#69, "Beautiful (remix),” Mary J. Blige (feat. Black Star) (1999) 

150 Favorite Songs: #69, "Beautiful (remix),” Mary J. Blige (feat. Black Star) (1999) 

There are two kinds of love songs. There are the ones you put on a tape* for someone you've been with for a long time, and the ones that you put on a tape for someone you've recently decided is someone you want to make tapes for. "Beautiful" is very much the latter sort of song. Listen to Yasiin Bey’s opening line, which is one of the lovelier romantic sentiments, like something out of Rumi. “I dreamt that I could paint you with words / but there were no colors bright enough / black or white enough / blue or green enough / it didn't mean enough." The lyricism is breathtaking. 

This remix of “Beautiful” is not a famous song. Near as I can tell, it was never officially released. I downloaded a leaked version of it from some file-sharing service in 2002. Even the original was never released on a Mary J. Blige album—it was the second single from the soundtrack to the 1998 Angela Bassett rom-com How Stella Got Her Groove Back. It’s wild that something this good was never released, though. 

“Beautiful” is the sort of song you'd put on a tape for someone you don't have a lived-in love with because it's not really about the other person. It's almost aspirational, maybe—I'm not sure if that's the word I mean, but it's close. I mean that it's the sort of thing that speaks to you about a person because you have decided that you want to try to be in love with that person, because you've found that there's more to that person than you can hope to explain, and you don't know them well enough to try. And that's why you are thinking about love songs—because you are excited to learn the rest. 

When that love is a grown-up thing, lines like that seem inadequate. You could paint with words, because you wouldn't just use colors—there's more definition, and you can rely on line-work. And that love, the kind that has been sweated over and fought for, that has learned how to survive, that isn't convinced by lines like "what I'm gonna do is be totally committed." It's deeper than that. It's harder to write songs about it, and there aren't as many of them. And that's okay, because when you've been with someone for a long enough time, they don't need tapes as often as they did at the beginning.

But for that first kind of love? The kind that grows up and becomes the second, if you're lucky? There aren't a lot of songs about it that are prettier than "Beautiful."

*playlist, sure, i’m old.