FEATURE:
A Buyer’s Guide
Part Sixty-Nine: Mariah Carey
___________
ONE of the most influential artists ever…
I have waited a while to include Mariah Carey in A Buyer’s Guide. I am rectifying that now. Before getting to her essential albums, I want to bring in AllMusic’s biography of a modern-day superstar:
“One of the best-selling female performers of all time, Mariah Carey rose to superstardom on the strength of her stunning five-octave voice. An elastic talent who has easily moved from glossy ballads to hip-hop-inspired dance-pop throughout her career, she earned early comparisons to Whitney Houston and Céline Dion, and did them both one better by co-writing almost all of her own material from the start. All four singles off her multi-platinum debut album, Mariah Carey (1990), topped the Billboard Hot 100, beginning with "Vision of Love," which also led to Grammy Awards for Best New Artist and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. Each one of her proper studio albums, including the diamond platinum releases Music Box (1993) and Daydream (1995), as well as the Grammy-winning The Emancipation of Mimi (2005), has peaked within the Top Five of the Billboard 200, promoted with smash-hit singles that either pushed or adapted to contemporary pop production trends with solid songwriting at the core. By the time she released her 15th album, Caution (2018), Carey was one of only six artists with two songs in the upper half of the Billboard Top 100's All-Time Hot 100 Songs (the record-breaking "One Sweet Day" and "We Belong Together"). Two years after that album, Carey celebrated the 30th anniversary of her debut with archival releases such as The Live Debut: 1990 and The Rarities.
Born in Huntington, New York, on March 27, 1970, Carey moved to New York City at the age of 17 -- just one day after graduating high school -- to pursue a music career. There she befriended keyboardist Ben Margulies, with whom she began writing songs. Her big break came as a backing vocalist on a studio session with dance-pop singer Brenda K. Starr, who handed Carey's demo tape to Columbia Records head Tommy Mottola at a party. According to legend, Mottola listened to the tape in his limo while driving home that evening, and was so immediately struck by Carey's talent that he doubled back to the party to track her down.
After signing to Columbia, Carey entered the studio to begin work on her 1990 self-titled debut LP. The heavily promoted album was a chart-topping smash, launching four number one singles: "Vision of Love," "Love Takes Time," "Someday," and "I Don't Wanna Cry." Overnight success and Grammy wins in the categories of Best New Artist and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female (for "Vision of Love), made expectations high for the follow-up, 1991's Emotions. The album did not disappoint, as the title track reached number one -- a record fifth consecutive chart-topper -- while both "Can't Let Go" and "Make It Happen" landed in the Top Five. Carey's next release was 1992's MTV Unplugged EP, which generated a number one cover of the Jackson 5's "I'll Be There." Featured on the track was backup singer Trey Lorenz, whose appearance immediately helped him land a recording contract of his own.
In June 1993, Carey wed Mottola in a headline-grabbing ceremony. Months later, she released her third full-length effort, Music Box, which became her best-selling record to that point. Two more singles, "Dreamlover" and "Hero," reached the top spot on the Hot 100. After her first tour and a break, she resurfaced in 1994 with a holiday release titled Merry Christmas, scoring a seasonal smash with "All I Want for Christmas Is You." Released in 1995, Daydream reflected a new artistic maturity. The first single, "Fantasy," debuted at number one, making Carey the first female artist and just the second performer ever to accomplish the feat. The follow-up, "One Sweet Day" -- a collaboration with Boyz II Men -- repeated the trick, and remained lodged at the top of the Hot 100 for a record 16 weeks.
After separating from Mottola, Carey returned in 1997 with Butterfly, another staggering success and her most hip-hop-flavored recording to date. #1's -- a collection featuring her 13 previous chart-topping singles as well as "The Prince of Egypt (When You Believe)," a duet with Whitney Houston effectively pairing the two most successful female recording artists in pop history -- followed late the next year. With "Heartbreaker," the first single from her 1999 album, Rainbow, Carey became the first artist to top the Hot 100 in each year of a decade; the record also pushed her ahead of the Beatles as the artist with the most cumulative weeks spent atop that chart.
