The Meaning of Mariah Carey

by Mariah Carey

  The day of O.D.B.’s shoot was overcast, and we had one simple setup for him on the boardwalk. I went into his dressing room for our first face-to-face meeting bearing a gift—a silver flask engraved with his initials. We talked over the concept—which, again, was pretty simple, because I didn’t want anything to overshadow his performance (as if it were possible for anything to upstage O.D.B.). I told him about the idea of tying the clown up on the pole and really featuring his grills. He was down with all the action, but he had some kind of problem with his wardrobe and wanted a wig.

  “I want a wig,” he kept saying, “like one of them mothafuckas from the sixties. Like Al Green. I’m like this generation’s Al Green.”

  “Oooooh, I don’t know about Al Gweeeeen, but you definitely are something incredible,” I respectfully responded. He was already in his full-blown drunk uncle mode. I had to send the stylist out to the mall with him so he could get exactly what he was envisioning. Mind you, we were in Westchester (it was my video, but I was still in Tommy’s territory).

  When they returned, after an hour or two, the stylist was a wreck. Apparently, O.D.B. was singing and shouting and “woahhhhhhhing” and drankin’ all through the mall! But his look was perfect, the elongated and baggy proportions were just right for his dancing and weird, wonderful movements. He used his sleeves and his hood as props. It was spot on. And the scene where he’s bare-chested in the straight mushroom wig, with the pointy shades—he was giving a little more Ike Turner than Al Green, but whatever it was, it was unforgettable! His performance was all him, and it was perfect. I know O.D.B. had some real trouble on his soul, but he brought nothing but joy to the remix, to the video, and to my world.

  R.I.P. O.D.B.

  * * *

  “Fantasy” was a big record. It was the first single to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in history by a female artist and the second artist to ever do it (the first was Michael Jackson with “You’re Not Alone”). It held the top spot for eight consecutive weeks and remained on the charts for a total of twenty-three weeks. It was my ninth number-one single. Even the critics liked “Fantasy” and the remix (some really liked it)—the entire Daydream album did amazingly well: certified diamond. As an album it had some really special enduring singles, like “Always Be My Baby” and, of course, “One Sweet Day,” whose lyrics and music I cowrote with Boyz II Men, inspired by the passing of my incredible friend and collaborator David Cole and their tour manager, both of whom died too soon. “One Sweet Day” was the longest running number-one single in American history for twenty-three years.

  I was set to perform “Fantasy” and do some other bits at the twenty-third annual American Music Awards, where I was nominated in several categories. It was a big night for me, but winning the best female pop artist and best female R & B artist awards was not the most memorable moment for me.

  When I wasn’t onstage or waiting in the wings I sat in the front row next to Tommy. We were both outfitted in couture tension (the cover shoot of Daydream by photographer Steven Meisel, who was arguably the most prominent in the fashion industry at the time, set the look of the chic black-is-the-new-black style for the tone of the album’s promotion). Ironically, my outfit for this performance was giving you pseudo “Militant Mariah” vibes, with black leather pants, a black leather trench coat, and a black turtleneck (I’m sure Tommy liked it because the only skin exposed was my face). Maybe it was a premonition of what was ahead.

  Because I had more than just the “Fantasy” performance to do that night, I had a trailer behind the Shrine Auditorium for wardrobe changes and such. I was returning to the trailer to get into another ensemble. Security was everywhere, so I didn’t need to be followed for the short walk to where all the artists’ trailers were parked behind the theater.

  As I stepped out in a complete rush to get back to the stage, I noticed a white Rolls-Royce quietly, slowly approaching. Just as my toes touched the asphalt, the gleaming elegant vehicle came to a gentle stop right in front of my door. It was as if time itself had slowed to a stop. The tinted passenger window glided down.

  He was alone, leaning back in the driver’s seat, so that the arm that gripped the leather steering wheel was nearly straight. He propped his head back just enough that his luxurious eyelashes didn’t cast a shadow and obscure his alert and amazing dark eyes that looked into mine.

