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The release of Mary J. Blige's Growing Pains prompts me to pull out a piece in which I tried to get to the heart of the hip-hop-soul queen's torment--the combination of "imperiousness and vulnerability" that makes her so special. And yes, the title was a play on the name of a famous book by the psychologist Alice Miller. Barney Hoskyns

"WE LOVE YOU, MARY!" The shouts float up from isolated pockets in the plush auditorium housed within New York City's glitzy Time Warner building. Mary J. Blige has just wrung every last drop of pain from "Not Gon' Cry," the Babyface song she contributed to the 1996 film Waiting To Exhale, and it's left her lost and little-girlish on stage, unsure whether to replace the protective sunglasses she's briefly removed.

"We love you, Mary! We love you!" The reassuring yelps are a natural response to the honesty of Blige's emotional confusion, and to the narrative of self-destruction and redemption that her career represents. "The Queen of Hip-Hop Soul," as MJB has for some years been dubbed, is a beguiling mixture of imperiousness and vulnerability, a bitch goddess who shows us the wounded child inside. We hear the rawness of her pain in a voice that foregoes the showiness of modern R&B divas. Blige, in fact, isn't a diva at all: she's a street queen, a tomboyish everywoman from the projects who for over a decade has spoken not only for women but for all survivors of urban poverty and violence.

Blige is quintessential East Coast, quintessential NYC R&B. When her sometime mentor André Harrell introduces this live memory-lane trawl through Mary's key songs he borrows the timeless image of "a rose growing up through the concrete" from Ben E. King's immortal ghetto poem "Spanish Harlem." Something about Blige touched Harrell deeply when years ago he heard the yearning in her 1989 mall-booth recordings of Chaka Khan's "Sweet Thing" and Anita Baker's "Caught Up In The Rapture." He saw the hurt in her anger, the residue of her loveless abusive childhood. "We were able to take Mary's pain," he has said, "and make it a platform."

Born in Savannah, Georgia, on January 11, 1971, Blige was raised in the notorious Schlobohm Projects of South Yonkers, a place where, in her words, people lived "like crabs in a barrel." The absence of her father was compounded by molestation she suffered as a child. On her own from the age of 17, she was signed to Harrell's MCA-distributed Uptown label in 1991, releasing her debut album What's The 411? the following year. The opening cut, "Leave a Message"--a succession of phone messages from her answering machine over a slick drum-machine groove--made it immediately clear that Blige was street rather than chic. Meanwhile the wistful "Reminisce" and "You Remind Me" hinted at the loss and melancholy behind much of hip hop's aggression.

With the help of his pushy lieutenant Sean "Puffy" Combs, André Harrell moulded Mary into a post-buppie icon of urban black aspiration: modern R&B's own Aretha Franklin, musical mother to Beyoncé and all her sisters. The very fact that she wasn't conventionally cute made her all the more charismatic. After a decade of Whitney Houstons, Mary was the perfect female figurehead for the new convergence of soul melodicism and hip-hop beats/attitude, togged out in combat boots and backwards baseball caps. Her "keepin'-it-real" stance became an emotional touchstone for urban African-Americans, who fetishized her pain and welcomed the elision between her life and her art. "They think this is entertainment," Blige told Ebony two years ago. "This Mary J. Blige thing is not entertainment. This is my life and I put it out there on the line for everybody."

My Life itself was a 1994 manifesto for Mary's pain, equal parts despair and hope. Tracks such as "Be Happy" and "I'm Goin' Down" spoke of the dreams and self-destructiveness of the girl who'd felt ugly in school, who didn't get noticed by boys. Women lapped it up, clinging to the album as an articulation of their own sorrow. For younger female R&B artists like Destiny's Child, My Life was life-changing.

Blige's music became more sophisticated when MCA brought in Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis--the legendary writer-producers behind the Human League's "Human" and Janet Jackson's "Control"--to work on 1997's Share My World. 1999's Mary, with its stark monochrome image of Blige in profile, pushed her closer to the pop mainstream and featured cameos from George Michael, Elton John and Eric Clapton. It even boasted a ballad--the divine "Give Me You"--from the hand of Ms. Diane Warren.

Behind the scenes, the Queen of hip hop soul was in alcoholic-narcotic meltdown, angry and damaged. "Nobody around me loved me or cared for me," she has said. "Somebody actually told me, 'Girl, you young. It's okay to drink and sleep around.' I'll never forget that. That's where my life was, spinning out of control--drinking and drugging, staying up for days and days and days. The way I was living, I should have been dead." Volatile relationships with such fellow artists as Jodeci's K-Ci Hailey contributed to Mary's plummeting self-worth.

Only when she met and fell in love with industry veteran Kendu Isaacs did Blige clean up her act, the result being the repentance and resolution of No More Drama, its title track a stormingly emotional testament to her recovery. (She has said she quit drinking and drugging after the death of singer Aaliyah in August 2001.) Performing "No More Drama" at the 2002 Grammy awards, Mary burst into tears as the song concluded. "I know it sounds like something everybody says, but I had to like me and I didn't," Blige told Newsweek. "I was drinking, which was something people in my family did all my life, so I thought that was the answer. But it just blinded me to what was really going on in my life and in my career."

With Blige's sobriety--and inevitable religious redemption--has come the charge that she's lost her edge, that she's too ensconced in domestic bliss to make the powerful music of her cocaine-blighted heyday. 2003's underperforming Love & Life, which reunited her with the tycoon formerly known as Puffy Combs, was regarded as a disappointment. Understandably Blige was peeved that people had so much invested in her pain and couldn't feel pleased for her newfound happiness. Her new album The Breakthrough continues in the vein of therapy-through-song.

At the Rose Hall's invite-only celebration of her 15-year career, Blige started tentatively, reaching back to her euphoric block-party classic "Real Love" but remaining distant in her shades and her black uber-hooker garb. For all the innovations in sound and style in black pop of the last decade, the presentation of R&B live hasn't changed greatly since the '80s, with the musicians arranged conventionally behind the star: the band-leader keyboard dude, the beefy drummer playing micro-fills-within-fills, the four backing singers in a line of black Armani suits, the three-piece horn section, the overly flashy guitarist.

If Blige tore through the bourgeois sheen of '80s soul, one still hears the scatting and melisma of Anita Baker in her vocal digressions. Her range is impressive tonight, spanning low contralto notes and arching Aretha wails. As she works her way through "My Life," "I Love You," "I'm Goin' Down," and the Rufus-ish "Love I Never Had" she warms up, pulling off the sunglasses so we can see the feeling in her eyes. The cathartic "No More Drama" lacks the concentrated agony of its shattering performance at the Grammies but stills gets the hairs standing on your arm.

With the buoyant, swaying "Family Affair," Blige gets the mainly black audience on its feet, shouting along with her like a gospel congregation. "Don't need no hateration, holleratin' in this dance for me," she sings as she stomps around in her giant platforms. "Let's get it percolatin', while you're waiting, so just dance for me..." It's party time at the Rose Hall.

"I feel like I'm a new artist," Blige announces before a final song that looks back over her life and namechecks the music that made her a star. The years of gin and blow are behind the happily-married 34-year-old, whose standing has suffered in the era of the R&B starlets she inspired. The "broken street kid"--Mary's own words--has become Aretha's "Natural Woman," still raw and flawed but weary of her own rage. We love you, Mary.

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