After signing an $80 million deal in 2001 with Virgin -- the biggest record contract ever -- she starred in her first film, Glitter, and made her label debut with its attendant soundtrack, which went platinum thanks to the single "Loverboy." Virgin and Carey parted ways early in 2002, with the label paying her $28 million. That spring, she found a new home with Island/Def Jam, where she set up her own label, MonarC Music. In December, she released her ninth album, Charmbracelet, her first proper studio album to go merely platinum rather than multi-platinum.
The Emancipation of Mimi, her most successful work in years, appeared in 2005. It climbed to multi-platinum status and earned Carey three Grammy Awards -- Best Contemporary R&B Album and, for the single "We Belong Together," Best Female R&B Vocal Performance and Best R&B Song -- thus restoring her status as a megastar. Two weeks before the release of her subsequent album, 2008's E=MC2, Carey scored her 18th number one hit with "Touch My Body," a feat that pushed her into second place (and past Elvis Presley) among all artists with the most chart-topping singles. That hit song, along with the late April news that she had married Nick Cannon, kept her in the spotlight that year.
Carey went back to work fairly quickly, and in 2009, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel -- featuring collaborations with the-Dream, including the Top Ten hit "Obsessed" -- became her 12th studio album. The following year, Carey released her second Christmas album, Merry Christmas II You. She gave birth to twins in 2011, and within a year was performing again and judged the 12th season of American Idol. The Miguel collaboration "#Beautiful," the lead single to her next album, was released in 2013 and went platinum. Me. I Am Mariah: The Elusive Chanteuse, her first album for Def Jam, followed in 2014 and debuted at number three.
Between releases, Carey started a residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which ran from January 2015 to July 2017 and showcased all 18 of her number one singles. She also made appearances on the small screen, directing a Hallmark Channel movie, A Christmas Melody, and guest starring on Empire. On the big screen, she lent her talents to 2017's animated The Lego Batman Movie and the hit comedy Girls Trip. After the conclusion of a summer co-headlining jaunt with Lionel Richie, she debuted a new Vegas residency, which commenced in July 2018.
Caution, an album featuring appearances from Slick Rick, Blood Orange, and Ty Dolla $ign, arrived five months later as her first release for Epic. A number five hit, the LP yielded the number seven adult contemporary single "With You," Carey's collaboration with DJ Mustard. Carey celebrated the 30th anniversary of her debut throughout 2020. She published her memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, and issued a number of archival projects. Among these were digital reissues of her singles (including the remixes), The Live Debut: 1990 (a recording of a New York club performance), and The Rarities (previously unreleased material spanning her career). A streaming holiday program and soundtrack, Mariah Carey's Magical Christmas Special, premiered in December 2020 and found the singer performing with a variety of guests, including Ariana Grande, Tiffany Haddish, Jennifer Hudson, Jermaine Dupri, Snoop Dogg, and others. Included on the soundtrack was a re-recorded version of Carey's song "Oh Santa" featuring Grande and Hudson”.
To celebrate one of the greatest living artists, here are the essential four albums from Mariah Carey, an underrated gem, her latest studio album. I am also including a book about her that is worth reading. If you need some guidance regarding the best work from Mariah Carey, then hopefully the list below will…
HELP you out.
_____________
The Four Essential Albums
Emotions
Release Date: 17th September, 1991
Label: Columbia
Producers: Mariah Carey/Walter Afanasieff/David Cole/Robert Clivillés
Standout Tracks: Can't Let Go/Make It Happen/Till the End of Time
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/mariah-carey/emotions
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/0SHpIbyBLUugMXsl3yNkUz?si=FJB3xTT3SwmGFHiJC97DDQ&dl_branch=1
Review:
“At the time of its release, Mariah Carey’s sophomore effort, Emotions, was considered a commercial disappointment, failing to reach the top of the charts and selling just half of what the singer’s blockbuster self-titled debut did. In his review of the album, Rolling Stone’s Rob Tannenbaum deemed Mariah’s singing “far more impressive than expressive,” a criticism ostensibly borne out by the album’s titular lead single, on which she proclaims that she’s been “feeling emotions.” Not to put too blunt a point on it, she then tells us, rather than shows us: “I feel good, I feel nice!”
