SOTW: Sanity Rules! || "Work That" by Mary J. Blige

It took Marguerite Yourcenar 30 years to complete her Memoirs of Hadrian. She later remarked of the experience: “There are certain books one should not write before the age of 40.”

It took Mary J. Blige nearly two decades in the music industry to complete her current Growing Pains. She recently remarked of the experience: “I can’t settle and be miserable because you want me to sell a miserable album…If you want to deal with some other artist, then go deal with some other artist. That’s the chance, as a leader, that I take. I’m not worried about finances or you buying my album. I’m worrying about my sanity.”

It is the kind of line that makes Left-Eye smile in heaven.

While there are probably certain songs that one should not sing (or get) before the age of 40, thank the stars for the youthful impulses of Mary J. Blige, 36, who has long recognized in life and song that there are certain privileges that age carries.

“Work That,” a track from her turn-of-the-year release Growing Pains cannot be dismissed (as many male critics already have) as yet another interchangeable ladies power jam. And no, I don't care that Apple just used the song for an ipod promo. We all know that within every ladies power jam is a specific circumstance and remedy. Think through, for example, what ALOTR instigator Barbara Johnson (right) might call the “critical differences” between Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money”; La India’s “Ese Hombre”; or La Lupe’s version of Phil Ochs's “That’s the Way It’s Gonna Be.”

In the case of “Work That,” the circumstances are flexible enough to incorporate a spectrum of predicaments, be you unemployed, at the mercy of a manager-from-hell, single at the strike of midnight, pissed at your parents. The remedy, as Blige so vitally reminds, is to be yourself. The opening strident sounds of a toy piano remind us of our earliest musical steps. Its initial clumsiness is deceiving, as you’re soon driven into the kind of bump that has an intense gravity to it. It’s a song that requires slowed down Bell Biv DiVoe choreography, moves so ably modeled by CBB at O!H’s east coast launch. Dig your heels into the ground, dance at the lower levels, and raise your bottles in the air.

Ladies, in my pre-40 precociousness, I’d like to lean on the words and sounds of “Work That” to ring in 2008. Tear a page out of the Coney Island Polar Bears Club Rulebook and dive in. Burn your supply of Pepcid AC and get down to this:




Japi New Jeers! Don't forget to eat grapes. - (ATV)