Tuesday 3 July 2001

Visions of Mariah

It's hard to imagine that 10 years have gone by since the world was introduced to the lung-busting style of Mariah Carey. Back then, it was just musically-speaking. Nowadays, Carey prefers the less is more concept of sartorial style, but her music has changed quite a bit, too.

Cue Loverboy, her first single off the soundtrack album Glitter, which also serves as her debut release on Virgin since her split from Sony Music. The new label deal will pay Carey a reported RM100 million per album. Loverboy features Cameo, Da Brat (her close friend who tells her like it is) and Ludacris, and the video has a very chirpy Mariah cheering on a car race in a suitably racy hot pink suit which leaves nothing to the imagination.

This song features a hook from Cameo's hit Candy, but rather than sample it, Carey got Larry Blackmon and Thomas Jenkins to remake it for the song. Loverboy has been remixed by Carey fave David Morales and garage star MJ Cole.

The single wouldn't be out of place in the Rainbow album, but it does have an edgier feel to it. Expect the Glitter album to have an urban R&B feel with hip-hop inflections.

Rewind to 1990 when the multi-octave singer was a struggling waitress trying to make it into the music business. Legend has it that her demo was passed to record bigwig Tommy Mottola at a party, and he was so taken by the singer's extraordinary voice that he tracked her down pronto.

A record deal was signed and in 1990, her self-titled debut spawned the hits Vision Of Love, Love Takes Time, Someday and I Don't Wanna Cry. It was a pop album with the big voice love anthems that sell in truckloads. The album also went eight-times Platinum in the US and sold over 12 million copies worldwide. She also won two Grammys for Best New Artist and Best Pop Vocal Female.

Emotions was released two years later, and it garnered her two Grammy nominations. That year, her performance on MTV Unplugged resulted in an album that sold more than five million copies worldwide. Her cover of I'll Be There was her sixth number one single.

Arguably her best effort yet, Music Box, came out a year later. The balance of melodic ballads and sassy R&B found equilibrium here. And about 24 million people thought so as they parted with their cash to buy the album.

Carey made history with her 1995 album Daydream, becoming the first female artist in history to have three studio albums sell more than eight million copies. Daydream went ten times Platinum, gave her number ones number nine, ten and eleven, including the longest-running number one single in history. One Sweet Day, with Boyz II Men, spent 16 weeks at the top.

The clothes fell off prominently with the Butterfly album. She also seemed to celebrate a new phase in her career with a decidedly more urban sound, working with Ma$e and The Lox for a more street sound.

As her collection of number ones was pretty impressive, a compilation of them was inevitable. The album featured something nobody thought was possible (thus making it a record company exec's ultimate brag): a duet with Whitney Houston. When You Believe, from the Prince Of Egypt soundtrack was as diva a performance as diva performances went. Tough to say who sounded better on it.

Carey's most recent offering is Rainbow, an album which gave her a fourteenth number one. The video had Jerry O'Connell as the Heartbreaker and showed us Bianca, Carey's badgirl alter ego. Mariah Carey's record of of album sales and history-making number one singles tally (she has more number ones than any active recording artist) makes the colossal RM100 million take home packet per album look like a justifiable amount.

She's got more number one albums than any female artist in the 1990s with four, and both Music Box and Daydream have gone Diamond. All in all, Carey has sold over 120 million albums in her eleven-year career. Carey is the only artist to have had number ones for every year in the 1990s. In fact, Carey has had all her debut singles from all her albums go to number one.

Carey is of course, a writer and producer, and she has co-written and co-produced most of her number ones. Will Glitter add to that tally? We'll just have to wait until August and see.

(E Media News)

Many thanks to Matt.



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