Critics like Tannenbaum routinely griped about Mariah’s reliance on vocal acrobatics, which, they claimed, kept audiences at a remove from her actual songs. Like that of Whitney Houston, to whom she was often compared (and much to both women’s irritation), Mariah’s voice was indeed almost supernatural, a thing to marvel at from a distance. But the assertion that her music lacked expression, even at this early date in her career, is one that the songs themselves simply don’t bear out. The deliriously joyous “Emotions,” however broad its lyrics may seem, all but mandates a performance of the magnitude that Mariah delivers: Her object of desire has her feeling “intoxicated, flying high,” and though hers might be a literal vocal interpretation, it’s certainly an expressive one.
Mariah and her label, however, obviously got the very public memo, as the arguably gratuitous sustained whistle note at the end of “Can’t Let Go,” the album’s second single, was removed from the radio edit of the song, and her upper range was employed sparingly, and often only as background textures, throughout much of the remainder of the decade. Luckily, Emotions still exists as it was conceived, complete with Mariah’s unapologetic deployment of her powerful instrument, and free of the reproach of the same people who would, in just a few years’ time, lament its inevitable deterioration.
Beginning with a rumbling piano tremolo followed by what might be the lowest note Mariah has committed to tape, the bombastic “You’re So Cold” is a lesson in fabulous excess, a showcase for four of Mariah’s infamous five octaves. The first 60 seconds of the song make for a deceptive introduction, with the singer’s portentous, protracted opening invocation (“Lord only knows…why I love you so…”) giving way to a bouncy, horn-filled kiss-off to a cruel devil in disguise. Of course, whistled at a pitch where articulation is rendered secondary, the word “disguise” becomes as unintelligible as Mariah’s euphoric squeals throughout the title track.
There are, believe it or not, moments of subtlety and nuance on Emotions, the fact of which is perhaps key to understanding the frustrations some have regarding Mariah’s myriad vocal tics. “Can’t Let Go” is, in hindsight, one of her most understated hits, her downcast verses floating ephemerally atop the song’s pointillistic percussion, while the album’s penultimate track, “Till the End of Time,” finds Mariah taking her sweet time building from a barely audible whisper to a thundering belt over the span of five minutes.
Mariah’s albums hadn’t yet become venues for her karaoke-style covers of ‘80s power ballads, but Emotions was an early indicator of her penchant for musical quotation. Mimi’s fascination with appropriating hits from her youth manifested itself on “Can’t Let Go,” which swipes its opening keyboard riff from Keith Sweat’s “Make It Last Forever” (she would go on to more directly sample the 1987 R&B hit on a remix for 1999’s “Thank God I Found You”). More than on any other Mariah Carey album, though, disco is a clear influence here, thanks in part to her collaborations with Robert Clivillés and David Cole of C+C Music Factory. House music, the duo’s genre of choice, was still gloriously and inextricably bound to hip-hop in the early ‘90s, as both were built almost entirely on pastiche: “Emotions” is a shameless homage to “Best of My Love” (by none other than the Emotions), while “Make It Happen” makes a less overt nod to Alicia Myers’s 1981 single “I Want to Thank You.”
If Mariah’s struggle to locate her musical identity at this point in her career often resulted in her cribbing from the past, she was already exerting a sense of agency in her lyrics. Songs like the autographical “Make It Happen” and “The Wind,” the latter of which is the story of the death of a friend set to Russ Freeman’s instrumental jazz composition of the same name, hint at the inspirational anthems and confessional manifestos, respectively, that would come to be fixtures on Mariah’s future albums. “No proper shoes upon my feet/Sometimes I couldn’t even eat,” she sing-raps on “Make It Happen,” recounting her struggle from Long Island backup singer to multiplatinum superstar by the age of 20. Though her “struggle” ended before most people’s usually begin (“It just didn’t take that long for the girl with one shoe to acquire many,” Rich Juzwiak quipped in our 2005 retrospective of Mariah’s work), her performance is galvanizing and soulful.
