or those of you who are reading this magazine for the first time, and
picked this issue off the crowded newsstand because of Mariah Carey's
provocative/seductive cover pose, I think we owe you something of an
explanation. First, TRACE is not what you might think it is. TRACE is
not a new pop-cultural mega-zine that dabble sin shallow celebrity
journalism. In fact, TRACE is probably not anything like you imagined it
from that first glance at the newsagent's. Mariah Carey is on the cover
because we know that you have a strong opinion about her - you either
hate her guts or respect her for finally thrusting herself into the
driver's seat, but in no way have you ever thought of belittling her
achievements. Because like it or not, 83 million records later, Mariah
is here to stay. And if you are of the category who hates her guts, and
cuss her every time you see her parading in miniskirts on MTV, it may
well be because you have a problem with her sudden appropriation of
black culture and its more derivative hip hop undercurrents. Puff and
Mase on "Honey" was acceptabe - if you discount the uniformed syncro
dancers - but Mobb Deep and Bone Thugs? Come on! Mariah's early career
in platinum proof that you never get a second chance to make a first
impression, and first impressions are what TRACE aims to deconstruct...
“I go round consciously trying to maintain in a world that’s a little
bit crazy,” says Mariah Carey, nestled deep in the backseat of her limo.
“And I really love music, like I really, seriously do. And I love the
fact that now I’m able to do what I want and I just wanna get it exposed
to as many people as I can and even if 99.9 percent of people who hear
‘The Roof’ don’t know that it’s ‘Shook Ones,’ it is.
Well that sounds reasonable doesn’t it? Girlfriend’s got her divorce on
and now she’s getting open. Hanging with the homeboys. Saking off the
shackles of a faded relationship and making the kind of music that she
always wanted to make, way back when she was a teenager,
teenage-dreaming about success like this. But now, almost for the first
time in her professional career, she is being herself. And that should
be cause for a adulatory “Go girl!” but for some reason folks ain’t
feelin’ it. The skepticism and mistrust are palpable. And her motivation
is being questioned. They say she’s bandwagon-jumping. They say she
ain’t really down. They say she’s fakin’ it.
Making my way through customs at LAX, LA’s enormous - and enormously
characterless - international airport, I had to explain the nature of my
visit to the young African-American officer who was on duty. I told her
I was in town to interview a recording artist. “That’s great! Who is
it?” she asked, genuinely excited at the idea. I told her it was Mariah
Carey. “Mariah Carey? Hmm,” she said, in a disappointed kind of way. I
was curious to know what had prompted that response, so I asked what she
would want to know about the “people’s pop princess,” as one recent
article referred to Ms. Carey. “Umm...,” the customs officer said.
“Nothin’, really. I don’t really want to know anything about her at
all!”
That wasn’t the first time I’d heard that response over the last couple
of weeks. In the run up to my trip to Hollywood for an audience with
this one-woman, billion-dollar-plus entertainment industry (no
exaggeration: 80 million records sold, areound $15 a pop - go figure),
I’d asked around my friends what they would have me uncover. In most
cases they thought about it for a minute, then just shrugged. Nothin’
really. Nothin’ at all.
Which is kind of strange, when you think about it. Whole industries have
sprung up around the fascination we almost invariably have with our
celebrities, to the point where even C thru Z-list personalities find
themselves constantly on talk shows, in the tabloids and scandal sheets
and generally being gossiped about, because folks seem to have an
inveterate response to celebrity of any order, which is to get all up in
its business.
But not, it seems, where Carey is concerned. She shifts product alright,
to a degree virtually unmatched in the entertainment business, so she’s
popular, but only as in popular artist, popular music - pop. What she
never seemed to possess was the electric snap and crackle of the truly
stellar. That ineffable quality whereby someone seems to touch and
engage with just about every other person on the planet - manages to
actually mean something to virtually all of us - has not been a part of
Mariah Carey’s repertoire. Instead there she’s always been, part of the
pop firmament, singing well-meaning ballads in a voice of spectacular
beauty without a shred of relevance. That is to say, without any direct
links with our lives, our realities, our existence. Without
significance, without connectedness, she was just...Mariah Carey,
cut-out-and-keep pop star.
Then suddenly something a little strange started to happen. The Puff
Daddy remix of “Fantasy,” drawn from the Daydream album, featured a
then-new phenomenon, a guest spot by a well-known rapper to beef up an
otherwise fairly anodyne track and accrue to it some street love. Well,
as a marketing device, it was nothing if not forseeable. As the urban
market suddenly became the market per se, that hood dap was going to
become a valuable commodity, to be got by fair means or foul. And the
conjunction of fair and foul was particularly apt in this archetypal
example of the device. Yup, you remember - “Me and Mariiiiiah:” enter
stage left Ol’ Dirty Bastard, from moniker thru facial expression to
vocal style the grimiest rapper to ever walk the earth. Alongside Mariah
Carey? Whu...?!
