Mariah Carey cost EMI, approximately,
US$150 million to release one flop of an album. Glitter cost
more people their jobs than one record ever should.
After this, she had somewhat of a mental breakdown
which, when you consider everything she’s been through
in the last fifteen years, is perhaps not that surprising.
Ever since she was a teen signed to Sony by Tommy
Mottola – whom she later married – Mariah Carey has
had the voice. After moving to New York City
as a seventeen year old, and from her self-titled
debut release in 1990 she was, arguably, the biggest
female force of the 1990’s, much as Madonna had been
in the 1980’s. Admittedly, a downward trajectory
began with her separation from Mottola and subsequent
embrace of hip-hop, eschewing the classic torch songs
that made her name.
After flipping from EMI to Universal for Charmbracelet,
she sensibly took three years off before returning
with The Emancipation of Mimi, an album that – some
fifteen years since she began – has found her back
atop the charts. Here, the hip-hop sounds are more
subtle and less in-your-face, combined with the famed
five octave workouts of songs like “Mine Again”.
With Antonio ‘LA’ Reid in her corner, all of a sudden
she’s a major priority artist for her record label,
with the likes of the Neptunes roped in for the Snoop
Dogg guesting “Say Somethin’”.
Whilst her vocal chords are noticeably more ragged
than they were on her first couple of albums, but
it’s hidden especially well on tracks like “I Wish
I Knew” and “Fly Like a Bird”, where producer ‘Big
Jim’ Wright allows her voice to back what are, essentially,
smoove `70’s soul cuts. What is surprising about The
Emancipation of Mimi is just how much it apes
one of her followers, namely Beyoncé. It’s got that
same ultra-slick, bling-afflicted, product-placement
obsession, complete with spoken word passages where
she asserts her ‘realness’.