Soul is a quality that’s impossible to quantify; either someone has it or they don’t. Mariah’s critics claimed it was an essential ingredient that her songs lacked. Her mixed racial heritage was widely publicized, and was even treated as a selling point, but her music was carefully calibrated for both pop (read: white) and R&B audiences. Songs like “And You Don’t Remember” draw on gospel and Motown, but render those influences in the most palatable way possible. On the other hand, “If It’s Over,” a collaboration with Carole King, doesn’t water down its R&B bona fides with synthesized strings and bass, instead bolstering Mariah’s vocals with brass, Hammond organ, gospel harmonies—an unbridled throwback to the pop-soul hits of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
From the clothes she wore to the songs she performed, Mariah and her music were marketed to be nonthreatening, and appeal to the widest possible audience. Though it would be a few more years before she would comment on the subject explicitly in her songs, it’s hard not to see the battles she would go on to fight to earn both her professional and personal freedom telegraphed in the album’s cover art. Her face is overexposed, but her body is bathed in shadow, creating the (likely unintentional, but nonetheless striking) impression that her skin is much darker than it is. Likewise, Mariah’s head is thrown back in ecstasy, her mouth open, while at the same time her hands can be seen demurely clutching her knees together, suggesting a struggle between chastity and sexual liberation, confinement and freedom.
Mariah wouldn’t completely liberate herself from the fetters of everything she believed was holding her back until 1997’s Butterfly, and has since strained to maintain an equilibrium in terms of both her music and image, often slipping into caricature. But on Emotions, at least musically, she managed to strike a balance of soul and pop that’s not just technically impressive, but filled with undeniable, honest-to-god feeling” – SLANT
Choice Cut: Emotions
Music Box
Release Date: 31st August, 1993
Label: Columbia
Producers: Mariah Carey/Dave Hall/Walter Afanasieff/David Cole/Robert Clivillés/Babyface/Daryl Simmons
Standout Tracks: Dreamlover/Anytime You Need a Friend/Never Forget You
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/mariah-carey/music-box
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/2NKxb7pk04CuZab5udkGUl?si=X360fzDQRte4Q5_XJ4R6Hw&dl_branch=1
Review:
“Mariah Carey has been stung by critical charges that she's all vocal bombast and no subtlety, soul, or shading. Her solution was to make an album in which her celebrated octave-leaping voice would be downplayed and she could demonstrate her ability to sing softly and coolly. Well, she was partly successful; she trimmed the volume on Music Box. Unfortunately, she also cut the energy level; Carey sounds detached on several selections. She scored a couple of huge hits, "Hero" and "Dreamlover," where she did inject some personality and intensity into the leads. Most other times, Carey blended into the background and let the tracks guide her, instead of pushing and exploding through them. It was wise for Carey to display other elements of her approach, but sometimes excessive spirit is preferable to an absence of passion” – AllMusic
Choice Cut: Hero
Daydream
Release Date: 3rd October, 1995
Label: Columbia
Producers: Mariah Carey/Walter Afanasieff/Dave Hall/Jermaine Dupri/Manuel Seal/David Morales
Standout Tracks: One Sweet Day (with Boyz II Men)/Always Be My Baby/Forever
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/mariah-carey/daydream
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1ibYM4abQtSVQFQWvDSo4J?si=jvytB6VbTyyKKSMtpcwmOg&dl_branch=1
Review:
“Daydream is still interesting when Carey isn’t breaking new stylistic ground. She may have been showing off a newfound versatility on “Long Ago” and “Melt Away,” but she was also still near the peak of her powers as an athletic vocalist, and she put that athleticism to work powering daring arrangements and stunning modulations. “One Sweet Day” may be built around a killer hook, but that’s not what sticks with you on repeated listens—it’s the song’s ecstatic second half, in which Carey and Boyz II Men use that sturdy chorus as the foundation for gymnastic riffs and clusters of harmony. It’s not just showmanship, it’s an expression of communal grief that transcends lyrics and musical structure. (Carey wanted to write a eulogy after the producer David Cole, a collaborator and close friend, passed away in early 1995.) Their performance transforms an elegy into something joyous, a celebration of life and whatever might unite us after it. And while no other song on Daydream can match the emotive power of “One Sweet Day,” Mariah’s performances are uniformly strong no matter the context. “I Am Free” is a gospel workout, complete with an organ and the support of a mini-Mariah choir; dewy weeper “When I Saw You” is rescued by her melismatic belting; Ariana Grande would eat her ponytail for a ’50s waltz as potent as “Forever.”
