The opening track Leave A Message from Mary J. Blige's debut album What's The 411? immediately works on the imagination. It's a series of answering machine messages on a funky drum beat. Surprisingly, most callers end their message with 'peace', instead of 'goodbye'. The singer herself can only be heard on the second track, but from that moment on she does not let go of an album full of high-quality
… urban / r & b / soul. While it sounds extremely commercial, nowhere is it quite as flat as the work of some other female pop stars of the 1990s. Songs like Real Love are more like Aretha Franklin than nineties R&B. Blige can rightly be called Franklin's only real successor.more
