![]() In truth, her career began picking up not long after Glastonbury – her 2017 album Strength of a Woman, was her highest-charting in eight years the following year, her performance in the period drama Mudbound saw her nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe – but the sense of a dramatic increase in momentum over the last 12 months is hard to miss. Google revealed she was the year’s second-most searched music artist in the US, behind Maroon 5’s scandal-hit frontman Adam Levine. ![]() She launched her own festival in Atlanta, announced the arrival of her own talk show, The Wine Down, and won Billboard’s Icon award. Clad in an outfit emblazoned with 10,000 Swarovski crystals, she gave a reading of No More Drama only marginally less intense than at Glastonbury, the highlight of a show that subsequently won an Emmy. Last year, her Super Bowl halftime performance succeeded in stealing the show from her co-stars Dr Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent and Kendrick Lamar. ![]() She begins 2023 with her most recent album, Good Morning Gorgeous, garlanded with six Grammy nominations, including record of the year and album of the year. Onstage at Glastonbury, Blige did not look much like an artist prepared to quietly accept diminished circumstances. Mary J Blige: Doubt (live at Glastonbury 2015) – video It proved the lowest-selling album of her career. The results were OK, but the concept smacked of an artist casting around for a new direction – and the fact that the British artists got billing on the album cover seemed to say something about Blige’s diminished stature: it was being marketed as much on their presence as hers. The previous year, she had released The London Sessions, a game attempt to pair her up with a series of UK artists: Disclosure, Sam Smith, Emeli Sandé, Naughty Boy. The imperial phase that had begun with the release of her 1992 debut What’s the 411? had drawn to a close as the 00s turned into the 2010s. It was a relatively lowly billing for an artist with 100m sales to their name, but the sight of an R&B artist on the Pyramid stage still carried the tang of novelty – it was the year someone got up a petition protesting Kanye West’s headlining appearance as “an insult to rock music” – and, moreover, Blige’s career was, by her standards at least, on its uppers. She appeared on the Friday afternoon during a rainstorm so relentless that the TV coverage was frequently blurred by water on the camera lens, innocuously sandwiched between Alabama Shakes and a wheezy-sounding Motörhead on their last legs. In 2015, Mary J Blige performed at Glastonbury.
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