Mariah Carey, Elusive No More (original) (raw)

Music|Mariah Carey, Elusive No More

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/04/arts/music/mariah-carey-memoir-rarities.html

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Critic’s Notebook

A new memoir and rarities collection show the powerhouse vocalist and songwriter’s evolution into a poised, boundary-blurring pop superstar.

The star singer and songwriter reveals herself in the memoir “The Meaning of Mariah Carey.”Credit...Joseph Del Valle/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images

Published Oct. 4, 2020Updated Sept. 17, 2021

On the rainy night in the mid-1990s when Mariah Carey first kissed Derek Jeter — a tentative step away from her suffocating marriage to Tommy Mottola, the music mogul who had been crucial to building her career — the singer, drenched, returned to her waiting limo and turned on the radio. What she heard was the “grimy, dangerous, sexy-ass beat” of Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones Pt. II,” one of the crucial New York rap statements of all time, the sort of desolate song that can drop the temperature 20 or 30 degrees in an instant.

The track was stuck in her head when she got back to the palatial home she and Mottola had built together in Bedford, N.Y., Carey writes in her new memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey.” The next day, she started working on a song based on a sample of “Shook Ones” that told her story of going romantically rogue. “The Roof (Back in Time)” is both rugged and sensual — Carey cooing over a sample of Prodigy jabbing, “I got you stuck off the realness.” It was a product of its era, in which pop, R&B and hip-hop were all beginning to loosely commingle — soon it would be the norm.

“The Roof” appeared on Carey’s fifth album of original songs, “Butterfly,” in 1997, a propitious moment in her life and music. Carey, the pop-soul megastar with the most impressive voice of her generation (Whitney Houston, for these purposes, was in the prior one), was deepening her connections to hip-hop right as it was fully emerging as the pop culture lingua franca. Carey the embattled and surveilled wife was catching her first glimpses of romantic and sexual freedom. And Carey, the daughter of a Black father and a white mother, who had been the target of racist taunts in her childhood (“like a first kiss in reverse: each time, a piece of purity was ripped from my being”) and was urged to play down her Blackness by her music business partners, was announcing who she was loud and clear.

For Carey, all of these vectors — professional, personal, romantic, creative, racial, familial — intersected and often overlapped, and had since her childhood. “The Meaning of Mariah Carey” tells that story vividly and emotionally and, for long stretches, unblinkingly. It is a memoir about a determined and preternaturally talented artist focused on her craft long before she’d captured the world’s eyes and ears, and also about a young woman foiled at almost every turn when trying to feel secure in her identity.

Her musical gift — the only sturdy thing — provided a beacon of hope as family turmoil wrecked her childhood. It also saw her through a traumatic marriage to Mottola, who she said effectively imprisoned her in their upstate home and smothered her with security guards, even as she became one of the biggest pop stars on the planet.

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