American singer and songwriter Mary J. Blige began her career as a backing vocalist for Uptown Records in the early 1990s. She has released 13 studio albums, eight of which have individually achieved worldwide multi-platinum status. The Queen of Hip-Hop Soul and Queen of R&B, Mary J. Blige is uniquely credited as the first singer to release an album singing over hip-hop beats, which created the genre "hip hop soul" which fuses elements of soul, R&B and gospel style vocals over hip hop beats. Blige's genre-changing sound, in many ways, changed and shaped the sound for modern day R&B and blue-eyed soul artists. In September 1999, Rolling Stone bestowed her first album, What's the 411?, as "genre-creating". Her discography consists of 14 top 10 Billboard 200 studio albums, two live albums, two remix albums and over eighty singles—including more than 20 as a featured artist. In 2009, Billboard magazine ranked Blige as the most successful female R&B/hip-hop artist of the past25 years. In March 2017, Billboard magazine ranked her 2006 song "Be Without You" as the most successful R&B/hip-hop song of all time, as it spent an unparalleled 75 weeks on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, 15 of those weeks at number one. In 2011, VH1 ranked Blige as the 80th greatest artist of all time. Moreover, she was ranked 100th on the list of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" by Rolling Stone magazine. In 2012, VH1 ranked Blige ninth among "The 100 Greatest Woman in Music" listing. Blige started her own musical career in 1992, releasing her multi-platinum-selling debut album, What's the 411? on MCA and Uptown Records. The album gave Blige her first Billboard 200 top ten album, and all of her subsequent studio albums have charted in the top ten on this chart. Among Blige's most popular songs to date are "Family Affair", "Real Love", "Not Gon' Cry" and "Be Without You". Blige has had four BillboardHot 100 top-ten singles as a lead artist in the United States, and has had a total of sixteen top-forty charting singles in the United States. She has had thirty-three singles charting inside the top one hundred on the Billboard Hot 100, making Blige one of the best-performing R&B artists to date on the chart.