  “Hey, Mariah,” he said softly, my name pouring out of his lips like smoke. Then that spectacular smile burst through everything. In an instant, the window went back up, and Tupac rolled away.

  Had it not been for a production assistant or someone calling me back to the stage, back to earth, I may have stayed there stunned for hours. I did my bit onstage and returned to my stiff seat next to Tommy. My heart fluttered nervously, but he didn’t know. No one knew. I’d just had Tupac Shakur’s eyez all on me.

  * * *

  Though I was recording Daydream, parts of my life were still quite a nightmare. I was writing and singing upbeat songs like “Always Be My Baby,” and sweeping ballads like “One Sweet Day.” I was totally inspired by the creative risk we took in collaborating with O.D.B. on the “Fantasy” remix. I was exploring my musical range, but I was also filled with rage. It’s always been a challenge for me to acknowledge and express anger. My personal life was suffocating during Daydream, and I was in desperate need of a release.

  Music and humor have been my two great releases—they have been how I survived all the anguish in my life. So while I had a full band and studio time at the Hit Factory for that album, I created an alter-ego artist and her Ziggy Stardust–like spoof band. My character was a dark-haired brooding Goth girl (a version of her, Bianca, showed up a few years later in the “Heartbreaker” video) who wrote and sang ridiculous tortured songs. At the end of each session I would go off to a corner and, without over-thinking it, quickly scribble down some lyrics. In five minutes I’d have a song:

  I am!

  vinegar and water

  I am!

  Someone’s ugly daughter

  I am wading in the water

  And I ammm!

  Like an open blister

  I am!

  Jack The Ripper’s Sister

  I am!

  Just a lonely drifter

  I’d bring my little alt-rock song to the band and hum a silly guitar riff. They would pick it up and we would record it immediately. It was irreverent, raw, and urgent, and the band got into it. I actually started to love some of the songs. I would fully commit to my character. I was playing with the style of the breezy-grunge, punk-light white female singers who were popular at the time. You know the ones who seemed to be so carefree with their feelings and their image. They could be angry, angsty, and messy, with old shoes, wrinkled slips, and unruly eyebrows, while every move I made was so calculated and manicured. I wanted to break free, let loose, and express my misery—but I also wanted to laugh.

  I totally looked forward to doing my alter-ego band sessions after Daydream each night. Tommy was off in Italy a lot at the time, so I had a little space and air to do this bizarre, fun thing that was just for me. The band loved it, and we ended up with an album’s worth of songs, which we mixed and everything. My jokey “anger release” project ended up being a weirdly good satirical, underground, alternative rock thing. When Tommy and some of the other label folks heard it, they couldn’t believe we had done all that while recording Daydream. I even got the art department at the label to design a cover I had conceptualized. I wrote the title with pink lipstick over a Polaroid picture Tommy had taken of a giant dead cockroach in Italy. I told them to add a smashed-up eye shadow makeup palette. They laid it out, and it was perfectly grungy and cheeky. I got a lot of personal satisfaction out of making that “alternative” album. I made the sarcastic hardcore head-banging record no one was ever going to allow me to make. My assistant and I used to blast it in the car riding up the back streets of Westchester, singing at the top of our lungs, giving me a brief moment to be
outwardly angry, irreverent, and free.

  There was a song on the album called “Crave” (that I eventually renamed “Demented”). Tommy knew I had a talent for recognizing talent, so he created a boutique record label for me that I named Crave, inspired by the song.

  The first act on the Crave label was a hip-hop group called the Negro League (they have cameos in “The Roof” video). They named themselves after famed Black baseball players like Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell, who’d had to form their own league because of segregation. They were young, fun, and all of them were fine. I just loved rolling into a party with them—they would chant “NEGROES! NEGROES!” Nothing ambiguous about that, dahling.

