquitous Babyface produced two songs on World, including the apple-sweet Missing You and the mournful Not Gon' Cry (which was also on the Waiting to Exhale sound track), and Blige's oak-dark voice adds shading to his sometimes colorless work. Several other songs, including Everything, Seven Days and Searching, stand out like pure pop gems--expertly cut, with sparkling vocals.

Talking to Blige, one gets the sense, to paraphrase Langston Hughes, that she's "known rivers"; there are some deep currents of pain running through her, but where they're flowing from is hard to say. Her older sister LaTonya, Mary's backup singer and closest confidante, says that in private the singer "laughs all the time" and spends her nights watching Bette Davis videos. But riding in her limo recently, Blige is, at first, a little wary of questioning. She comes alive, though, when we make a stop at the showroom of French designer Thierry Mugler. She loves shopping at the pricey places--Versace, Fendi, Chanel. Her taste in clothes, however, isn't always as sure as her taste in music. She tries on a floor-length purple coat that looks like something Rick James would have worn to Louis XIV's coronation. "Oh, my God!" she exclaims, loving it. Next, a lumpy bright orange coat that makes her look like a citrus industry spokeswoman. "Oh, my God!"

Later, in her hotel room, spent from shopping, she relaxes, but rarely looks directly at the interviewer, her eyes darting around the room instead. Why is she so self-conscious about self-examination? Blige says she only just started to build up her self-esteem. "I hurt myself because I didn't love myself," she says, then proceeds to analyze herself in the third-person style favored by Bob Dole. "I didn't like Mary, I didn't care about Mary, Mary didn't finish [high school] and did a lot of stuff she had no business doing because she didn't care about herself."

Blige grew up in the Schlobohm low-income housing project in Yonkers, New York. She and her three siblings were raised mostly by their mother Cora; her father left for a while when she was young but later returned. Blige says the projects were full of fighting and "negativity"; she found an outlet by studying music at Lincoln High School in Yonkers, a public school that specializes in the performing arts. When Blige was 17, she recorded a karaoke-style version of Anita Baker's Caught Up in the Rapture in a mall one day, and after the tape was passed among family and friends, it found its way to Andre Harrell, then head of Uptown Records. Blige was signed, paired with hot young hip-hop producer Combs, and her career was launched.

Share My World is her first album without Combs, who has become mired in controversy after the shooting of his close friend rapper Christopher ("Notorious B.I.G.") Wallace (Combs is the head of Bad Boy Records, and Wallace recorded for that label). Combs added a unifying, streetwise grace to Blige's albums; without him, her music sounds more marketable but less funky. Blige gives different answers about their split. "It's not a big change for me," she says at one point, adding that "sometimes you have to move on."

The foundation of this maturity can be traced to Blige's newfound commitment to religion. She doesn't belong to a specific denomination, but she says her strengthened love of God has improved her self-image. "You better believe that I give a damn now, because I know what comes first," she says. "God comes first. If I don't love him, I can't love anybody. And if I can't love me, I can't love nobody." Can she get an amen?