The only Daydream ballad that’s an unequivocal failure is Carey’s cover of “Open Arms,” and that’s in part because it lacked Mariah’s pen. Carey came into her own as a writer on Daydream: she showed off her fabled vocabulary without leaning on the self-aware quirk of her later work, and almost every song is bolstered by at least one stunning piece of imagery. “When I Saw You” opens with a description of a lover that takes on cosmic significance: “Soft, heavenly eyes gazed into me/Transcending space and time.” (She touches on the power of “dawn’s ribbon of light” in the second verse.) The bridge of “Melt Away” opens with a “cloud of reverie” and ends with Mariah “rhapsodizing.” And she describes the love she feels throughout “Underneath the Stars” as “so heady and sublime,” a phrase that also happens to describe Carey’s lyrical stylings.
Daydream wasn’t just transitional in a musical sense. We know now that it was the beginning of the end for Mariah’s innocence, a moment that has some gravity given we’re talking about a star who likes to refer to herself as “eternally 12.” Her marriage to former Sony Music chief Tommy Mottola was crumbling, and she would look back on their relationship later and reflect on how it was governed by abuse and control. She didn’t know it then, but her absolute commercial zenith would soon be in the rear-view mirror. The instability of Rainbow and the full-blown breakdown of Glitter weren’t far away. Only closer “Looking In” hints at the darkness looming on the horizon: “She smiles through a thousand tears/And harbors adolescent fears/She dreams of all that she can never be.” It’s a startling final statement, but you still leave Daydream with effervescence in mind—sweet, stirring, and dominant, a tour de force from one of the greats at the top of her game” – Pitchfork
Choice Cut: Fantasy
Butterfly
Release Date: 16th September, 1997
Label: Columbia
Producers: Mariah Carey/Walter Afanasieff/Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs/The Ummah/Stevie J/Trackmasters/Cory Rooney/David Morales
Standout Tracks: Honey/My All/Close My Eyes
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/mariah-carey/butterfly
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/7aDBFWp72Pz4NZEtVBANi9?si=jRhbKdl_TzOfFliMS4MG5g&dl_branch=1
Review:
“Honey” and “Butterfly” together exemplify the abrupt gear shifting that appreciating Mariah the artist requires. Butterfly’s pop brilliance doesn’t always come easy, where detecting it depends on the audience’s newfound ability to apply Carey’s pop life to her pop music (the divorce shaded her in and put some real-life behind her on-record misery). Like very good camp, Butterfly requires work. Russ Meyer knew and Paul Verhoeven sometimes remembers that the most enthralling camp is that which doesn’t always announce itself as such (ahem, John Waters), but which alternately winks knowingly and blinks blindly at the consumers, awarding them the decision of what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s so-bad-it’s-good. Though Butterfly does a lot more blinking, there’s a similar mechanism at work that’s actually inherent to all of Carey’s music, since all unbearable sappiness, to varying degrees, counteracts with her extremely listenable, extraordinary voice. Butterfly heightens the effect as Carey swings wildly between emotional extremes (cool and, to use one of a few 10-cent words Carey drops throughout the album, fervid), between mushy subject matter and specificity. Carey’s means may not be as astute as those of Meyer and Verhoeven, but her end has the head-spinning effect that the aforementioned auteurs ideally achieve: entertainment by any means necessary.
Butterfly is too eager to please for it to merely settle into guilty pleasuredom. Yes, it’s incredibly slow and the flutter turns to a crawl during the album’s final third, which becomes audacious with a how-slow-can-you-go cover of Prince’s “The Beautiful Ones” with Dru Hill. But a moderate pace more often suits Carey, who’s less prone to running (thematically and vocally) to the bigger picture during Butterfly’s wonderful middle. Little more than yearning, kissing, and remembering happens during the course of “The Roof,” a rough-enough R&B revision of Mobb Deep’s “The Shook Ones.” But lyrically, Mariah the writer is vivid, sometimes shockingly clever (rhyming “liberated” with “Moet” is a stroke of genius).
