Mariah moves right along
What happens when a heavy metal devotee interviews balladeer extraordinaire Mariah Carey? Adam Harvey in New York reports: Mariah's moving on. Deep below the nightclubs and celebrity apartment buildings of New York's meat-packing district, in the basement of a hotel, so trendy it has four bouncers, a group of journalists prepare to listen to Mariah Carey's new album.
Most have flown in from Europe for the privilege. We sit around a boardroom table where a thick notepad, a pen and a $7 bottle of water awaits us. There's no small talk. Three music company flunkies adjust a CD player and amplifier and finally after 30 awkward minutes a young mad wearing a long-sleeved white polo top enters the room holding a CD without a label.
"Thank you all for coming," he declares in a sonorous, important person's voice. "I'm here to play you The Emancipation of Mimi." He fits the CD into the rack, presses play, and the room rumbles with the heavy rhymes of Mariah Carey's collaborator, Jermaine Dupri. Carey's unmistakable voice joins in, singing of a part and Bacardi and tamale and it sounds... well... not as bas as an unreconstructed Led Zeppelin fan might expect.
The Mariah Carey I remembered - the one whose voice haunted commercial radio and shopping malls throughout the 1990's - had an eardrum-perforating trill and sang G-rated lyrics about Christmas and heroes and angels. This Mariah - Mimi, as her friends have always called her - sounds more restrained, cooler, as if she's spending less time in the mall and more of it hanging in nightclub VIP lounges with album mates Snoop Dogg and Kelis.
But there's something a bit strange about the mix - a weird kind of whine, like an off-key backing track. Hang on... it's white polo man, sitting by the CD player singing every lyric under his breath. His deep voice has become an unfortunate squeak as he mimics Carey's impossibly versatile voice; "No tears, no time to cry/ Baby I'm making the most of life."
Emancipation is an unashamed party record - upbeat, danceable, ripe for remix. It suits my mood, Carey explains the following night at the unusual interview time of 1:30am. Carey likes to do things late. She's not in the room at first, so there's time to admire the $5000-a-night, split-level penthouse, with its Warhol prints, fireplace and view to the Hudson River.
Eventually, there's movement upstairs and the roomful of flunkies fall silent. Then down comes Jack, a long-haired terrier. Carey follows her dog a few minutes later. She's in grey tracksuit pants and a sleek top, holding a glass of red wine and gripping the hand of a minder who helps her navigate the steps in high heels. She stretches out on a lounge and holds forth on her Emancipation.
The positive album "is very much a snapshot of where I am in my life right now", she says. Carey's bad days are behind her, she avows. it has been more than three years since her dramatic meltdown on MTV and the crash and burn of the movie Glitter, and almost eight years since the end of her marriage to Tommy Mottola, then president to Sony Music.
"I'm in a very grounded place spiritually," she says. "This is kind of like the real side of me, because I've been through so much to get to this point where I feel really free." That sense of freedom seems to have grown with distance from Mottola. Carey's PR has warned us against questions about her ex-husband and the infamous breakdown ("Mariah really wants to keep things positive to keep looking forward," I was told) but she seems happy enough to chat about both subjects, and they're certainly not avoided on the album.
What seems a pretty obvious reference to the marriage comes just a few lines in, on the track It's Like That ("It's my nigh/no stress, no fight/I'm leaving it all behind") and in the video for the song she dusts off her Vera Wang wedding dress from 1993. "When I started, and for the first five or sic years of my career, I would do a day like this, then be whisked away by my husband/head of record company/manager and have to drive three hours up to the country and sit there with a bunch of cows and look at the foliage. Which is lovely if you're a retired couple, but I was 21yrs old and who wants to do that?"
A weekend in the country sounds alright to me, I say. "Yeh, it's great for like one time, but I mean if you're just hearing your record on the radio you want to go out, you want to be out and have fun," Carey says. "I got through that time because it was what it was: it was an abusive relationship, and it wasn't healthy but it was part of my journey, part of my struggle - and I learned from it."
Emancipation, her 10th studio album, won't sell 25 million copies like 1993's Music Box. But with a fortune estimated at $295 million, Carey hardly needs a mega-seller. The edgier the music and hip-hop collaborations ensure club and radio airplay and even a degree of critical success.
The track Say Somethin' is a collaboration with Snoop Dogg, produced by The Neptunes. Snoop plays against type, Carey says. "He was really nice and respectful." He joined hip hop's A-list on this album: "There's a Neptunes track next to a track by Big Juim Wright - and it's not like, 'What's going on?' It fits," Carey says. "You hear a James Poyser record next to someone like Jermaine Dupri's, and it's not jarring."
I must have worn a blank expression, because Carey pauses mid-stream. "Do you know who these people are? Do you want me to tell you who these people are? I got the skinny on you." Someone has grassed, telling Carey that I'm no fan and had to ask whether she wrote her songs (she does). So she pulls me up when I say that her vocals sound relatively restrained on Emancipation.
"I think you should listen again, because some are restrained, but some are full-blown belting. That's what a lot of people say who have been listening to it - who are actually fans that know my music well. No, I'm just saying like my hairdresser. He's someone who has all my albums, who has them in his iPod alphabetically, and he said to me; 'I love it when you sing in that mid-range and really let go, really belting.'"
Cary says her favourite track is the last cut, Fly Like A Bird, It's the most introspective song on the album, and it opens with a line from her family's preacher, Pastor Clarence Keaton. "It's basically a gospel song and he says, 'Weeping man, dour in the night, but joy comes in the morning.' That's a phrase I really needed to hear at one point in my life, and nobody said it to me." (The Sunday Telegraph)
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