Listening to Mary J. Blige's Love & Life twenty years after its release offers a feeling of time displacement. The hip-hop soul cultivated by Blige and Sean "Diddy" Combs is a sound that re-entered the zeitgeist by younger artists looking to recapture the 90s with on-the-nose sampling. Enough time has passed that revisiting that style is more welcome, but in 2003, that could be debated.

Their approach then made sense, at least regarding fidelity with earlier partnerships. Love & Life opens with a riff on the legendary "Leave A Message" intro that ignited What's the 411?, setting the stage for Combs' cinematic production style and establishing it as the final act in a trilogy that began with 411? and continued with the career-defining My Life. Until that point, Blige worked to distance herself from Combs and veered into a more adult contemporary lane by collaborating with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds. She didn't abandon hip-hop altogether, but her work with Combs more closely evoked the crate-digging, deep-cut nature of the genre. A track like "All My Love", which recalls Grand Puba's "I Like It" through a Cal Tjade sample, works in context. A reteaming with Method Man over A Tribe Called Quest's "Hot Sex" similarly works, with the context being Blige and Combs' history as a duo honoring sounds that shaped their ears as young Black New Yorkers.

However, establishing its contribution to the genre takes time and effort. Did Love & Life come too early as an experiment in revisiting a familiar formula, or was it too late? Not a full ten years had passed since the release of My Life, and we'd see many artists since, including Combs' own, leverage the same formula. The album serves as a reunion of two superstars who found greater success after going their separate ways than an attempt to push the genre forward.

All of this might be why evaluating an album years later is important, allowing time for it to settle or blossom into its position in an artist's catalog. To regard Love & Life merely as a 2003 release, where we'd also get Worldwide Underground and Dangerously In Love, undercuts that position. Despite its intentions, it is never mentioned in the same breath as My Life, which might be its lack of a pivotal single. It aims for cohesion as an album, where the overall experience counts for more than one-off statements or trends. Production-wise, Combs closed ranks by relying on his in-house Hitmen team (including Stevie J. and Mario Winans), with Dr. Dre being the main outlier. In addition to Method Man, there are appearances by 50 Cent, Jay Z, and Eve. The uptempo beats are jeep-ready, and the vocals are raw. The ballads, in turn, yearn for more than the sole immediacy of romantic gratification and invite scrutiny of the competing agendas between Blige and Combs.

If you had the privilege of getting your hands on the accompanying documentary, you had a front-row seat to tension in the studio. Between Blige and Combs recapturing the carefree vibe from their earlier years, we got debates over the album's texture and the emergence of the "trickery" meme. We also got one of the first appearances of Kendu Isaacs, who Blige has since divorced but who influenced the themes of this album and the more successful one that followed. To say her feelings around recording Love & Life are complicated is an understatement.

Despite this, Love & Life reached #1 on the US Billboard 200 and US Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and earned platinum status. It does not only rely on a familiar template; it celebrates it and earns its spot in the "hip-hop soul" tradition from two major players who coined the term.