Butterfly peaks exactly where it should, with its sixth track, “Breakdown.” It’s the song of Carey’s career, where the lyrical strokes are as broad and obvious as they are naked. The song’s central question, “So what do you do when/Somebody you’re so devoted to/Suddenly just stops loving you?” is so naïve and bare, it’s almost as devastating as a child asking hard questions about death. The song finds Carey paired with half of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Krayzie Bone and Wish Bone. Mariah the chanter flawlessly adapts to their singsong style, largely boxing her multi-octave range into a sly, hypnotic melody so that when she really wails at the end, you really feel it. As with “The Roof,” Carey lunges toward musical maturity by embracing, not shunning hip-hop. This is the height of her elegance—and maybe hip-hop-soul’s too.
The comedown after “Breakdown,” and the last in the album’s mid-game rally, is “Babydoll,” Carey’s sole stab at Timbaland-styled skitter balladry to date. No longer able to seem nonchalant about the breakup that surfaces repeatedly throughout the album, Carey wants to be smothered once again: “Wrap me up nice and tight/Love me all through the night.” And here Mariah the confessor explicitly reveals what post-“Honey” Butterfly lacks: “I wanna get intimate/But you’re not within my reach.”
A quiet storm album without the fucking, Butterfly is, above everything, idiosyncratic. Here, like never before, we’re asked to take Carey for what she is: unabashedly chaste but ultra femme, unrelentingly precious but undeniably vulnerable. It’s this perceived waffling that makes Carey such a divisive pop artist; certainly the girliness doesn’t help either, since femmephobia is perhaps the status quo’s least-questioned fear. And it’s Mariah the inconsistent that makes Butterfly so ultimately fascinating and endearing.
Viewing her character from a completely different angle on the album’s weepy last track, “Outside,” Carey observes that she’s “always somewhat out of place everywhere/Ambiguous/Without a sense of belonging to touch/Somewhere halfway/Feeling there’s no one completely the same.” Whether she’s talking about her mixed-race heritage, her career, or both, it’s the old Carey one-two, a seemingly unhappy ending fueled by the know-thyself philosophy that otherwise makes Butterfly joyous. As Carey’s most bizarre moment of self-celebration, it’s also a triumph, since it could only make sense coming from Mariah the person” – SLANT
Choice Cut: Butterfly
The Underrated Gem
The Emancipation of Mimi
Release Date: 12th April, 2005
Label: Island Def Jam
Producers: Mariah Carey/Jermaine Dupri/Manuel Seal, Jr./Bryan-Michael Cox/Swizz Beatz/LRoc/James ‘Big Jim’ Wright/The Neptunes/Kanye West/James Poyser/Rodney ‘Darkchild’ Jerkins
Standout Tracks: It’s Like That/Shake It Off/Mine Again
Buy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Emancipation-Mimi-VINYL-Mariah-Carey/dp/B089M54T59
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1GHogjt7IfGPiaap9zSsON?si=r6zYSlYuSGawM5IhEqO8Qg&dl_branch=1
Review:
“If such a stacking of the deck seems predictable, it gets the job done: Every song on Emancipation showcases Carey’s undeniable vocal strengths. Heavy on ballads and midtempo love songs, it always keeps at least one foot (more often both feet) planted firmly in comforting old-school diva soul. This is an R&B record for folks who think there hasn’t been any good R&B since Minnie Riperton died.
Even the rappers are on their best behavior, with Snoop playing an amiable around-the-way lothario on ”Say Somethin”’ and Twista motormouthing his way through ”One and Only” (”Twista and Mariah/Together like a grip on a tire,” he raps, and it must be admitted that Carey does a fair job of trying to keep up with him).
”It’s Like That” isn’t the old Run-DMC song, but it’s almost as cool, with Carey fantasizing about easing into a nightclub buzzed on Bacardi. ”No stress, no fights,” she sings, making it sound like a trip to a vacation spa. ”To the Floor” is another hooky dance-floor anthem that ought to get a party started (although it does sound like Nelly phoned his part in).
