Music - Richard Cook on a soul superstar

Since rap and hip hop became the immensely powerful forces they now are, what used to be thought of as the mainstream of black music seems like it's adrift, not quite this or that. It used to answer to the name "soul", but what, as Ben E King once asked, is soul today? Soul singers are characterised as passionate, lively, free-flowing, where rappers are intense, fixated, driven. The premier voices of the art are most often virtuosos whose ability to emote goes hand in hand with their power to fly free of their surroundings. The most head-turning track on Mary (MCA), the sixth album by the singer Mary J Blige, is "Don't Waste Your Time", an imagined conversation between Blige and - effectively playing her soul godmother - Aretha Franklin. Where Mary merely takes a powerful trip through the lyrics, Aretha uses them like a springboard for her majestic leaps into the stratosphere, a place where words and music somehow commingle, rather than lock together. It isn't a cutting contest, but it's pretty obvious who comes out on top.

Not that Blige is anything like a nervous new girl. She is one of the most successful singers of her day. Like the rest of her superstar brethren - and that includes such different crossover giants as Garth Brooks and Metallica - she has the knack of moulding a simple vernacular out of language that would be hard-core in many other guises. Blige's music began as a tough, rather gangly and raw-boned mix of dance music and deep soul, but this album integrates the various threads of her music so seamlessly that she never has a step choreographed out of place. She is an impressive singer, but just in case she wasn't, her various producers leave nothing to chance: she is shadowed throughout by multi-tracks of herself, polyrhythmic drum parts, filters and every sweetness that a digital mix can provide - along with a sound that has the iced-water sheen such a mix cannot avoid. The result is something that is both sparse and cutting and mellifluous and lyric at the same moment.

Blige does her best to make the record original, but, like so much in today's pop, it wants to look forward and back at the same time. The most distinctive old master hung up in this gallery is Stevie Wonder. The duet between Blige and George Michael , "As", is a revival of a track off Songs in the Key of Life, and that's followed by a song called "Time", which deliberately parrots chunks of another song from the same source, "Pastime Paradise". In some ways, the whole record is a tribute to Wonder's prescience: the dry, reverb-less sound that he loved to work with in the 1970s is the blueprint for this modern soul album. The opening track, "All That I Can Say", is a ringer for any number of Wonder's melodies and arrangements.

It was written, produced and arranged by Lauryn Hill, whose star is even brighter than Blige's at present - so much so that the ad campaign for the album is trumpeting Hill's name almost as much as the artist's. Elsewhere the record is dotted with other cameos: Eric Clapton, Elton John, Michael, Franklin. It is to Blige's credit that only Franklin outpaces her. But the way such star names barely register says something else about the album. The 15 tracks use no fewer than 12 different production teams, from Hill and Babyface to Jam and Lewis, and inevitably, after 70 minutes, it sounds more like a various-artists compilation than a single-artist album. If Blige had the gravitas to tie it together emotionally, it might transcend its jigsaw feel. Yet even the songs' subject matter is little more than a faddish shopping-list of what the concerned young conservative of today has on her mind. Perhaps it's pointless to compare such an album with previous milestones, but if you have to ask if the record can stand next to Anita Baker's Rapture or Aretha Franklin's With Everything I Feel in Me, you're likely to find the answer disappointing.

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