Back then the hardcore devotees would never have thought that it would
work. After all hip hop was invioacle, sacrosanct - neither for sale or
hire, nor to be allied to any other cause. Hip hop at that time was all
about “Keep it real,” not yet the Benjamins. But the world she was a
changin’, and typically that consummate auteur of acumen, Sean “Puffy”
Combs, was in the vanguard of her tranformation. The rest is recent
history. Mariah Carey parted company with , and then divorced, her
husband of four years, Sony boss Tommy Mottola. Their romance had been
whirlwind, the marriage itself an extravagant spectacle costing some
$500,000 (but how he recouped!); still rumors abounded of her being
manipulated, controlled and dominated by a possessive and jealous
Mottola. Various accounts tell of a certain Sony employee who would turn
up wherever Mariah was, of her being virtally imprisoned in the couple’s
Beford, NY marital home. The rumour mill didn’t end with the split
either; in fact the stories got even more wild. Suffice to say they were
probably mostly bulls**t, but there’s no smoke without a little bit of
fire, as Carey herself will concede, albeit tangentially.
Following the spilt and the divorce, Mariah Carey parted company with
her manager Randy Hoffman and lawyer Sandy Gallin - said to be too close
to Mottola - and did what she done virtually every year since she left
high school, every year this decade: she went into the studio and made
an album. Butterfly is the latest in a long line of mega-selling albums
from the Carey hit factory. It has the power-ballads for which she’s
globally, incredibly, unimaginably famous, and which emerge from a
long-standing collaborative arrangement with
producer/arranger/composer/songwriter Walter Afanasieff. His name has
appeared on all her albums to date, so it is no surprise to see his
credit after quintessentially Mariah songs like “My All,” “Fourth Of
July,” and the album’s title track. But what does raise eyebrows is the
list of other collaborators on Butterfly. Bad Boy, Trackmasters, The
Ummah (ATCQ’s production crew), Mobb Deep, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. And all
of a sudden she’s here, in our world, rolling with our peeps, gettin’
down with our lives. For most of the last seven years she’s been the
squeaky clean pop queen, somewhere out there in the territory occupied
by Celine Dion and Michael Bolton, (Boyz II Men? Babyface? Not even!)
with about as much pertinence, but now she’s all up in here. It’s the
Whu...?! factor all over again.
Except, accoring to Mariah, it isn’t, or at least has no business to be.
This album, she claims, is absolutely, totally, 100 percent, like, her.
Who she wants to be; where she wants that person to be at; what’s going
on at this point in her life, given all that’s gone on at points prior
to it. And while she won’t admit to being totally happy righ now, she
says she’s “probably the happiest [she’s] ever been.”
The reason for that happiness? Control. “I don’t love being at this pace
and not being able to do anything but at this point I’m choosing to do
it myself,” she states with evident satisfaction. “In the beginning I
don’t that I really understood what I was doing.” I ask if this is all
there is to her life, this kind of stardom-maintenance process, and she
says no; that there’s another place she goes to, when she’s in New York,
around her people.
Then she tells a story about being around at the home of one of her
girlfriends, staying up late and falling asleep on the couch. But
“everybody was freaking out,” she says, “calling her every five minutes
and going ‘is everything all right, what’s she doing, what’s going on?’
And my friend was like, ‘she’s fine she’s here.’ But I was at peace and
at ease so it wasn’t a big deal ro me. It’s just that everybody else
makes a bigger deal out of it, like ‘why is Mariah sleeping on a couch
in Brooklyn?’”
She tells this story, and I’m thinking two things: firstly that I’ve
heard it before - she told it on the Oprah interview she did right after
the separation - and also that it genuinely seems to be a big deal to
her. That to do something most 27 year-old socially-sctive women just do
from time to time, crash roudn their girl’s crib, genuinely was
something new and exciting to her, a kind of adventure. So I’m
wondering, is this her stock ‘hey. I’m just a regular girl’ tale, her
of-the-people bona fides? Or has it really been so long since she had
the freedom to do something akin to what you and I might consider normal
that this episode was still worth relating apparently months after it
happened? It’s exactly this kind of paradox that you’re faced with with
the new-look Mariah Carey. On the one hand she seems so genuine, yet
there’s a whiff of manufacture behind her plausibility. Is she or isn’t
she?
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