“There were no role models for people who were clearly mixed or, you know, light-skinned or whatever we were categorizing it as then, so I didn’t know who to look up to when I was growing up. She also felt “othered” as a biracial girl growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood on Long Island. “It was an extremely dysfunctional childhood, to the point where it’s shocking that I made it out of that at all,” Carey told me. In her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, she recounted harrowing scenes of violence and drug abuse among her siblings.
#MARIAH CAREY RITA REPULSA SERIES#
This is true even, or perhaps especially, when a lack of sound check, a faulty sound system, or any other affront to her fabulosity triggers a series of regal on-stage eye rolls and knowing winks to the crowd that seem to say, “Darlings, can you believe this is happening to… me?”Ĭarey was born in Huntington, New York, to a Black father, an aeronautical engineer, and a white mother, a singer who performed with the New York City Opera. And there is something sublime that happens whenever the Songbird Supreme graces us with a live performance. Yes, darling, we love that every winter, the most wonderful time of the year commences only when Mariah decides to pull her red body-hugging Santa onesie out of her vast designer-filled closet. A twinkling constellation of Dolly Parton campiness and Aretha Franklin musicality, her Mariah-isms are forever etched into the public imagination. Eighteen of those chart-toppers were written or cowritten by Carey herself, including “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which has charted every holiday season since it was released 28 years ago, in 1994.īut her endurance goes far beyond her towering stack of career receipts. She has had 19 songs top the Billboard Hot 100-more than any other solo artist in history, and second only to the Beatles.
Her career has only ascended higher than the heavens above ever since. When her debut single, “Vision of Love,” was released in 1990, Carey tore through the charts like a rocket leaving Earth’s atmosphere. 1 single in each of the past four decades, and, with 145 million albums sold, she ranks as one of the most commercially successful musicians of all time. It includes songwriting (Carey was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2022) Olympic-level vocal gymnastics (she famously has a five-octave range) and game-changing artistic risks (her catalog of R&B, hip-hop, and dance-music remixes is still the gold standard to which all musical acts aspire). There are pop stars, and then there is Mariah Carey.
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