Whatever, it got me thinking about the way she lives. The events of the
day that culminated in this interview had been illuminating. The
photographer and I arrived at the studio where we were shooting around
lunchtime. Over the next several hours a retinue arrived peacemeal,
sundry publicists, a stylist, hair and makeup people, security guys,
Mariah’s manager, Mariah’s executive assistant, two drivers, two tour
managers, and so on. Everyone had a role to perform, a requirement to
fulfill, so by the time Carey arrived at around 7pm, the sudio had the
extra lounging areas that had been requested, the bottle of Cristal was
on ice, the food she had ordered was prepared just so, and around 20
people were milling around.
Later on I comment upon this to her, about how wherever she goes in the
world there’s this advance guard travelling ahead, getting everything
straight for her. Doesn’t she find it at all bizarre? And she does
something that she is to do several more times over the course of the
interview: start out seeming like she had to excuse the lifestyle her
success had granted her. “But half of those people I don’t know, for the
most part,” she says. “Not that I don’t know them, and that’s not a dis
to the record company people or whatever, bworld there’s this advance
guard travelling ahead, getting everything straight for her. Doesn’t she
find it at all bizarre? And she does something that she is to do sever
This is disingenuous: not instructing your staff personally doesn’t mean
they aren’t working for you. But it’s as though she feels somewhat
ashamed of the consequences of her popularity, feels compelled to
distance herself from events to some degree, to see them as part of a
preordained, natural process that just happens, rather than an
inevitable adjunct to her chosen career.
It is only after this disclaimeer that she gets to the nitty gritty: “At
this point I feel I should have approval over certain things,” she
states, and I ask if she means because of her commercial position.
“Sure,” she replies. “And because of being burned and having certain
issues and problems and whatever.” I ask if she’d had a lot of
difficulties thus far, somewhat surprised, saying that I thought her
career had been something like a fairytale. “Yes it has, and I’m very
grateful for everything, and I feel very proud of a lot of the things
I’ve done...” Again this initial disclaimer - not wanting to appear
ungrateful, almost apologising before speaking her mind. “...but I don’t
feel like I lived a lot of those things that were going on. I don’t feel
like I really experienced them the same way that I’m experiencing things
that go on now.”
I enquire (sic) whether that were something to do with her marriage, and
all of a sudden the long, free-associating answers dry up. Instead there
are only short, ambiguous allusions, the real information communicated
via facial expressions. It’s something that I actually only noticed
after the interview, while transcribing the tape. Certain difficult or
problematic questions Carey handles by going into inscrutable mode,
responding by grunt and grimace, so that any inferences I draw are just
that - my contentions and no more, nothing concrete and attributable; or
she does what seasoned politicos do - answers a slightly different
question fulsomely, leading you away from dangerous territory.
Both of which tactics reveal considerable savvy vis a vis her public
image and its handling. Unsurprising in a person of her position, but it
does make you think a little when she infers (anything but
unequivocally) that the squeaky clean, racially non-specific image was
one imposed on her by the record company people, rather than something
she acceded to because it was better for business. That paradox again.
But even if the latter were totally the case - and incidentally I don’t
believe it to be so, for reasons I’ll go into later - it gradually
became clear to Carey that the cost was too high. “I started meeting
people who were also young and successful in the music business, and
having relationships with them,” she explains. “Forming friendships with
Boyz II Men, Jermaine Dupri and Da Brat, and people that I related to on
a creative level, and they would come visit me and we would work
together at my house, but that was kinda like the extent of it. Or we
would go places but it was all very surreal. Then they would go and they
would live their lives and they would do normal things - even though
they’re still famous and they get noticed and things like that, it just
seemed like they were freer in a lot of ways.” She pauses for a second,
rueful, and then continues in a measured, deliberate tone: “And that was
kinda like the beginning of me looking around and saying, ‘something’s a
little weird here.’”
What does she mean, I ask. That there were too many things she was
missing out on? Implying was she was kept from them by Mottola? She
doesn’t directly answer that one, but instead starts talking about her
unconventional childhood, about life choices (“there were pivotal
moments where I made choices not to do something or to do something, and
had I chosen the other path I definitely would not be here right now.”);
which leads to another revelation concerning her period as the
high-school hellcat (“believe it or not - and this is funny because my
image is always so goody two-shoes - but when I was in seventh or eighth
grade girls used to be scared of me, that I was like gonna beat them up
in the bathroom. I mean I was a really bad kid! I used to smoke
cigarettes in the bathroom, slam kids against the lockers, I was bad!)
which she says arose out of confusion relating to her race (“it was
because of my insecurities; of being mixes, of being different, just not
feeling comfortable within myself, so I was taking out my aggression of
not being the norm, not really fitting into a specific category.”)
