I Do Know Her: The Undying Diva Power of Mariah Carey

Wednesday night, Mariah Carey was in Brooklyn, preparing to take the stage for a rare in-depth interview about her songwriting process. On the internet, a small miracle had just occurred. Glitter, the soundtrack to Carey’s much-maligned 2001 movie, had risen from the dead and hit no. 1 on iTunes’ Soundtrack chart. This unlikely event was thanks to Carey’s fan base—known as “the Lambily”—who had done their best to get the hashtag #JusticeForGlitter trending in the days before Carey was set to release her first album in four years, Caution. As Carey emerged, she was aware, and she was grateful. “First of all,” Carey said, carefully taking her seat on stage in a dimly lit Gowanus warehouse space that serves as the headquarters of the lyrics website Genius, “justice for Glitter!” The Lambs roared.

#JusticeForGlitter began as a complaint from fans that Carey doesn’t play much of her Glitter material live, but it eventually morphed into a general appreciation for the misunderstood work, and, finally a directive to purchase the album on iTunes en masse to make it chart. (That Glitter was going for only $4.99 certainly did not hurt.) Although she hadn’t started it herself, #JusticeForGlitter had the rainbow arc of a classic Mariah Carey story: long-delayed triumph over public adversity, sprinkled with a healthy handful of fairy dust. There we were, cheering for one of the most notorious flops in soundtrack history. One sweet day had arrived at last.

Carey is not usually one for candid interviews. A wild Guardian profile from earlier this year described the omnipresence of several imposing handlers who, during the interview, made sure the journalist didn’t ask any personal questions; Carey instead leaned into her diva mythology, so the piece was headlined with the pull quote “I Bathe in Milk.” The Genius conversation was not exactly freewheeling; Carey mentioned that she could not turn her head too far to the right, because she had been lit quite precisely by her personal lighting director—a concoction that made her look radiant on stage but like an indistinguishable ghost in any photos I tried to take of her on my phone. The interview was savvily centered on songwriting—perhaps the one topic on which Carey believes journalists have not asked her enough. “Do you feel like you get enough credit as a songwriter?” interviewer Rob Markman asked her near the beginning of the conversation. Carey hesitated for a moment, before the Lambily answered for her. In unison: “NOOOO!”

They weren’t wrong. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind when anyone mentions Mariah Carey is The Voice—that five-octave range, that whistle register, those high notes that can kiss the heavens when they stand on their tip-toes. That she emerged nearly fully formed as a songwriter (her debut single was a track she’d cowritten and included on an early demo, none other than the powerhouse ballad “Vision of Love”) doesn’t come up as often. But it’s true, and many who have collaborated with her speak in awe of both her work ethic and her raw talent. “The thing about Mariah is that she’s such a master melodist,” songwriter Walter Afanasieff told Billboard in 2016, reminiscing about working with Carey and Boyz II Men on “One Sweet Day.” “Today, that’s commonly referred to as a ‘top-line writer’…. someone who can start singing right off the bat. Mariah is such a gifted top-line writer that she can sing melodies and come up with lyric ideas on the spot.”

Songwriting can be difficult to talk about for those skilled at it, especially because the lyrical stage often happens quickly. To do it well can sometimes mean just being acutely alive to one particular moment and having the sense to write it down. On stage in Brooklyn, Carey spoke about the inspiration for some of her most iconic songs with a shrugging nonchalance that bordered on comedic. “It didn’t take me a long time to write this song,” she said, when asked about “Hero.” “It wasn’t a whole thing.”

It seemed wise for Carey to be embracing her identity as a songwriter as opposed to a vocalist, though the reasons why aren’t all rainbows and butterflies. Voices, after all, are human, fallible, prone to the fluctuations of biology—as some of Carey’s more recent televised performances have reminded us. Songs, or at least the kind that Carey has written, are transcendent, and they have the potential to outlive us all. When Markman asked what Carey’s twin 7-year-olds think about her music, she quipped, “They’re gonna love it when it’s their catalog.”

Carey was born in New York to a black father and an Irish mother, who divorced when she was 3. When she was young, she moved around a lot with her mom, and this sense of uprootedness coupled with her biracial identity made her feel, as she’d later write in one of her most moving songs, “Neither here or there / Always somewhat out of place everywhere.” Her older sister, Alison (from whom she is now estranged), struggled with drug addiction in her youth, had a child at 15, and contracted HIV. Witnessing all of this made the young Mariah Carey turn into “a very guarded person,” she has said. She escaped into a fantasy world: She wrote poems from a young age and eventually began putting them to melodies. Rainbows, daydreams, and butterflies have remained her lifelong muses; the first poem she ever wrote was called “A Dream.” As she put it during the Genius interview, “I was always looking for the positivity in things.”

