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When something like that happens to you, if you’re a survivor, or you want to survive this is your music. And that’s always a quiet place.”īlige “one million percent” believes songs have the power to move the needle on issues like this one - but she said it’s also more personal than that. The beat is going crazy, the lyrics are going kind of angry and emotional, and then it dies down to the piano - and ‘it ain’t over till it’s over.’ You come to a place where you understand that you’ve got work to do. “You’re marching, you’re mad, you’re angry,” she said, “but at some point it has to come to a place of calm. Blige took this rousing call to action and suddenly turned it on the individual hearing it. Like, there’s 80-year-old women still healing from things that have been done to them since they were children.”Īfter pounding the streets with a mixture of fury and light, “See What You’ve Done” ends with an introspective piano solo. “And will they have the strength to come out of the tragedy and the trauma triumphant like this girl did? And besides her being triumphant, she has wounds that will never heal. “I guess the overhanging darkness is: Who else is being treated like this?” Blige said. The documentary ends with a legal victory, but a cloud of sadness and open-ended tragedy still hangs over the credits accompanied by Blige’s song. It ain’t over, ’cause some wounds never heal - do you see what you’ve done?” It ain’t over till it’s done, till these shackles are broken. Moving into the chorus, she declares over hand-claps: “It ain’t over till it’s over.

Everyone they touch, they give something real, something with depth and beauty all at the same time.”īlige’s own voice swirls and harmonizes with her lead melody, creating a kind of vocal army. And I could do it on my own, but I love working with Nova Wav. Her other cowriters on the song were Nova Wav, the producing and songwriting duo of Brittany “Chi” Coney and Denisia “Blu June” Andrews, who have penned hits for Rihanna and Beyoncé.Įven when she’s making fun dance tracks, Blige said, “I still want to make people feel something.

She sings with determination over a driving, syncopated rhythm and a thumping beat, courtesy of her regular collaborator DJ Camper. “This,” Blige noted, “is what I saw when I saw the film.”

How can we ignore what’s going? I got questions. The lyrics continue: “What’s going on, when I gotta fight for a right that is rightfully mine? What’s going on, when the world can decide if a caged bird flies or ever gets a chance to grow? Too many people are invisible. “Why are Black women being treated like this? This is not right.” Rather, it was Blige’s blunt reaction immediately after seeing the film. Her incredulous anthem begins with the words “What’s going on?” The nine-time Grammy winner said she wasn’t thinking of Marvin Gaye’s classic song when she wrote that line - “It wasn’t intentional it was probably subconscious” - although it certainly rhymes with the injustice against Black bodies Gaye was decrying in 1971. “I was livid at the beginning when I saw this stuff, and then when I saw her fighting, it was so hopeful.” “No matter what they did to her, they couldn’t take away what was hers, which is her life,” Blige added.