"I Only Obey Myself"

translated by Lutz Hoffmann
from Stern (a German mag)- Nov. 20
edited by thewind@oocities.com

This article stirs up some controversy about Tommy and the marriage like the Vanity Fair article. Some things are obviously exaggerated for effect, by others...it's not quite clear, especially with some of the quotes (you can't fabricate quotes!).

Again and again the former waitress swore the great love by her 80 millions
records - and became less happy day by day with her marriage to one of
the top US music managers. Since her separation she has tried to find her own
tunes.

She is not simply coming through the door. Mariah Carey staggers in like a confused
fairy, her hands looking for something to hold: "I am so tired", she moans.
Behind her follows a man sticking to her back constantly picking her hair, by her
side a woman with powder and brush. It is 7 pm, Mariah rolls her
eyes and glides down on a sofa, the hair man and make-up woman follow.

Everybody in the room is nervous. The manager, president-manager and vice-manager
of her label SONY strafe around, and when asking for Mariah, if one is
allowed to speak, a second of silence follows. "Yes, you will be able to talk
to her soon," she's let's one of the girls answer. All the others wipe
away the sweat from their fore-heads and do "pfft". An employee of the
"Leibziger Hotel" whispers that "Miss Carey isn't in a good mood today." You can
hear workers working a few rooms away, laying parquet flooring, which was ordered
over night, because "Miss Carey" wanted to rehearse for the show,
for which she is advertising her new CD "butterfly".

Mariah Carey is 27, and you really can call her a spoiled goat. A pop star,
who sold 80 millions records with voice and soft-ballads; a Cinderella
with a similar history - waitress and sometimes background-singer from Long
Island, discovered 1988 and raised to popularity by her prince,
SONY-Music-boss Tommy Mottola. A relationship built on the typical columns
of the upper-class: sex and money. Mariah, at that time 18 years old, made
Tommy, at that time around 40, young again and secured his presidential seat
with her chart successes. He, a multi-millionaire, stuffed dollars into her
career and into her wardrobe. The marriage in June of 1993 "was more a crowning,"
guests were saying. Mariah studied the video of princess Diana's
wedding for days, her dress was made for US$ 25000, and of course names on the
guest list were Bruce Springsteen, Barbara Streisand and Robert DeNiro.

With saying "Yes," Mariah started a dream that became a trauma. 
After the wedding to one of the most powerful men of the music
business, a weapons-freak who sometimes sits in the cellar of his mansion
cleaning his rifles, Tommy built up a ten-million-dollar palace with two
pools, a tennis-court and a sound-studio for both of them in Bedford close
to New York. But he also employed 2 body-guards who followed her even to
the rest-rooms door. She believed him whenever he told her which dresses to wear -
closed-to-the-throught-ladylike [??] and sex-less. She may have called it love, but she
just did not realized that Tommy, from a second phone, listened to every one of
her private phone calls in Bedford. Tommy controlled her mail. Tommy never
allowed a acting-teacher in the house and cancelled good-looking, non-gay
dancers from the casting list of her videos.

Nobody told her that Thomas D. Mottola Jr. already was called "Don Tommy"
in the music business: coming from an Italian background of the Bronx, he
worked himself up using a lot of strange and shady methods. The master of
stars like Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Gloria Estefan is so much
self-assured of his power, he sometimes allegedly threatens that if the
Japan motherhouse does not stops criticizing his politics, he will take SONY Music
away from them. And Mariah wasn't a love for him, but a project that secured
his company the top of the charts.

Mariah realized that only gradually. "No," she says, "friends did not warn
me. I didn't even leave the house for a few years." Only from time to
time, when she locked herself in one of the rooms, listening to incredibly
loud rap-music and Tommy shouting in front of the door, she thought,
"He is too close to my butt." But she had no time to think it over. Records
were produced like on a assemble-line, white middle-class soul with
calculated emotions. Mariah became a kind of Maria Callas for hobby-markets
and car-shops, where songs like "Without You" and "Anytime You Need A
Friend" should raise the buyers' will to buy. Even though her voice reaches
six octaves, her musical abilities stayed on base-level. The US mag "Time"
certified it "nutra-sweet soul," but the marketing-concept of the blond
daughter of a irish mother and a black venezuelean grew. "Every company would
have loved to have her," so says music-mogul David Geffen.

Mariah winds down on the sofa and pulls her black way-to-short leather-skirt.
Her breast is so much pressed and pushed in her white top, pressure-strips
are visible, and her thin, almost ash-blond hair won't stay in shape. Since
she must not wear her dresses closed up to the throught [thigh??], she
demonstratively shows more skin. Life did not leave any contours on her round
face yet, even though there have been a lot of ups and downs recently.
Downs like the day this May, when she left Tommy Mottola; Ups like these
weeks in which her latest CD is high in the charts. "It is my most
important album," she says, "because it is so personal. It is a part
biography." Maybe that is why "Butterfly" is her worst [darkest??] album so far?

Behind the golden bars of Bedford Mariah developed the idea to also
stand musicaly on her own. She started to write songs in secret during the
night, teen-lyrics on outbursts and "finding yourself." "But i always put
them aside again." It was autumn 1996 when she started to write for
"Butterfly" together with black musicians - the soundtrack of her
emotional outburst.

A childish project with childish pictures - in the video to her single
"Honey" for example, the chained Carey lets herself be saved from agents in
a house and then swims to freedom in a bikini. "Everything in the video
shall show: Kiss my butt, Tommy", her ex-producer Walter Afanasieff says. "No,"
says Mariah, "it may looks like that, but that is over-interpretated."
Then she blinks her eye. "That is my most important album," she repeats,
"because i finally gave something away from me. I come from New York and
I had a terrible childhood, my father left us when I was three. I grew up
with rap-music, these are my roots."

The fact that she produced "Butterfly" with rap-legends like Puffy Combs,
Mase and Da Brat, initiated shocks at SONY, because they have to
stick with Mariah for another four albums, the Mariah who now turned
into a gangster-girl with a "fuxx you"-lyric. "They all were very nervous,
because I changed the formula of success. They have asked if I am totally crazy."

The excitement came down fast, because the album still follows the formula of
success of the soft ballads, and only a few songs dare venture a slight step into
soft rap - an undecided work and a failed try to be Janet Jackson. Nevertheless
 Sony's first-lady is full of self-confident: "Musically nobody can
tell me anything, there I am only obeying myself. I can do it on my own."
Mottola on the other hand wasn't thoughtless when he stated his parole (??) in
the company saying: "Let her do anything, she knows what she does."

Scenes like after the grammy-show in 1996, when Mariah wasn't able to get
 a award and after the show in a hotel lobby shouted into Tommy's face if he
really isn't powerful enough to get her a Grammy, probably will be saved
from that man. The separation, both was announced publicity in May, happened
in financial agreement, the divorce is supposed to happen in the next year.
"We speak very friendly to each other", Mariah says. Just recently they
met on a yacht. Tommy made pasta.

After one hour in Leibzig Mariah again falls back on her sofa. She moans,
she is hungry. What for? "Pasta," she whispers, "but simply cooked only."
Again a pile of managers come into the room, again everybody is nervous.
That's because actually Mariah STILL is the wife of the boss.

Back To The Wind - Mariah Carey