Friday 8 July 2005

Carey in the community

That Mariah Carey, she has her detractors - but can we allow a little post-Live 8 credit where it's due? Many lesser singers would have been nervous about following Madonna with her miracle famine survivor. But with 20 singing African orphans in tow and a dress that appeared to be sewn on to her, Carey's set was, in its way, no less forgettable. Her requests for a microphone stand went either unnoticed or unheard. She was luckier with her requests for water, but her tiny sparrow-sips cast doubt over just how thirsty she really was. Then, when she tried to get one of the orphans to say hello to the watching world, numb terror descended upon the poor youngster.

Anyone for whom Carey remains the quintessential pop diva may not have been surprised by the succession of mini-dramas that punctuated her 15-minute slot. What is surprising however is her reaction the following day. Far from being embarrassed at the previous night's events, Carey seems amused as the rest of us. "It was fine in rehearsals," she says, pulling her ruched peach dress over her knees, "but when he saw himself on the huge screen, I think it totally freaked him out."

What a nightmare, I say. You must have wanted to strangle him right there and then. Carey smiles, albeit uncertainly. "Do you know they are orphans?" Sorry, I tell her. I didn't literally mean it about strangling him. "Right, OK... because they were actually so cool, all of them. Anyway, he did say hello in the end, but he didn't scream it like I wanted him to."

Perhaps it helps that she has brazened out far bigger ignominies than this one. In 2001, her record deal with Virgin (reportedly worth $80 billion) ended almost as soon as it began when she starred in the semi-biopic Glitter - a movie which, according to one review at the time, "provided absolutely no intentional pleasures for adult moviegoers". Anchored to the film's awfulness, the eponymous album performed so badly that Carey's new paymasters paid her a further $28 million just so that she didn't record any more albums for them.

If Carey can laugh about it now, it probably helps that she's just spent a month atop the US charts with her current album, The Emancipation of Mimi. At the time, though, the singer says she remembers a kind of panic setting in. Convinced that with enough promotion she could "save the project", Carey threw herself into a "21-hour-a-day promotional schedule" - adjourning only to post unhinged messages on her website. "I just can't trust anybody any more right now, because I don't understand what's going on," went one - a point underscored by her appearance on MTV's Total Requests Live, in which she handed ice-cream to her fans wearing little more than a T-shirt.

With the benefit of some hindsight and a lot of therapy, Carey adds that her ensuing collapse - on her mother's kitchen floor - was the culmination of factors that could be dated all the way back to the beginning of her career, when her long-held acting ambitions were smothered by a husband - 20 years her senior - whose name she still would rather not utter if she can help it.

Seasoned Carey-watchers will, of course, need no introduction to Tommy Mottola - the legendarily flamboyant Sony godfather who swept the teenage singer from waitressing to Grammy-chomping global dominance. He gave her a career; in the circumstances she felt it impolite not to give him what he wanted - her hand in marriage. Aged 23, Carey said goodbye to her friends and her mother (her Venezuelan father had fled the family home when she was three) and moved upstate to the town of Hillsdale with, to quote its official website, "its open spaces, rural character and friendly people".

"It wasn't all bad," she insists limply. "I had a barn with horses and all that kind of stuff. (Tommy) loved it. He was very much like, Let's go stare at the foliage. After a while though, I got to calling it Hills-jail. After that first three-and-a-half-hour ride in the car, when the radio station stops about an hour into the journey, the appeal quickly starts to wear thin. And this was a journey we would make every Thursday. I would want to put on my Wu-Tang Clan CD and he would want to listen to Frank Sinatra."

As depictions go, this generational stand-off speaks volumes about so much of Mariah Carey's Nineties output - how a street-smart young New Yorker seemed content to become the global queen of supper-club R&B. No matter how much her recent output may have improved, there are people around the world who will struggle to forgive her for the likes of Hero and the Boyz II Men-abetted atrocity One Sweet Day. For her part, Carey doesn't seem over-eager to make a case for their artistic worth. "The songs that I tend to like the best are the grittier songs that not everybody will necessarily warm to."

By "grittier", she's referring to the songs written during the latter years of her marriage to Mottola, when they moved into a new mansion in New York. One such tune can be found on the 1999 Rainbow album. "I gravitated towards a patriarch," she sings on Petals, "So young predictably/ I was resigned to spend my life/ With a maze of misery."

Tellingly, Carey brings up the subject of Joss Stone, who she met prior to her own set: "I was struck how she was mingling with all the other singers. When I started out, the same age as her, I never got to meet any famous artists. I wasn't allowed to. It was bleak."

It doesn't take a genius to work out what a song like the 2002 "comeback" single Through The Rain was about. With her marriage, the Virgin debacle and that breakdown all behind her, America offered Carey the leg-up of redemption after a soul-baring Oprah interview. The song was another one of those that she wrote to order - not a bad trick if you can manage it. "Through The Rain (was) specifically made to be mass appeal," - but she says that for the first time, it earned her the right to make "an album that is 100 per cent Mariah". It's not an implausible claim either. Compare those cheesy early singles to the block party R&B and ripe hip-hop jams of this year's The Emancipation of Mimi - complete with cameos from Snoop Dogg and Nelly. Mariah Carey, now 35, sounds like a woman living out her adult life in reverse. And thankfully, someone's finally told her that it really isn't necessary to sing eight notes when one would do perfectly well.

"Do you not like that stuff? Well no, I don't do as much of it any more. Maybe I no longer feel the pressure to bring down the house from the first note."

She must also be aware that it's a singing style that has left a bitter legacy across the karaoke bars of Europe and America. Any regrets? "You think that's all my fault? To be fair, karaoke did exist before me. And people with big voices did exist before me. Would it be diva-esque of me to object?" I'm not sure, I tell her. "Diva" can take in a multitude of foibles and eccentricities. "Well, my mother was an opera singer," she ponders, "so I'm comfortable with the old-fashioned meaning of the word diva. And if somebody said you were the cupcake diva of Manhattan, that would be OK too. But I'm not, like, this hysterical woman - I promise you!" At which point, she starts to laugh. Hysterically.

(The Times)



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