Arc of a diva
After a sharp dip in Mariah Carey's career curve, is the wayward star back on track? For the first time in years, there is a buzz about Mariah Carey. The discarded diva releases her tenth album on Monday and, so far, the signs suggest a credible comeback. It's Like That, the first single to be taken from The Emancipation of Mimi, is a slinky slice of hip-hop-pop that hit the Top 20 in the States. In Britain it's forecast to go Top Five in its first week. In the US it's hardly been a huge hit for the biggest-selling female singer of the Nineties but it is a marked improvement on Carey's recent run of flops - her last two singles didn't chart at all - and thanks to heavy radio play, has turned the focus from her mental health back on to her music.
More importantly, despite delays in delivery, The Emancipation of Mimi is shaping up to be Carey's best album since her heyday. You could thank the pricey, if predictable, line-up of A-list collaborators - producers the Neptunes, Jermaine Dupri and Kanye West and guest rappers Snoop Dogg and Nelly. Or you could just call it good timing - with J-Lo's career in the doldrums, Whitney still on the missing list and Christina out of the limelight, the pop world could do with a decent diva.
But the real reason Mimi is causing such a stir is that the songs make the most of Carey's magnificent voice. Gone is the girly whispering that made Glitter such a stinker. Thankfully, it hasn't been replaced by the vocal acrobatics that were the trademark of her big, early ballads. Instead, Carey uses her five-octave range to playful effect, hitting plenty of high notes, but never holding them.
Yet while, musically, Carey may be back on track, it's hard to say how many fans the 35-year-old has left. Her last album, Charmbracelet in 2002, was the first fruit of a new record deal and supposedly a fresh start after her much publicised nervous breakdown and the double disaster that was the Glitter album and film. Charmbracelet wasn't a bad album, but it didn't revive Carey's career.
Where she has to work harder is on rebuilding a reputation she destroyed four years ago almost overnight with a plate-smashing incident in a New York hotel suite. She was taken to hospital amid rumours of a suicide attempt and spent two weeks in rehab. A revival is likely to be due less to the sound of her new songs than to the latest man in her life, her manager Benny Medina, best known as the brains behind the career of Carey's arch-rival, Jennifer Lopez.
When Carey claims, as she will do endlessly over the coming months, that The Emancipation of Mimi "reflects the real me", don't believe a word of it. She may do much of the writing and be credited as co-producer, but Mimi has all the hallmarks of a Medina masterplan. For a start, there's the striking title. Previous Carey albums have had short, fluffy titles such as Daydream, Butterfly and Rainbow.
Carey, who recently described herself as "a 12-year-old who hasn't stopped believing in Santa Claus", has probably never used a word as long as emancipation in her life. As for Mimi, it's a nickname she says she has decided to share with fans, yet it smacks of the snappy J-Lo, which helped to turn Lopez into a brand.
You can bet it was Medina who told Carey to dust down her greatest asset, pack away her hooker gear and get back with the hip-hop boys. After seeing J-Lo's career collapse since firing Medina two years ago - Lopez is now begging him to take her back - Carey was clever to heed his advice. Yet to suggest her feet are back on firm ground may be wishful thinking.
Like her idol Whitney Houston and many of the great pop divas of the past, Carey is a complex character who, on the one hand, is strong-willed and hard working, and on the other, can't keep away from the self-destruct button. The youngest of three children born to an Irish mother who had been an opera singer and a half-black, half-Hispanic father who worked as an aeronautical engineer, Carey has described growing up in a white neighbourhood on Long Island, New York, as a living hell. She has claimed their neighbours waged a war against the family, burning crosses into their lawn, poisoning their dog and even blowing up their car.
Whether or not it's all true, there is no doubt that Carey didn't have it easy. After her parents were divorced when she was three, she didn't see her father, her brother left home and her sister, Alison, had a baby at 15, became addicted to drugs, worked as a prostitute and was diagnosed as HIV positive. The family moved 13 times to increasingly shabby apartments and Carey rarely attended school, preferring to stay at home writing songs. Aware that she could sing - she had perfect pitch aged four - Carey used to pray at night to become famous to get her out of Long Island.
By 16, she was working as a waitress and singing backing vocals. At 18, taken to a music industry party, she gave a demo tape to a Sony executive, Tommy Mottola, and, a few months later was in a studio recording syrupy pop. In 1990, her debut album became a multimillion seller, but fame didn't give Carey the freedom she had hoped for. Twenty years her senior, Mottola was a controlling mix of father figure, mentor and lover and, by the time they were married in 1993, in front of a VIP crowd that included Robert De Niro, Barbra Streisand and Ozzy Osbourne, he had allegedly banned Carey from leaving the house alone, wearing revealing clothes or talking to anyone who wasn't a business associate.
When the couple split five years later, Carey, who had sold more than 100 million records, got her first taste of freedom and went overboard. She wore tacky outfits, had breast surgery and began drinking too much. At first her career continued to thrive, thanks partly to her sexy, new image and partly to the hip-hop elements she introduced to her music. But by the end of the Nineties, Carey was spinning out of control, making increasingly outrageous prima donna demands (she famously refused to "do" stairs, meaning that she couldn't walk on to her own stage set and had to appear through a hole in the floor) and turning up on TV shows the worse for wear (on one, she delivered an odd monologue about ice-cream, on another, she claimed she was invisible and that Marilyn Monroe spoke to her through her piano).
The more control Carey took of her own career, the more mistakes she made. She signed to Virgin Records for $80 million and was dropped a year later, after the failure of the Glitter project she based on her early life to help her to break into film.
Carey insists that the plate incident was simply down to exhaustion, but it spelt the end of her credibility. Had she been in a rock'n'roll band no one would have bothered, but divas are a different breed. When they no longer seem like a role model, their fame soon starts to fade.
Right now, Carey appears to be back on track with another older man as her mentor. Whether she stays sane as Mimi remains to be seen. Still, it makes for a more interesting artist and, at a time when real divas are in short supply, we'd be mad not to welcome her back.
The single It's Like That and the album The Emancipation of Mimi are released by Island. (The Times)
|