Her success was stratospheric. As well-known as it all is, it is still dizzying to consider: Her first five singles all hit no. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100—something no recording artist has done before or since. She has 18 no. 1 hits total, more than any other solo artist. “One Sweet Day,” her duet with Boyz II Men, still holds the record for the longest time spent atop the Billboard singles chart (16 weeks). She had at least one no. 1 single) during every year of the 1990s but one (’94) .

And then came Glitter, the soundtrack to which was released September 11, 2001. Suffice to say the campy movie did not tap into the national mood of the time. But Carey was then working so hard that she was barely sleeping, and the strain combined with the pain of the film’s monumental failure led her to an apparent mental breakdown. She behaved erratically in public: There was an infamous appearance on TRL. She said earlier this year that around this time she was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but she rejected the label, admitting, “I didn’t want to believe it.”

Failure freed her up to become more adventurous; what was left to lose? “Glitter, people looked at it like, Oh that’s her downfall, that’s it,” she said in Brooklyn. “So then I signed with Universal. … We did Charmbracelet, and with that album, there really was something to prove. And then we didn’t prove it, because it wasn’t a big hit. But then when I was working on The Emancipation of Mimi, it was like, Let me just really, really go deep.” Mimi was a huge hit, and it kicked off the Mariah renaissance of the mid-aughts: “We Belong Together,” “Shake It Off,” “Obsessed,” “Touch My Body,” “It’s Like That.” But all runs must eventually come to rest, and by 2009’s Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, Mariah fatigue began to set in. If there’s a late-period Carey album deserving of a recuperative hashtag, though, it’s her 2014 record, Me. I Am Mariah… The Elusive Chanteuse. For the first time in ages, Carey didn’t seem to be chasing trends, favoring instead a mature and timeless sound perfected on the duet with Miguel, “#Beautiful.” From its outrageous title to its lengthy track list, The Elusive Chanteuse basically defined the word “extra,” in the best possible way. You’d want nothing less from a diva.

Caution, though, is considerably more controlled than its predecessor; it’s a taut, tuneful 10-song record that stays safely within Carey’s range. The lead single, “GTFO,” is a melancholy but defiant kiss-off to an ex, produced by sometime Drake collaborator Nineteen85. (The chorus revolves around Carey breathily intoning, “Get the fuck out”; when her children sing along at home, they change it to the more family-friendly “get a fun cow.”) Even better is “A No No,” a brassy throwback that flips a winning sample of Lil’ Kim’s “Crush on You” and finds Mariah grasping for a multilingual thesaurus just to find new ways to tell an insistent man “no.” At the end of the song, she runs through the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese translations, perhaps nodding to the irrepressible spirit of Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s multinational shout-out on the “Fantasy” remix. (Relatedly, do yourself a favor and read everything you can about the making of ODB’s verse on the “Fantasy” remix.)

Even if it’s not in the most memorable song, the most surprising feature on Caution comes from the exuberant rapper Gunna, who currently has a hit with Lil Baby, “Drip Too Hard.” In the mid-’90s, Carey was a pioneer in pairing rappers with pop and R&B hits, and “Stay Long Love You” feels like a hat tip to the next generation. The most interesting and sonically adventurous song on Caution, though, is “Giving Me Life,” a slinky, six-minute shape-shifter featuring Slick Rick (definitely a more nostalgic cameo than Gunna’s) and Dev Hynes, a.k.a. Blood Orange. It’s an outlier on a record of otherwise concise and traditionally structured songs, but the fact that it’s here at all is exciting, and suggests a possible way forward for Carey if she were to focus on atmospherics over acrobatics, and vibe over voice. (All I want for Christmas is a Dev Hynesz–produced Mariah album.)

Caution is, of course, the first album Carey has released since her disastrous 2016 New Year’s Eve performance—like Glitter, if it had played out on live TV and in the age of Twitter. “One of her major problems on tour has been that some of her most beloved songs, the hits her audience wants most, demand a voice she has outlived,” New York Times critic Jon Pareles wrote the next day. “So the truly startling thing about Ms. Carey’s New Year’s Eve fiasco is that she planned to perform ‘Emotions’ at all. The canned music already included the song’s near-dog-whistle vocal flourish, which Ms. Carey no longer pretends to be able to deliver.”

The dark side of being peerlessly successful is that the only person you have to compete with is the ghost of your younger self. Carey’s voice and her singles once reached impossible heights. This deep in her career, it’s unrealistic to expect her (or anyone else, really) to reach or surpass them. Still, there is something about even Carey’s failures that feel fabulous, or at least deliciously entertaining.

It’s hard to take in the whole arc of a career like Carey’s, but reflecting on it the night of the interview it made it start to seem like Glitter, the spectacular embarrassment of the NYE performance, and the doubt and indignities she had suffered when she was younger were a part of a larger pattern. She—and the devoted fan base that follows her—lives for redemption, hard-won battles, second and third and fourth chances. It’s easy to focus on the storm, but Mariah Carey has always insisted that you don’t have to. You can also see it as a prelude to a rainbow.