My Life Review

The samples are the softest of her career, Roy Ayers and Curtis Mayfield and Barry White, all warm keys and gentle bass, and that warmth is what makes the record so hard to take. Blige is in genuine trouble across these songs and the music keeps offering her comfort she cannot accept. My Life itself is a plea disguised as a groove. I'm Goin' Down is a cover that she guts and rebuilds until it belongs to her.

Be Happy asks a question the whole album is built around, whether wanting to be happy is the same as knowing how, and never quite answers it. She wrote or co wrote most of it, which she had not done before, and the plainness of the language is the point: no metaphor, no distance, just a woman saying exactly where she is. Thirty years on it functions as a document people still play in the worst weeks of their own lives, which is a rarer thing than acclaim.