Mariah Carey: billion dollar babe
A shopping mall Sharon Watts, Mariah Carey's brand of down-home toothsomeness and accessible, tunes once attracted unimaginative housewives and directionless clerical assistants like moths to an old jumper. "She. Is. So. Inspirational!" panted one middle-aged admirer, tears spraying over the top of her bottle-top glasses with such force that they threatened to drown the cameraman of Mariah Carey: Billion Dollar Babe. With fans like that, we thought, it's a wonder it took Carey's nervous system so long to implode.
But implode it eventually did, characterised, in 2001, by a horribly confused MTV appearance that, following a desperately ill-advised striptease, ended in the songstress being admitted to hospital suffering from "extreme exhaustion". In an effort to add a different slant to its guests' opinions while simultaneously attempting to reflect the skewed mental condition of its quarry, Billion Dollar Babe's numerous commentators were shot from a variety of "unusual" angles. Paul Morley, for example, appeared to be falling backwards, his thick neck pressing against the underside of his fat jawbone. Another journalist, meanwhile, seemed to be leaning, stiff as a board, at a 37-degree angle, as if using himself as a spirit level. However, such maverick camerawork failed to have any effect on the assembled noise-makers' comments, which, rather than shooting out of their mouths at said exciting new angle, came out all normal and boring instead.
Most opinions centred on the rubbishness of Carey's decision-making process, with entertainment reporters bemoaning her cosmetic enhancements and a couple of biographers banging on about her questionable taste in men. Only Morley demonstrated any real empathy. The writer raged against the hypocrisy of the music industry, a medium that demanded Carey's distinctly un-peachy-clean background be airbrushed to the point that all the interesting bits (she was the product of an interracial marriage, her elder sister was a prostitute, etc) were "literally bleached out".
Yet, ironically, Carey's latter-day quest to return to her musical roots has proved as false as her breasts. As hinted at by her freshly booty-fied image, her post-breakdown, freshly-renovated R&B thang is, in fact, as authentic as a packet of Cheese Strings. Billion Dollar Babe's repeated, blunt assertions that this was a "cautionary tale" wound up in a suitably curt moral. "Well?" it asked. "What did you expect?"
A question directed not, surprisingly enough, at Mariah - who had, after all, dared to agree with 95 per cent of the population by wanting to be rich and famous and thus deserved every droplet of soul-wringing misery that was coming to her - but to us. Just as one can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, one can't concoct a fluffy pop confection without squishing a few vulnerable brain cells. Frankly, it's a miracle more fame-peddlers don't flip their expertly coiffured wigs. But fame's effects are far-reaching. It incubates an unquestioning allegiance to the notion of celebrity, encouraging Joe and Josephine Public to accept it as an altered, higher state of consciousness in which golden-winged super-beings dazzle and tempt us with their emotion-free, Stepford perfection. All things considered, Carey got off lightly. It's us we should be worrying about. (The Scotsman - Mariah Connection UK)
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