A very revealing period of conversation this, because in it Mariah Carey
confronts two of the popular (mis?)conceptions that abound about her:
firstly that she is this squeaky-clean Malibu Stacey character; and
secondly that she is in denial of her racially-mixed heritage. I respond
by saying that all through her career she has seemed to embrace that
very same racial ambiguity that troubled her so as a teenager, even
though, as I mention, she did that “Fantasy” remix with ODB. Right away
she starts talking about that record, about how she “got away with that
by the skin of my teeth,” that “had the record company known...I don’t
think they really realized how raw he was. They never listened to his
album; if they heard the Wu-Tang 36 CHAMBERS it would’ve been over!”
rather than answering the question, which was about the ‘beigeness’ she
had hitherto personified.
Later on she gets a little more specific: “I don’t know how much [racial
identity] was downplayed from day one. And it wasn’t me,” she states,
“The thing is, it still happens to me, and I can’t tell you how many
times I say in everything I do, my father is black and Venezuelan. That
doesn’t mean he’s black from Venezuela. That means his mother was
African-American down from the south, a real hardcore black grandmother
that’ll set you straight in a minute, and his father is from Venezuela.
His real last name was Nunes, Alfredo Nunes. My father’s father changed
his name when they moved here; they gave him another name which is what
they did to a lot of people in those days if they couldn’t pronounce it.
And my mother, she’s American but her parents came from Ireland. They
always make it like, my mom’s an Irish immigrant and my father’s a
Venezuelan guy who’s black, and that’s not how it is. My mother’s from
the Midwest, my father’s from Harlem.
All of which makes me think about growing up. About how your teens and
early 20s are the time when you arrive at a lot of decisions about
yourself, about who you are, who you want to be, and come to terms with
everything you are not. How that’s an often painful, sometimes
accident-prone period of growing up. How it’s a time when decisions are
made, later to be rued. Who among us can say they regret nothing, that
they made no mistakes during adolescence? Who can honestly say that
given the choices Mariah had, they would not have done exactly as she
did? (there's some mixups here....)
Which is what I meant when I wrote earlier on that I don’t believe
Mariah Carey is just some overexposed pop diva trying to restore herself
a little cachet in the changing market by fakin’ the funk. While Janet
Jackson tries desperately to be Lauryn Hill on “Got Til It’s Gone” and
Aaliyah on “I Get Lonely,” and Madonna aspires to Bjorkness all through
RAY OF LIGHT, Mariah Carey is still, essentially, herself. BUTTERFLY is
an archetypally accessible Mariah Carey album, tougher beats or no, so
much so that Carey is more irritated by the flak she caught from within
the Columbia operation than without.
“I’m still known for songs like ‘Hero’,” she says. “And I don’t think
that I’ve shunned that on this album at all. I think that in a sense
people were trying to project this image on me, that ‘she’s gone
left-of-centre, she’s made a hip hop record,’ but it’s not a hip hop
record. I collaborated with people I wanted to collaborate with, I
worked with producers I wanted to work with, but it’s basically the
direction I was going in on ‘Fantasy’, on the ‘Always Be My Baby’ remix,
it’s the 1997/1998 version of where I wanted to be on DAYDREAM.” But the
singles that I always love, like ‘Underneath The Stars’ and ‘Melt Away’
- singles that Brat will call me up and be like ‘Yo, you gotta make them
release ‘Underneath The Stars’, that’s my shit!’ - and no-one wanted to
because they’re like ‘it’s a passive R&B record, it doesn’t mean
anything.’ and it just seemed like I was very mouldable. So they’d
choose to put out like, another ballad, and the thing about me is that
they know I can write those other kinds of ballads.”
A little later on she returns to this topic: “It’s a problem because
some people said this record is harder to market because it’s a hip hop
record.” Whu...?! Which record? I ask, staggered? “BUTTERFLY!” she
replies, equally dumbfounded. “The album! I’m like, ‘are you crazy?’ Yes
there are tracks that are definitely influenced by hip hop but ‘Fantasy’
couldn’t have been more that way. But that version wasn’t on the album so they kind of had an excuse, and it’s like look, I still have the
ballads on there, I have ‘My All’, I have ‘Butterfly’, whatever. I’m not
stupid enough to just throw that side of myself away.”
Next page -->
Return to Mariah Carey articles
Looking In at Mariah
Get your own Free Home Page