The Profound Racial Subtext of Mary J. Blige’s U2 Cover
Bono’s most beautiful song sounded most urgent after Hurricane Katrina
“I listen to Mary for her conviction and honesty; her voice is secondary to the emotion she conveys in her raw portrayal of life.” — Natasha Ria El-Scari, poet, Cave Canem Fellow
“Everybody should look at Katrina,” Mary J. Blige told the Guardian journalist Zoe Williams in late 2005. “Don’t act like it can’t happen to us. That’s how it’s been for years… I haven’t seen anything change. I’ve just seen things get worse. We would have been those people in New Orleans, the people who couldn’t get out, the people who died.”
In her interviews in the months after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, Blige seemed willing to talk publicly about issues in a way she’d rarely done before. All of America (and the world) watched while New Orleans residents crowded into the Superdome (twenty-six thousand in an emergency facility set up for a few hundred) and waited on rooftops for help. Four days of horror passed as nothing substantial happened to rescue the sixty thousand black and poor residents of neighborhoods like the city’s Lower Ninth Ward, many living in the top floors and on the roofs of flooded homes.
Fifty levees had failed Monday, August 29. But it was Friday, September 2, before any large-scale rescue began. That day, President Bush toured the area, and, that same day, concerned about looting, Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco gave shoot-to-kill orders. Certainly many black viewers of that Friday’s NBC benefit, A Concert for Hurricane Relief, understood what motivated Kanye West’s now famous outburst. After Mike Myers delivered a scripted statement about three levee breaches and five feet of water filling homes, West took his turn and went off script.
Nervously but deliberately, he stared into the camera and said, “I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, ‘They’re looting.’ You see a white family, it says, ‘They’re looking for food.’ And, you know, it’s been five days because most of the people are black.”
Standing next to West, Mike Myers looked nervously back and forth at the monitor, uncertain when to come in again. West continued, chastising himself for not acting sooner but pledging to take action immediately, adding, “So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help. . . . America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off , as slow as possible.
“I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way — and they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us!”
A seemingly rattled Myers took the moment to deliver the next part of his scripted speech before West delivered his most famous line — “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
The camera cut away to a startled Chris Tucker, who transitioned elsewhere, but West’s point had been heard ’round the world. Blige certainly grasped West’s desperate need to make this statement at this moment, with so many lives so clearly at stake.
In Blige’s interview with Williams, she seemed emboldened to talk about the impact of race on her career. “The blacker you are, the worse it is for you. If you’re mixed, you’ve got a shot. If you cater to what white America wants you to do and how they want you to look, you can survive. But if you want to be yourself, and try to do things that fit you, and your skin, nobody cares about that. At the end of the day, white America dominates and rules. And it’s racist.”
West’s words just seven days earlier certainly echoed through Blige’s duet with the Irish rock band U2 for yet another hurricane relief telecast, Shelter from the Storm: A Concert for the Gulf Coast, an all-star benefit put together by Joel Gallen, who had all but created the form with the 9/11 benefit America: A Tribute to Heroes.
Blige was also being courted to play Nina Simone for a new movie, and Blige had read Simone’s autobiography earlier that year. Her relationship with Simone and a lifetime of thought went into her performance of that song, race playing no small part.
Blige’s history with “One” extended back a couple of years before any of this. Interscope’s Jimmy Iovine suggested she perform the song at the 2003 MusiCares Person of the Year tribute to U2’s lead singer and songwriter, Bono. She loved the song and impressed guitarist Shane Fontayne (of Lone Justice) so much that he wrote in his February 2003 blog: “We were running a little behind schedule. . . and Mary J. Blige had been observing things for a while. She came up and sang ‘One’ appropriately just once, giving everything to the lone performance. And ‘everything’ in this regard was a performance that was so emotional I knew as soon as it was done that we wouldn’t see her again until the following night. She was shaking as she left the stage. There was no point in ‘rehearsing’ it any more.” The next day at MusiCares, she reportedly left everyone else shaking.
In 2006, Blige told Gavin Martin:
“As I learned the song, when I was listening to the words, they struck, they got in my spirit, and they really made me think of everything in the world because you know the World Trade Center, New York was blowing up, and it was just crazy and it just really got to my heart, the song, I love it. The music was incredible, Bono was singing the mess out of it, and that’s when I fell in love with that record.
“Let’s fast forward to a year after that. I’m sitting around with the president of the record company, Jimmy Iovine, and we’re sitting in his house and the song comes on. And I get that same feeling again, like I have to record this song. I said that to Jimmy, and Jimmy said to me, ‘Don’t you forget that you said that.’ And I said, ‘I won’t.’
