FEATURE:
Groovelines
Mariah Carey - Fantasy
__________
THE lead single…
from her fifth studio album, Daydream, Fantasy was released on 23rd August, 1995. It is one of Mariah Carey’s greatest tracks. It is my favourite song from her. Some prefer the Bad Boy Remix was O.D.B. However, I am going to focus on the original ahead of its thirtieth anniversary. Forbes, SLANT and Time Out magazine have listed Fantasy among the best songs of the 1990s. Fantasy was Mariah Carey's ninth chart-topping on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart. It was also the first single by a female artist to debut atop the chart. I want to go deeper with Fantasy for this Groovelines. There are a few features I want to introduce. Although a lot of features discuss the remix and how that was transformative, I want to keep things mainly concentrated on the first release. This article gives some interesting perspective on Fantasy:
“For almost any iconic artist, being able to wield the brush to the canvas of your music artistry is the truest map to a long-lasting career. For songbird supreme Mariah Carey, taking the reins on her trajectory meant changing the course of music history as we knew it.
Convivial and liberating in nature, Carey’s “Fantasy” exudes a spirit of artistic freedom and calls back to a time where innovation, like intense love, came at a whim.
Here, the torrid summer energy presented on Tom Tom Club’s 1981 “Genius Of Love” is leveled-up for a new decade, decorated in Carey’s breezy emphatic metaphors of vigorous passion and a fiery backbeat that got even the most obstinate listener out of their seat.
Bottom of Form
Twenty-five years after Carey unveiled “Fantasy” as the lead single to her Grammy-nominated fifth studio album Daydream, the bouncy ’80s-esque number continues to prove it has the stamina and formulaic sampling power to exert influence over a plethora of musical acts to follow.
While it further broke new ground for rap and R&B — already introduced by a hip-hop soul queen — the infallible pop-R&B formula behind “Fantasy” is all too familiar.
Despite her label, Columbia Records, pushing Carey to continue with the palette of bonafide adult contemporary and pop that catapulted her career, she paired with famed R&B producer Dave “Jam” Hall to essentially reenvision her Music Box lead single “Dreamlover” from two years earlier.
Co-produced by Hall, “Dreamlover” was a slice of heavenly chart-topping perfection, drenched in the bubbly pop that Columbia pressed so hard. But its incorporation of thunderous kick-snare-bass interplay from Big Daddy Kane’s “Ain’t No Half-Steppin” gave it the energetic facade it needed to transcend urban radio”.
One reason why I cannot talk about the remix of Fantasy is because of the involvement of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, as he was a producer on the track. For that reason, I don’t think it is right to go too much into that version given who he is and the fact he should be exiled form music history. I actually prefer the original which arrived on 23rd August, 1995. Before finishing off with some critical reception to Fantasy, I want to include parts of Stereogum’s investigation of Fantasy. They do note how the Bad Boy Remix is definitive, whereas the album version is perhaps too similar to other songs from Mariah Carey:
“Genius Of Love” happened to come along at the same time as sample-heavy rap music was just starting to become a commercial proposition. The first rap group to sample “Genius Of Love” was Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde, the duo that included future Uptown Records founder Andre Harrell. Jeckyll & Hyde used the “Genius Of Love” groove on their single “Genius Of Rap” in 1981, before the Tom Tom Club track even reached its Hot 100 peak. A year later, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, the biggest rap group of their era, used that same “Genius Of Love” groove on their own single “It’s Nasty (Genius Of Love).” Those early singles involved studio bands re-playing “Genius Of Love,” not sampling the beat directly from the record. In the years that followed, “Genius Of Love” remained part of the rap language.
Tom Tom Club kept recording occasional albums after that first one, and none of them really caught on. But “Genius Of Love” lingered. That sample was especially popular in West Coast rap in the early ’90s. Ice Cube, 2nd II None, Above The Law, Mellow Man Ace, and former Number Ones artist Coolio all rocked over the “Genius Of Love” beat or referenced its dreamy, childlike lyrics in the early ’90s. Then, in 1995, the queen of the Hot 100 was starting to push her music more in the direction of rap and R&B, and it took the “Genius Of Love” beat to fully cross her over to the audience that she wanted.
By 1995, nobody could tell Mariah Carey shit. At that point, five years into her career, she’d already landed at #1 eight times, and she’d co-written seven of those chart-toppers. With Mariah’s 1993 album Music Box, her husband and label boss Tommy Mottola actively pushed her in the direction of centrist, adult-contempo pop ballads. Mariah had flirted with house music on 1991’s Emotions, and it hadn’t been quite the blockbuster that Mottola wanted, so he clamped down on her playful side. Music Box did even better than anyone could’ve anticipated, going diamond and sending two more singles to #1.
In 1994, Carey released the holiday album Merry Christmas, which went triple platinum in its first year. (It’s now octuple platinum, and one of its songs will appear in this column a long time from now.) That same year, she also teamed up with Luther Vandross to cover Diana Ross and Lionel Richie’s 1981 chart-topper “Endless Love,” and the Vandross/Carey version of the song peaked at #2. (It’s a 5.) Point is: Mariah Carey was a commercial juggernaut, and she’d earned herself some artistic freedom — or, at least, she thought she had.
