More like a screaming "Mimi"
Pop diva Mariah Carey hits the right notes, but misses the mark emotionally. Does having a great voice automatically make you a great singer? Hardly. Consider the pipes of Mariah Carey. By any technical measure, they're a marvel. Carey has enough lung power to hit notes out of the ballpark like a pop Babe Ruth. She has a range wide enough to cover all the octaves between an alto and a soprano, and the agility to move between those roles with swiftness and aplomb.
But being a great vocalist isn't simply a matter of hitting the notes. It has far more to do with the character of the voice, the ability of a singer to connect with the feelings behind the sounds, and, most important, the skill to treat a lyric like phyllo dough, finding in it more layers of meaning as the song goes. By those measures, Carey croaks like a frog.
On her latest CD, "The Emancipation of Mimi", in stores today, the singer exploits the pure power of her voice with a new recklessness. Carey has brought back that trademark dog-whistle she exploited in the callow part of her career with a vengeance, using it on 11 of the CD's 14 tracks. Nearly every cut builds to the kind of screech you thought you'd hear only from a dentist's cruelest tool.
Musically, Carey has fiddled with her formula by upping the hip-hop quotient. And while that genre has been a part of her repertoire for years, on the new CD she tips the balance closer to harder club beats, stressing melodies that conform to a rapper's notion of R&B. Unfortunately, this means a gross reduction in the melody element - something Carey can barely afford.
Like the laziest compositions of R. Kelly, Carey has long based her tunes on the busy flutter of her vocal tics rather than on the formal rigor of a tune. Producers can cover for some of that - and Carey hired some of the best in the biz. But somehow she drew from them their worst efforts.
The Neptunes seldom fail to come up with innovative sounds. They managed to here. Jermaine Dupri, a wiz at sonic gimmicks, hasn't devised enough to distract us from Carey's meager tunes. Kanye West alone scores with "Stay the Night" - if only because he turned it into a virtual cover of "Betcha by Golly Wow!" Carey's lyrics are as full of cliches as usual. But what should forgive the verbal blankness - her singing - is ultimately what does her in.
For Carey, vocalizing is all about the performance, not the emotions that inspired it. Singing, to her, represents a physical challenge, not an emotional unburdening. If no one can question the scope of Carey's voice it's too bad she has again used it to say nothing. (New York Daily News)
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