Great songwriters can get inside the head and heart of the artists for whom they’re writing. And great artists can take songs from any writers and make those songs their own. When it all comes together in perfect harmony, you get something as stirring as “No More Drama” by Mary J. Blige.
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Blige was recently nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s her second nomination; she was also up for the honors in 2021. If she indeed gains induction, it will be for the way she imbued songs like “No More Drama” with lived-in pain and inspiring resilience. Let’s take a look at how this incredible track came together.
Drama Class
Blige emerged in the early 1990s firing on all cylinders, right from her very first album What’s the 411?, which shot to the top of the R&B charts and included an immediate Top 10 pop hit in “Real Love.” That success continued unabated throughout the ’90s, even as Blige’s personal life endured rocky periods.
As the new millennium dawned, Blige attempted to shake free of all that previous baggage, and she intended her music to reflect that change. The album No More Drama, released in 2001, injected a bit more positivity into the proceedings. Blige, as she had done through most of her career, used a variety of co-producers and writers, and she once again collaborated with the legendary R&B masterminds Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who had contributed to her previous two records.
The song Jam and Lewis wrote for her was intended to mirror the new attitude she had in her life. To drive the point home about the need for avoiding drama, the pair came up with the idea to build the song’s melodic structure around a sample of the theme to the long-running CBS soap opera The Young and the Restless. That song is also known as “Nadia’s Theme” and was written by Barry De Vorzon and Perry Botkin Jr. Because of the sample, De Vorzon and Botkin are listed as co-writers of “No More Drama” along with Jam and Lewis.
“I’m a big soap opera fan, and I always wanted to do something using The Young and the Restless theme,” Jam told Rolling Stone in 2015. “We figured Mary was at a point in her life that she knew about drama and it was a song lyrically she could sing. We wrote all the lyrics, but always with the intention that she would rewrite it to make it personal to her. When we went to New York, she listened to it and said: ‘You been following me around with a spy or something? This is exactly what I’m feeling. I’m not changing a thing on this one.'”
What is “No More Drama” About?
From the moment those well-known piano chords start playing and Blige speaks about being So tired, tired of all this drama, you can tell “No More Drama” is going to be something special, especially when Jam and Lewis’ hip-hop beat kicks into gear. The song is an ode to self-reliance (Gotta count on me) and the need to leave the damaging stuff (and people) in the rearview.
Jam and Lewis find a clever way to reference the sample when they have Blige sing, Or maybe I like the stress / ‘Cause I was young and restless in the second verse. It fits well into the overall narrative, one of Blige overcoming the negative stressors by the force of her will. This message peaks in the third verse, when Blige draws a line between her past dramas and how she wants to live from this point: Only God knows where the story ends for me / But I know where the story begins.
And I choose to win, she powerfully declares before the chorus comes around again, and she testifies to her newfound outlook. “No More Drama” marked a turning point in the messaging of Mary J. Blige’s music. What remained the same was the inimitable manner in which she delivered that message.
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Photo by Rick Kern/Getty Images for Honeyland Festival
