Grammys 2024: Mariah Carey to get Recording Academy's Global Impact Award

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?”