“So when I went in the studio to record my album, which was a year later, Jimmy reminded me that I wanted to record the record. So, it ended up on the album.”
Martin asked her what it was about the lyrics of the song that attracted her.
With great emphasis, she recited,
“Love is a temple/Love is a higher law/You ask for me to enter/ But then you make me crawl/I can’t keep holding on to what you got.”
“That right there?… is so powerful to me. ‘Love is the temple; love is a higher law. You ask for me to enter,’ meaning people use love, they lure people with so-called love, and then when they get in it, they got to go through so much and call it love just like the way we live here on this earth, like, this place, the United States say they care about us and stuff like that, and we got to go through so much. There’s so many people who don’t have. Those people are crawling. So many people with AIDS, so many people dying; we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, but it’s hurtful to watch some of the stuff that goes on. A lot of us are fortunate because we’re working hard, but in this system we’re still faced with racism and segregation and separation. But at the end of the day it was those lyrics that were really, really strong to me, that made me think of everybody and how we’re in this all together.”
“What is your experience of racism being in the record industry?” Martin asked.
Blige responded:
“Uhm, just the fact that, you know, sometimes I can’t… they don’t want me on shows or they don’t want me in places, and they’ll say I’m too urban, like my music is too urban for this pop station or whatever the case may be, unless I actually make a record that is suitable for their ears and feels good to them. If I give them like an urban urban record, they won’t play it. It just all looks weird to me, like. . . what kind of record do I need to make? This is what I am and this is who I am, so this is the kind of stuff that is going to come out of me.”
Of course, Blige’s blackness was a significant part of what excited both Jimmy Iovine and Bono about Blige singing the MusiCares benefit. Before she came out that night in 2003, Bono made his excitement known: “Mary J. Blige is going to sing ‘One’ for God’s sake! We’re going to church this evening whether we like it or not!”
But Blige brought something more to her cover of “One,” which most of the world first encountered on the night of the Shelter from the Storm benefit two years later. Church was in there, as it is in everything Blige does, but this service was clearly about matters of class and race and gender.
That September night in 2005, the power of that first recorded performance of the duet remains palpable. U2 started what may be its most beautiful song with appropriate solemnity — camera on guitar, snare and keys gently ringing out. Bono stepped to the mic, and almost whispered the question, “Is it getting better?” He sang that verse solidly but seemingly shaken, almost frail. At the end of the refrain, he called out, “Mary?”
With a black wide-brimmed fedora stating volumes next to Bono’s white cowboy hat, Blige stepped out of the red-and-black background and took her place by Bono’s side, asking, “Did I disappoint you?”
Immediately, the song’s central argument became evident. She pointed her finger, singing, “We’re one, but we’re not the same.”
When Blige and Bono doubled their voices on the wordless refrain that followed, the contrast between his sweet open notes and her soulful vibrato drove the point home.
When Blige took the next verse, she confronted all the white hats who had taken offense at Kanye West, who had blamed the victims, who continued trying to rationalize away the racism of this national tragedy. “You gave me nothing, now that’s all I got,” she cried.
“We hurt each other, then we do it again,” she shouted, before pointing again. And that’s when she sang those lines about being asked to crawl and no longer being able to hold on to what you got. In those soaring vocals, she sang with enough fury to overturn anything in her path.
When the camera panned back to Bono, he looked close to tears. She shouted out to her sisters, and splayed her fingers in a gesture of laying hands as she hung on to the call to her brothers. When they reached the call to “carry each other, carry each other,” she was rocking her arm back and forth the way she’d rocked an imaginary baby in other shows, but this was a move toward the audience, like the tossing of a ball.
In her 2008 essay, “All That You Can’t Leave Behind: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe,” Princeton professor Daphne A. Brooks wrote, “Blige’s Shelter from the Storm version of U2’s ‘One’ is perhaps the most insurgent political work of a black female pop singer since Nina Simone’s ‘Four Women’ and ‘Mississippi Goddamn,’” and Brooks made the case to prove it. She closed with the succinct summation, “Blige recycles ‘One’ — a song that mainlines the twice-removed blues of the Mississippi Delta by way of Keith Richards and the Edge — replacing it and replaying it as the soundtrack of the Louisiana Gulf Coast women who, in this moment in time, on this night, at this benefit, will — through this act of soulful surrogation — indeed have their say.”
Brooks’s argument is a richly layered comparison of Beyoncé’s and Blige’s work during this Gulf Coast disaster. What’s noteworthy for our purposes is that Blige wasn’t done having her say with “One” after this Katrina performance. When she finally recorded it on The Breakthrough, she would prove that she was prepared to follow through on the implications.
Excerpted from Real Love No Drama — The Music of Mary J. Blige by Danny Alexander. Available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other fine retailers.
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