Mariah Carey
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Mariah CareyDVDs - Posters - Books - News and Articles |
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Mariah Carey (born March 27, 1970) is an American pop and R&B singer-songwriter, record producer and occasional actress. Carey made her debut in 1990 under the guidance of Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola, and became the first recording act to have her first five singles top the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart. Following her marriage to Mottola in 1993, a series of subsequent successful records consolidated her position as one of Columbia's highest-selling acts, and according to Billboard magazine she was the most successful artist of the 1990s in the U.S.
Carey took full creative control over her image and music following her separation from Mottola in 1996, and introduced heavy elements of hip hop into her album material. Her popularity was in decline when she left Columbia in 2001, and she was dropped by Virgin Records the following year after a highly publicized physical and emotional breakdown and the poor reception of Glitter, her film and soundtrack project. Carey later signed with Island Def Jam Records, and after an unsuccessful period, she returned to the forefront of popular music in 2005.
In 2000, the World Music Awards named Carey the best-selling female artist of all time, and she has recorded the most U.S. number-one singles for a female artist. In addition to her commercial accomplishments, she is well-known for her melismatic singing voice which has been noted for its range, power (see vocal belting) and technical ability. However, some critics have said that Carey's efforts to showcase her vocal talents have been at the expense of communicating true emotion through song.
Carey was born in Long Island, New York. She is the third and youngest child of Patricia Hickey, a former opera singer and voice coach of Irish American Roman Catholic extraction, and Alfred Roy Carey, an aeronautical engineer of Afro-Venezuelan descent. As a multiracial family, the Careys endured racial slurs, hostility, and sometimes violence, causing the family to frequently relocate in the New York and Long Island areas. The strain on the family led to the divorce of Carey's parents when she was three years old. Carey had little contact with her father, and her mother worked several jobs to support the family.
Spending much of her time at home alone, Carey turned to music as an outlet. She began singing at around the age of three, performing for the first time in public during elementary school, and was writing her own songs by junior high. Carey graduated from Harborfields High School in Greenlawn, New York although she was frequently absent due to her popularity as a demo singer for local recording studios. Her renown within the Long Island music scene gave her opportunities to work with musicians such as Gavin Christopher and Ben Margulies, with whom she would co-write material for her demo tape. After moving to New York City, Carey worked numerous part-time jobs to pay the rent and completed five hundred hours of beauty school. Eventually, she became a backup singer for Brenda K. Starr.
In 1988, Carey met Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola at a party, where Starr gave him Carey's demo tape. Mottola played the tape while leaving the party and was very impressed with what he heard. He returned to the party to find Carey, but she had left. Nevertheless, Mottola tracked her down and signed her to a recording contract. This Cinderella-like story became part of the standard publicity surrounding Carey's entrance into the industry.
Carey co-wrote all of the original compositions on her 1990 debut album Mariah Carey, and continued to co-write nearly all of her material for the rest of her career, but expressed dissatisfaction with the contributions of producers such as Ric Wake and Rhett Lawrence. With substantial promotion the album ascended to number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, where it remained for several weeks. It produced four number-one singles and made Carey a star in the United States, but its success elsewhere was limited. Critics rated the album highly, and Carey won Grammy Awards for "Best New Artist" and "Best Female Pop Vocal Performance" for her debut single "Vision of Love".
Emotions, Carey's second album, was conceived as an homage to Motown soul music (see Motown Sound) and saw Carey working with Walter Afanasieff and the dance group C&C Music Factory. It was released soon after her debut album in the fall of 1991, but was neither critically nor commercially as successful; Rolling Stone described it as "more of the same, with less interesting material ... pop-psych love songs played with airless, intimidating expertise". The title track "Emotions" made Carey the only recording act to have their first five singles reach number-one on the U.S. Hot 100 chart, though the album's follow-up singles failed to match this feat. Carey had been lobbying to produce her own songs, and beginning with Emotions, she would co-produce most of her material. "I didn't want [Emotions] to be somebody else's vision of me", she said. "There's more of me on this album." She would also begin writing and producing for other artists, such as Penny Ford and Daryl Hall, within the coming year.
Although she had occasionally performed live, stage fright had prevented Carey from embarking on any major public tours. Her first widely-seen concert appearance was on the television show MTV Unplugged in 1992, and she said she felt that her performance proved her vocal abilities were not, as some had previously speculated, simulated using studio techniques. In addition to acoustic versions of some of her earlier songs, Carey premiered a cover of The Jackson 5's "I'll Be There" with back-up singer Trey Lorenz. Released as a single, the duet reached number one in the U.S. and led to a record deal for Lorenz, whose debut album Carey produced. Because of strong ratings for the Unplugged television special, the concert's set list was released on the EP MTV Unplugged, which Entertainment Weekly called "the strongest, most genuinely musical record she has ever made ... Did this live performance help her take her first steps toward growing up?"
Carey's ninth studio album The Emancipation of Mimi was released in 2005 and contained collaborations with producers such as The Neptunes and Kanye West. Carey said it was "very much like a party record ... the process of putting on makeup and getting ready to go out ... I wanted to make a record that was reflective of that." Mimi became the year's best-selling album in the U.S. and won three Grammy Awards (including "Best Contemporary R&B Album"). Reviews were some of Carey's most favourable for some time; The Guardian defined it as "a tough cookie of an album" and "cool, focused and urban ... the first Mariah Carey tunes in years I wouldn't have to be paid to listen to again". The second single "We Belong Together" occupied the Hot 100's number-one position for fourteen weeks (her longest run at the top as a solo artist) and was the biggest hit of 2005, with heavy radio airplay across the world. The third single "Shake It Off" also proved successful and "Don't Forget about Us" became Carey's seventeenth number-one in the U.S.; this achievement tied her with Elvis Presley for the most number-ones by a solo act according to Billboard magazine's revised methodology (their statistician Joel Whitburn still credits Presley with an eighteenth) By this count Carey is behind only The Beatles, who have twenty number-ones
01/21/08 03:13 AM