  Later, when it became clear to Tommy that the marriage was not going to make it, Crave quickly became defunct, and the alt album conveniently disappeared. There was one small, sweet residual benefit from Crave and the Negro League. I cast one of my friends from the group as my shirtless, motorcycle-riding, lip-licking love interest in Jermaine’s “Sweetheart” video. I called him “Flask” (which was close to his name) because he was so nervous on the flight over to Bilbao, Spain, that he drank and got smashed. But his hangover played well on film, emphasizing his already dreamy eyes. He was my sweetheart for a very short time right after a very tough breakup, which I’ll get to soon enough. He was fun, fine, and just the thing to lick my wounds.

  ONE SUMMER NIGHT, WE RAN AWAY FOR A WHILE …

  In the wake of the success of the “Fantasy” remix featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard I now had some ammunition that made it slightly easier for me to work with people outside of Tommy’s jurisdiction. I was starting to reach out to what I thought were the right collaborators, with whom I could achieve the sound I’d been hearing for a while, which included infusing hip-hop and working with a diversity of rappers. However, the old guard of A&R and music executives at the major labels didn’t know how to control or contain hip-hop and looked at me sideways for my suggestions.

  Rap was making a lot of money really fast, so the smart execs raced to try to get a piece of it. And Tommy was no exception. He was smart. Though he’d always had a more traditional pop/ adult contemporary style in mind for me, he couldn’t deny that the industry and the audience were shifting. It was well established that Tommy didn’t particularly like rap or rappers, but he was a shrewd businessman, and despite his initial resistance, he understood that I had my finger on the cultural pulse. I was determined for my next single to sound more like the music I was hearing in my head all day, the music I’d been dreaming of. So began my work on Butterfly.

  I had gotten to a place where I was trusted to choose people I was inspired by, not the predicable players. One of the most talented was a suave and scrappy producer out of Atlanta with a brilliant ear and instinct, Jermaine Dupri. Like me, Jermaine got in the game early. He was fiercely ambitious and super talented; by the time he was nineteen years old he’d discovered, developed, written, and produced multiplatinum hits for Kris Kross and secured a joint-venture deal for a record label, SoSo Def Recordings, with Sony and Columbia.

  I was really inspired by the work he did on “Just Kickin’ It” with the fresh girl group also out of Atlanta—Xscape. It was intentionally “underproduced”; his track choices were sonically raw—just what I was looking for. Once I heard that song, I knew we should work together. Jermaine—aka JD, aka Jermash (as I call him)—and I instantly creatively clicked. As producers, we both had a fierce discipline in the studio, but we could also approach the music with abandon, unafraid to try new things. We could focus and flow together. It was a rare relationship, and we knew it.

  Our first collaboration was “Always Be My Baby,” on Daydream. It was the first song we wrote together, but it was as if we’d done it a million times before. We sat in the studio and approached it like a blank canvas—sonically organic. With the gifted Manuel Seal on keyboards, we created this cool, yet endearing, classic song.

  In order to make the label happy, I had to deliver several versions of a single, including one that was up-tempo and simple, scrubbed of all ad-libs and “urban inflections.” In order to make myself happy and make sure a song I liked could work for the club kids (who have always given me life), I set aside time to make remixes, sometimes several on one song. I often did complete rewrites and all-new vocal tracks rather than recycling from the original—especially when I worked with David Morales. We would completely re-envision a song. We often worked late at night, when I could steal a moment for myself. David would come to the studio, and I’d tell him he could do whatever he wanted with the song. I’d have a couple splashes of wine, and we would just go wherever the spirit took us—which were almost always high-energy dance tracks with big, brand-new vocals. It was one way I found liberation while locked up in Sing Sing.

