Song Lyric Sunday was created by Helen Vahdati from This Thing Called Life One Word at a Time and author Jim Adams from A Unique Title For Me is our current guest host. For complete rules or to join in the fun, click here.

This week’s theme is  “no.”

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Considered the Queen of Hip-Hop-Soul, Mary J. Blige’s fifth studio album, No More Drama, is a rich part of the legacy that leads her to be ranked as Billboard’s most successful female R&B/Hip-Hop artist of the past twenty-five years and landed her on VH1’s 100 Greatest Women in Music (2012) and Greatest Artists of All-time lists (2011).

The title song, No More Drama was released on September 11, 2001–the day of World Trade Center attacks.

Reaching number fifteen in the U.S. and number one in the U.K., No More Drama was more than simply a hit song for Blige.

She told the Daily Telegraph February 7, 2008 that when she sings No More Drama in concert today, she feels a lifetime of pain unspooling every time: “I go through the emotion of being a child growing up in the projects, getting robbed, grown-ups snatching our trick-or-treating bags, being shot at, having to fight physically every day of your life, going home to alcoholic aunts and every woman around you being beaten so badly by men you can’t even understand it, and then growing up and realizing you’re repeating all those patterns, you’re drinking the alcohol and doing the drugs and being abused by men, and the pain and frustration of not being able to stop it. I rewind through that every time I sing it. I want to give people the real truth.”

The song was written by the team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who were also the producers of the track.

Fans of daytime Soap Operas will immediately recognize the piano part in No More Drama as the theme to the venerable CBS show The Young And The Restless. The TV song is known as Nadia’s Theme, although it was originally titled Cotton’s Dream. The sample was very fitting for this song, as drama is very much associated with the show. The writers of the theme – Perry Botkin and Barry Vorzon – are credited as writers on No More Drama because of the sample.

FUN FACTS:

• No More Drama won the 2002 MTV Video Music Award for Best R&B Song.
• The song was featured in the 2003 drama Honey, starring Jessica Alba.
• Tyler Perry used No More Drama as the background theme in his films Why Did I Get Married? and Why Did I Get Married Too?
• Blige asked Mariah Carey and P. Diddy to appear in the music video as they both were experiencing their fair share of drama. Carey suffered a nervous breakdown after finishing the soundtrack album for her star turn in Glitter, a commercial failure. Meanwhile, Diddy was facing the legal fallout from a club shooting. They appear on TV screens as Blige sings in front of a store window. The rest of the clip follows hard-luck stories of a drug addict, a gang member, and an abused woman. By the end, they all break the cycle and start new lives.

Enjoy!

See my Song Lyric Sunday selection for FeliciaDenise.com.

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