But the crux of the album is to be found in its heart-on-my-sleeve numbers. Perhaps the best of these is ”Fly Like a Bird,” a veritable prayer that explicitly references God. ”Sometimes this life can be so cold/I pray you’ll come and carry me home,” Carey sings melismatically. ”Carry me higher, higher, higher.” It’s so moving that we’ll resist the temptation to be crass and interpret the song as a plea for heightened record sales. Help from above is always welcome, but Emancipation sounds like it just might do fine all on its own” – Entertainment Weekly
Choice Cut: We Belong Together
The Latest Album
Caution
Release Date: 16th November, 2018
Label: Epic
Producers: Fred Ball/Mariah Carey/Dev Hynes/Angel Lopez/Lido/Daniel Moore II/Mustard/Nineteen85/No I.D./Luca Polizzi/Poo Bear/Skrillex/SLMN/The Stereotypes/Shea Taylor/Timbaland/WondaGurl
Standout Tracks: Caution/A No No/The Distance (ft. Ty Dolla Sign)
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/64zK6tmksJw9gNZR0L4DVx?si=xgoo1S0mRDaRM_Z7mWJ31Q&dl_branch=1
Review:
“It’s mid-November, therefore, it’s almost expected that the only Mariah Carey track you’ll be hearing is ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’, albeit prematurely. This year is different, however, due to the release of Carey’s 15th studio album ‘Caution’.
Mariah Carey is an icon. A legend even, and you don’t need to be part of the Lambily to acknowledge that. With an unknown birth year (either 1969 or 1970, depending on who you ask) and a penchant for some quite specific demands, from dog chauffeurs to white roses, Carey is enigmatic to say the least.
After a few viral live performances and personal matters that became tabloid fodder, it would be easy to write Carey off, however, ‘Caution’ puts her back in the driving seat, armed with that signature sultry Mariah sound and a ‘fuck you’ attitude.
This icon does things on her terms, as always, perhaps most evident on singles, ‘A No No’ and ‘GTFO’, both effectively calls to action for people romantically involved with trashy men. With the latter coupling perhaps one of the catchiest refrains of 2018 with cutting lyrics ("You took my love for granted/You left me lost and disenchanted/Bulldoze my heart as if you planned it/My prince was so unjustly handsome..."), Carey aptly taps into an experience that is unfortunately all too common for people in toxic relationships.
With tracks produced by Timbaland, Skrillex and DJ Mustard, Carey duly pays homage to the sounds prevalent at different stages of her career whilst remaining fresh and contemporary. Featuring guest vocals from serial featured artist Ty Dolla $ign, as well as Slick Rick and Blood Orange, a partnership that sounds odd in theory but works, this could be looked at as a new chapter for Mariah Carey.
With a critically acclaimed Las Vegas residency and a number of Christmas shows coming up, it’s safe to say that she’s back on top form” – CLASH
Choice Cut: With You
The Mariah Carey Book
The Meaning of Mariah Carey
Author: Mariah Carey (with Michaela Angela Davis)
Publication Date: 29th September, 2020
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Synopsis:
“The pop megastar’s remarkable life in her own candid, searchingly honest words, The Meaning of Mariah Carey soars from troubled childhood to international fame.
It took me a lifetime to have the courage and the clarity to write my memoir. I want to tell the story of the moments - the ups and downs, the triumphs and traumas, the debacles and the dreams, that contributed to the person I am today. Though there have been countless stories about me throughout my career and very public personal life, it’s been impossible to communicate the complexities and depths of my experience in any single magazine article or a ten-minute television interview. And even then, my words were filtered through someone else’s lens, largely satisfying someone else’s assignment to define me.
This book is composed of my memories, my mishaps, my struggles, my survival and my songs. Unfiltered. I went deep into my childhood and gave the scared little girl inside of me a big voice. I let the abandoned and ambitious adolescent have her say, and the betrayed and triumphant woman I became tell her side.
Writing this memoir was incredibly hard, humbling and healing. My sincere hope is that you are moved to a new understanding, not only about me, but also about the resilience of the human spirit” – Waterstones
Order: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-meaning-of-mariah-carey/mariah-carey/9781529038958