  I had a remix idea for “Always Be My Baby” and asked JD to bring Xscape and a big, exciting young female rapper out of Chicago named Da Brat who had a hit record, “Funkdafied,” that JD had produced, to my studio. Knowing how smoothly JD and I worked together, I calculated that we could bang out a remix and shoot a cool docu-style video all in the same session. It was an efficient move. It was a very big feat to secure a hit record; you had to be strategic in your creative choices. We chose “Tell Me If You Still Care” by the S.O.S. Band as the sample, thinking that it would be palatable for a crossover audience, and then having Da Brat rap on it would make it appealing for a hip-hop audience.

  JD was down. I knew how I wanted the remix to sound, with Supremes-style backgrounds. I had to redo all the vocals ’cause it was in a different key. But because Jermaine was so adept in the studio and so in tune with all of our styles, I knew he could bring it all together. The session was set—So So Def was coming to Sing Sing.

  * * *

  As you approach the grounds of Sing Sing, a security station sits to the right, obscured by trees. Inside were multiple screens connected to all the cameras throughout the house and on the property. JD made his way up the long driveway toward the enormous house that rose like a castle from a thick, fluffy blanket of glistening snow. He wasn’t prepared for such grandeur. I didn’t realize the rare air I was orbiting in until I caught that moment of recognition on JD’s face when he stepped out of the car. The scale and opulence of the mansion suggested not simply “music star” but the next stratosphere. Sing Sing was supersized. It was the physical representation of the combined power and influence of me and Tommy, a music-industry power couple. And in that moment, we were the music-industry power couple. When he got to the massive front door, Jermaine looked like Richard Pryor in The Wiz. Honestly, the whole lot of us looked like a group of children playing in a fairy-tale kingdom. But in actuality it was more like visiting day “upstate.” The joy was temporary.

  It was refreshing and a much-welcomed reprieve to have a group of fresh artists at my house to create something we would love and respect. These were my peers, steeped in hip-hop music and culture—and we were down to make a hit. Though we were all very young, collectively we were worth hundreds of millions of dollars in record sales. But once you walked through the gates of Sing Sing, that didn’t mean much. We were now all under surveillance. JD, Xscape, and Da Brat took note of the excessive presence of bodyguards and security, but it wasn’t immediately clear to them exactly who or what they were guarding.

  Jermaine was so focused and serious, he went straight to the studio to get acclimated and organized. He sat at the console, in full command, like the captain of a spaceship. While he worked on the beat, the girls from Xscape and I vibed and talked through the mechanics of the background vocals. It was probably the first time I ever had five women close to my age at my house. Xscape was Kandi Burruss, Tameka “Tiny” Cottle, and Tamika and LaTocha Scott. With their elaborate Atlanta hairstyles, glossy lips, and oversized sportswear, they were super fly and fully captured the glamorous-yet-chill look of women in hip-hop during those years. Their sound and style was exactly the right vibe for the remix and video. I wanted us al
l to look easy and real, not manipulated by “development executives.”

  From the studio you could see the massive French windows, which led to the indoor pool area with its museumlike high ceilings. On clear days the reflection of clouds would float on the water’s surface from the outdoor pool, which was beyond the walls. From the outdoor pool you could see the pond, and from there, on a clear night, you could catch the twinkling lights of Manhattan way in the distance. We hung out in the marble room with the pool, playing cards, drinking, cracking jokes—almost like actual girlfriends.

  And then there was Da Brat. Her energy was irresistible; I adored her, instantly. I was very reserved around new people back then. I had become shy, and it took me a long time to trust (it still does), but Brat broke right through the wall of my fearful past, on day one. We had kindred, childlike spirits, only Brat fearlessly flaunted her little-girl soul, while I was desperately hiding mine. A lot of effort, strategy, and money went into creating my classic-storybook-princess façade, but Brat, with all her irreverent adolescent spirit, armed in a big puffy coat and little braids and barrettes, burst right through my bubble. By this point, my life was so controlled by Tommy and his cronies, I could barely see it anymore. But Brat, with her spontaneity, brashness, and cool-assness, spotted my inner little girl right away and shook her awake.