| Thursday 13 September 2001 |
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Some things Glitter, some don't
Mariah Carey was just a spunky Long Island kid in the 1980s when the New York club underground exploded with new sounds and "dance-oriented" everything. Rockers, punks, funkers, rastas and rappers were all of the same basic opinion: if you couldn't dance to it, screw it. Carey's nostalgia for that era (shared by her main co-producers here, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis) is one of the central themes of her new album, Glitter, the soundtrack for her film debut. Yet, while Carey covers several bona fide '80s club favorites - Cherrelle's "I Didn't Mean to Turn You On", Tom Browne's "Funkin' for Jamaica", and Indeep's "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" - and presents a gloriously vintage-sounding Rick James tune ("All My Life"), these charming atavisms don't quite pack the same punch as her more familiar MO, wherein she "mastermixes" hooks from old hits into bubbly new ones of her own. The album's first single, "Loverboy", thus finds her doing what she does best: melding bits of Cameo's 1985 sex anthem "Candy" into a sassy sonic bricolage. Glitter's easy feel and sparkling sound evoke New York's carefree '80s club scene.
Judging by Glitter's easy feel and sparkling production, Carey hopes to evoke the simpler, devil-may-care atmosphere of the '80s, when white performers played ironic versions of funk and reggae, black performers made sardonic, punky funk-rock, and Latin performers flowed into jazz fusion, disco, and rap - all without worrying about race-specific marketing. The album finds her continuing her post-Columbia (and post-ex-husband, Sony executive Tommy Mottola) collaborations with major names in hip-hop - rebuilding burned bridges between rap and its estranged sister genre, disco. Busta Rhymes, Mystikal, Da Brat, Ludacris and others weigh in with tasty cameos, most memorably Jah Rule and Nate Dogg on a raggamuffin-ish "If We", and Rhymes playing a manic emcee on "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life". Among the co-producers working with Carey are bootstrapping rap producers Clark Kent and DJ Clue, and they complement her work quite nicely, Kent controlling the freestyle sound-clash of "Loverboy" with customary flair.
But, as usual on a Mariah Carey album, the uptempo tunes tell only half the story. Of the four ballads, only "Lead the Way" was made with her old producer Walter Afanasieff, leaving Jam and Lewis to orchestrate the singer's more introspective material. As a result, "Reflections", "Never Too Far" and "Twister" elicit a more candid mood from the half-caste diva, as they discuss, respectively, a "love child's" feelings of parental abandonment, surviving a star-crossed romance, and clinical depression. A verse from "Twister", ostensibly about a fictional suicide, goes: "She was kind of fragile/ And she had a lot to grapple with/ But basically she kept it all inside." While Carey has never been a particularly confessional musician, Glitter seems a step in a more cathartic direction, from which subsequent albums should no doubt benefit. In view of recent events, one hopes that Carey's art can offer her a meaningful way to work through issues that stardom often demands a performer repress. (SonicNet)
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