For Mariah Carey, time was always just a construct. In 1994, she gifted the world “All I Want For Christmas Is You”, a jingly-jangly love song that could have been addressed to Santa, the festive season or an unnamed lover, depending on how you chose to interpret it. It was part of Merry Christmas—the sort of holiday season album that most artists have put out at the end of their career, not when they were 25 and in the prime of their career.
Thirty years has not aged Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” in the way it has a lot of the music from that year. Just look at the statistics. In 2019, the single topped the Billboard Hot 100 charts for the first time after 25 years. The song has since ascended to the top of the charts each December, five years in a row, acquiring billions of streams and selling millions of physical copies each year.
We’re excited to be honoring one of the most celebrated voices in popular music at our #BMCHonors GRAMMY Week event alongside @AmazonMusic and @CityNational — @MariahCarey!The five-time GRAMMY winner has redefined the standards of vocal artistry, revered for her distinctive… pic.twitter.com/3q0bPcI6EH
— Recording Academy / GRAMMYs (@RecordingAcad) January 31, 2024
Indeed, for the lambily (as her fandom is called), Christmas is basically #MariahSZN. And Mariah Carey pulls all the stunts to maximise her presence, hovering over our social media feeds and sprinkling it generously with her specific brand of fairy dust. Last year, she broke out of an ice sculpture to flag off the season. Add to that the release of a special Mariah Carey Barbie, a sold-out tour, and hefty royalties and—as AP News puts it—“it's safe to say that Carey pockets millions every year from a song she wrote in 1994.”
Mariah Carey Barbie, released in November 2023. (Photo via X BallerAlert @balleralert)
That’s not all. Ever since her debut single, “Vision of Love,” was released in 1990, Carey has had swathes of listeners across the globe bewitched. She has had 19 songs top the Billboard Hot 100—more than any other solo artist in history, and second only to the Beatles.
With such staying power, owing greatly to her unique five octave vocal range, is it any wonder that a diva like Mariah Carey thinks time is irrelevant; or at the very least, bendable to her will? In multiple interviews, Carey has set arbitrary ages to her most iconic music; and even claimed her own age to be 12. To her fans, this sort of banter feeds into her magnanimous diva personality, making her all the more endearing, just as much as her earwormy hits, and predilection for gold, fur and shimmer.
But it is with time that Mariah Carey has revealed the woman behind the tabloid fodder and the brains (not just the voice) behind blockbuster hits like “Fantasy” and “Dreamlover”. In her bestselling memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey, released in 2020, she reckons with her unusual history—beginning with the fact of being the child of an Irish Catholic mother who was a trained opera singer and an African American father, who divorced when she was barely three years old.
Being neither white nor black (or both) left her feeling like a misfit, and the target of racial slurs and attacks. Music, she has said, was always the one thing she could rely on for escape. And she did escape that hell (and fall into another one), when she was discovered by Sony Music Entertainment exec Tommy Mottola, who signed her instantly, and also married her. It was a short-lived, sordid affair, with the surveillance and control on her life and work.
The mid-1990s were when Mariah Carey began to come into her own. If she was initially marketed as a racially ambiguous musician, now she was owning her black roots. She was collaborating with rising hip hop and R&B artists, finding her pop sound, while also donning the “sex symbol” personality.
What slowly began to come to the fore was that she wasn’t just the interpreter or presenter of music that was written for her by others—she was actively involved in the songwriting and arranging process as well. As a musician, along with her ample God-given gifts, Carey mined her life to say the things she couldn’t say directly through her music. Her 1997 track “Outside”, for example, takes on a whole new meaning when you hear her sing “always somewhat out of place everywhere”.
Carey also had her ear to the ground, paying special attention to the trends that moulded the musicscape of the time and mindful of her vast audience who, she suspected, may not be able to keep pace with her rapid shapeshifting. In 1999, for example, Carey was newly single, and working on the album Rainbow in a studio in the hills of Capri, and developing a darker R&B sound that leaned harder into hip hop.
“I have a broad demographic,” she told Interview magazine that year. “But I also have an audience that’s urban and one that’s Middle America. When I’m sequencing this album, and I want to put as the first song on my album my remix to the beat of (Snoop Dogg’s) 'Ain’t No Fun' starting out with Jay Z and DJ Clue and Missy Elliott and Da Brat, I’m kind of like, 'Well, I’m not so sure about everybody who buys the album for the second single—which is a ballad—putting it on and hearing (this hip-hop song).'”
“They might get totally flipped out and take it out of their CD player and break it in two,” she said with great insight. “So I have to really be a little conscious of the fact that it’s broad, and also it’s diverse in terms of the racial thing. I am anyway, being a mixed person racially.”
It was owing to this sort of attunement that Carey has held the attention of generations. The music cognoscenti will likely name her 1993 album Music Box as her most accomplished work, but albums like Butterfly, Rainbow and Glitter have spent significant time on top of lists and charts.
Deluxe anniversary editions of Music Box (30 years in 2023), Butterfly (25 years in 2022), Rainbow and Merry Christmas (forthcoming this year) promise deeper cuts, unknown trivia and peaks into the gossamer world of Carey. And as “All I Want for Christmas Is You” approaches its diamond anniversary, we can anticipate this winter’s festivities to be dialled up to the nines. Plus, she has teased “new music on the horizon”—Carey’s last album was released in 2018.
Carey’s music lives and breathes because it has that transportive quality—it can evoke the zeitgeist of the 1990s as much as the spirit of Christmas. But it was also that very public act of liberation during that last decade of the 20th century that imprinted her in pop-culture canon.
“Extreme talent begets extreme mythology—and as (unproven) legend would have it, Mariah hits the notes only dogs can hear, the notes that shatter glass, the notes that she says once opened a fan’s garage door,” writes Andrew Chan in his book, Why Mariah Carey Matters, released in 2023. The book traces the influence of Carey—the woman, the personality, the artist—on a cross-section of fans, millennial, femme, queer and more.
“But of the handful of American pop singers who have been treated with this degree of relevance, few are celebrated for their artistry outside the vocal booth,” says Chan of the “genre chameleon”. “Indeed, few can claim to have written all their signature songs, produced and arranged for other artists and directed several of their own music videos, as Mariah has.”
Which is to say, there’s a reason why Mariah Carey is variously called the Queen of Billboard, the Queen of Christmas, the Queen of the Remix and, quirkily, Queen of the Bath (google why). And why her continuing reign has brought us on the verge of a Mariah Carey renaissance (not to mention the ’90s complete takeover of our lives). But Carey, songbird supreme, wouldn’t see it like that. After all, as she said in an interview with W magazine: “Darling, each year is just a minute, okay?”
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