Sunday 5 February 2006

Carey, on

When Mariah Carey performs at the Grammy Awards on Wednesday, she'll be accompanied by Brooklyn's Love Fellowship Tabernacle Choir. Yes indeed, Carey will be singing praise to the Lord: for her eight nominations, for the 5 million albums she sold last year, for the stream of singles that made her the top-selling artist of 2005. The folks at Island Def Jam Records are giving thanks, too. In a year that Island president Steve Bartels described in Rolling Stone magazine as "arguably the worst in the music business's history", Carey's "The Emancipation of Mimi" gave the industry one of its few reasons to smile.

But this isn't just the story of a hit album. Kanye West, 50 Cent, and Green Day made shareholders happy, too. Carey's is a comeback of Biblical proportions. And prerequisite to any astonishing reversal of fortune is a proportionate fall from grace.

To refresh: Mariah Carey owned the 1990s. She was the best-selling female performer of the decade, bigger than Celine, bigger than Whitney. Nothing about Carey, from her Amazon bod to her five-octave range, was small. Even her lucky break smacked of the mythic: the pop music equivalent of Lana Turner being discovered at a Hollywood soda fountain. According to lore, dance-pop singer Brenda K. Starr handed a copy of her teenage backup singer's demo tape to then-Columbia Records chief Tommy Mottola at a party. Mottola listened to it in his limo later that night and was so struck by Carey's talent he hightailed it back to the party to track her down.

In short order Mottola signed and - in one of those proverbially creepy fairy tale twists - later married Mariah Carey. Her self-titled 1990 debut spawned four number one hits, and the following year she won a pair of Grammys, for best new artist and best pop female vocalist. As the decade progressed, dazzling melismas and smash singles stacked up like so many cases of Cristal. Carey was a commercial juggernaut: the only artist to have a chart-topping song in each year of the 1990s and the first artist to top the Beatles' record for cumulative weeks on the Hot 100 singles charts.

The 2000s weren't as kind to Carey. Or maybe it's the other way around. Free from her ties to both Mottola (the marriage lasted four years) and Sony, Carey kicked off the millennium by signing a whopping contract with EMI's Virgin label worth somewhere between $80 and $120 million - after which the superstar's personal and professional life nose-dived.

Here's what happened in 2001: Carey's big-budget film "Glitter" and its soundtrack CD both bombed. So, in turn, did her promotional gigs. During one memorable television appearance, she handed out popsicles on MTV's "TRL" seemingly clad only in a T-shirt. Carey began posting troubled ramblings on her own website that led many to believe she was suicidal, and ultimately checked into a discreet Connecticut hospital. Of course, no crash-and-burn is complete without salt poured publicly and painfully into the wound. For that we can thank Eminem, with whom Carey had had a brief fling. He started blaring snippets of her tearful voice messages, begging him to call her, as a sort of twisted overture at his arena concerts. Then, in 2002, mere months after it had scooped her up with much fanfare and a record-setting paycheck, Virgin paid Carey a reported $28 million to go away. When Carey released "Charmbracelet" later that year on her own boutique label, an imprint of Island, the album was panned and sold poorly.

Tumbling in satin gym shorts down the slippery slope of self-parody, Carey and her bizarre persona had become - in time-honored fashion - more engaging than her music. (See: Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson.) To feed our insatiable appetite for a good cautionary tale, not to mention divas-gone-awry, we ate it up. Carey-watching was bigger and, frankly, better than Carey-listening - although that calculus posed a chicken and egg dilemma. Which came first, the personal meltdown or the musical meltdown? At her 2003 Boston concert in support of "Charmbracelet", Carey staged a red-carpet entrance, sweeping down the aisles of the Wang Theatre surrounded by a throng of mock paparazzi, flashbulbs popping. There's nothing quite as depressing as a fallen diva announcing her divaness. Still worse, her voice was in tatters - a thin vestige of the elastic belter who had once executed gravity-defying vocal gymnastics with a flip of her golden curls. Even her superhuman high note was weird, sounding as if Carey was whistling through her ear.

She had nothing left to lose. And the truth is, hitting bottom was the best thing that could have happened to Mariah Carey. Where mediocrity breeds desperation, total burnout invites reinvention. And if re-visioning one's place in the world turns out to be more a matter of branding than self-discovery, so be it. The only thing consumers like better than a cautionary tale is a redemption story (see: James Frey), and if anyone was ripe for expiation, it was Carey.

Despite the perverted collective glee with which many followed Carey's fall, other people believed it was the ideal moment to take a chance on the singer - not unlike a savvy investor might buy a stock while it's down. People like Antonio "L.A." Reid, the CEO of Island Def Jam, who was himself recruited by the Universal Music Group at a career low point after being forced out as president of Arista Records. And Benny Medina, an artist manager who had previously worked (and publicly fallen out) with Jennifer Lopez and Brandy. And Jermaine Dupri, an A-list record producer and - awkwardly - an urban music executive at Virgin Records, the label that paid handsomely for Carey's exit.

New team in place, Carey proceeded to craft "The Emancipation of Mimi", the conceptual presentation of which screams liberation from oppression and a return to the true self. As she explains in the liner notes, that's Mimi (Carey's childhood nickname). But it's really just a return to the midtempo R&B tunes and powerhouse ballads that served her so well in her glory days, freshened up with club grooves and big-name guest rappers.

Let's not confuse Carey's triumphant return with a great artistic achievement. Let's do acknowledge the slim chances of anyone bouncing back from the all-points debacle Carey had become, because that's at the heart of her renaissance.

To be sure, her mixed-race market identity helps. On "The Emancipation of Mimi", Carey, whose mother is white and father is black, fully embraces both mainstream pop and urban influences; "We Belong Together", one of four singles to be released so far, accomplished the rare feat of remaining number one on both the pop and hip-hop charts (it also spent time on the adult contemporary, digital download, and ringtone charts) for more than three months. The track is nominated for four Grammys: record of the year, song of the year, best female R&B vocal performance, and best R&B song.

The song is a standout: an urbane dance-floor hookup infused - thanks to Dupri's deft sampling of Bobby Womack's "If You Think You're Lonely Now" - with a dose of old-school pop-soul. Elsewhere Kanye West, another of the album's producers, updated the '70s staple "Betcha by Golly Wow" for "Stay the Night".

Pretty much everywhere else on the album you can hear Carey dropping product placements for Bacardi and cooing about her sick hot tub, to excellent effect. It's no coincidence that Carey's downward spiral began with the cheesy true-life remembrances of 1999's "Rainbow", gained velocity when she investigated early '80s funk on "Glitter", and achieved warp speed with the demure schlock of "Charmbracelet".

On "The Emancipation of Mimi", Carey has indeed returned to her true self: bronzed, blinged, limo-loving superstar. Frankly, it's more of a relief than a revelation, which begs the question: Would the public have embraced the album so enthusiastically if it hadn't arrived on the heels of what looked for all the world to be her ruin? I don't think so. We love Carey's resurrection like we love her fashion sense: It's undeniably real. No stylist would allow her star client to be seen in the disastrous dresses and hairdos Carey wears, and few industry experts would have dreamed that, at 35, she would return to rule the pop culture that had dismissed her as damaged goods. Carey beat the odds, bucked the trend, showed the naysayers. We'd like to do that too, which is why Carey's comeback feels so sweet.

(The Boston Globe)



COMMENTS
There are not yet comments to this article.

Only registrated members can post a comment.
© MCArchives 1998-2024 (26 years!)
NEWS
MESSAGEBOARD