Despite all the records she was selling in the mid-’90s, Mariah Carey still had to fight for her ideas. In the time that she spent recording her 1995 album Daydream, for instance, Mariah had the idea to blow off steam by recording a shits-and-giggles grunge-pop album, so that’s what she did. But certain unnamed people at Carey’s label thought that a record like that would damage her image, so she wasn’t allowed to sing lead on the album that came out under the title Someone’s Ugly Daughter. Instead, Carey’s friend Clarissa Dane sang lead, with an uncredited Mariah singing backup and co-writing every song. The album came out under the band name Chick, and it promptly disappeared completely. Nobody even knew that Chick was a Mariah Carey project until she wrote about it in her 2020 memoir..
Mariah faced similar pushback when she tried to push her own music closer to the rap and R&B that she loved. She hated being seen as a square pop diva, and she wanted love from Black listeners. Years later, Carey’s A&R rep Cory Rooney told Billboard, “[Mariah] once told me though she was grateful for her success, she would trade in all of her record sales to get the respect that Mary J. Blige got. She said, ‘Mary doesn’t have to sell 28 million records to be respected. People respect Mary, and I just want to be respected like her.'” (Mary J. Blige will eventually appear in this column.)
That’s what Carey was going for when she worked with Mary J. Blige’s What’s The 411? collaborator Dave “Jam” Hall on her 1993 smash “Dreamlover.” Mariah worked with Hall again two years later when she had another idea for a bubbly, lightweight, clubby R&B track. She’d already had a basic melody idea for the song that would become “Fantasy” when she heard Tom Tom Club’s “Genius Of Love” on the radio. In Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits, Mariah says that hearing the song “reminded me of growing up and listening to the radio.”
Mariah took “Genius Of Love” to Dave Hall, and he made it into a beat. Working with Mariah in the studio, Hall would play the beat, and Mariah would freestyle melody ideas for 15 or 20 minutes at a time. Within a couple of days, they had a complete song. Mariah’s people got in touch with Tom Tom Club to clear the sample. In the Bronson book, Mariah says that Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth “were really into it.” Makes sense to me. If someone told me that they wanted to park a dumptruck full of cash on my front lawn, I wouldn’t object. (I don’t actually have a front lawn, so we would need to have a conversation about logistics, but I’d be down.)
In its final form, “Fantasy” twinkles and glistens. Mariah sings the song in an airy, flutter, once again layering her mind-bending leads over a soft bed of her own multi-tracked backing vocals. It’s a song about a crush, about imagining yourself with someone else while remaining perfectly aware that nothing’s going to happen. I guess that means it’s a song about enjoying your own dream-life, using it as an escape from whatever’s happening in reality. On and on and on, it’s so deep in her daydreams, but it’s just a sweet, sweet fantasy, baby.
I love Mariah’s vocal on “Fantasy,” the way she hammers the hell out of that opening line: “Oh, when you walk by every night, talking sweet and looking fine, I get kinda hectic in-side!” Her melody syncs up beautifully with the sample, and it gives the song a kind of unreal playfulness. When she actually sings a little bit of “Genius Of Love” on the bridge — “I’m in heaven with my boyfriend, my lovely boyfriend” — Mariah sounds like she’s singing along with the radio, or with a scrap of lyric that’s stuck in her head and clicks in with whatever she’s feeling”.
I am going to end with Wikipedia’s article concerning the critical reaction to Fantasy. Depending on whether you prefer the first version of the single or like the remix better, there is no denying the fact Fantasy was a breakthrough and step forward for Mariah Carey. It remains one of her most enduring songs:
“Upon its release, "Fantasy" garnered acclaim from contemporary music critics, who praised her songwriting and use of sampling. They commended her for exploring genres beyond the pop ballads she had become known for at the time. Bill Lamb from About.com was very positive on the song, calling it "truly inspiring" and a "career high water mark" for Carey. Stephen Thomas Erlewine from AllMusic also complimented it, saying "Carey continues to perfect her craft and that she has earned her status as an R&B/pop diva." A reviewer from Music & Media stated that "it's got more swing than anything she has done before.” Stephen Holden from The New York Times gave the song praise, writing "with 'Fantasy', Ms. Carey glides confidently into the territory where gospel-flavored pop-soul meets light hip-hop and recorded some of the most gorgeously spun choral music to be found on a contemporary album." Additionally, he claimed "Fantasy" held some of the album's best moments, writing "she continues to make pop music as deliciously enticing as the best moments of "Fantasy". Slant Magazine ranked the song at number sixty on their "Best Singles of the '90s" list, writing it is "escapism perfected, [a] summer bubblegum gem with a sweet, flawless vocal line driven by a diva in her prime." Mark Frith from Smash Hits said it "was such a brilliant, original, clever record that many people are going to have high hopes for the LP."
On 23rd August, it will be thirty years since the lead single from Daydream was released. Perhaps the standout album from Mariah Carey, I can understand why she wanted Fantasy to be the lead single. With that Tom Tom Club sample and this confident and glorious vocal from Carey, you can see why this song is still widely played on the radio. It is joyous. Thirty years since its release, it is this masterpiece. If you have not heard it for a long time then go and dive into…
THIS blissful song.