Music
December, 1998
R&BJust AS Aretha Franklin was crucial to the explosion of soul music in the Sixties, Mary J. Blige is essential to its current rebirth. Her early Nineties debut, What's the 411?, gave rise to a new wave of R&B singers. One look at the charts shows R&B's commercial power. What's debatable is the quality of the current music. With the exceptions of Babyface and R. Kelly, most of the songwriting is faceless, repetitive and slavishly derivative of earlier hits. That's why live albums are so rare in...
