TAZ'S MARIAH CAREY!

NEW YORK - "MARIAH!" Yells the directory of photography. "Chin down and eyes open!" It's the twenty-fifth take for a three-and-a-half-minute video, but Mariah Carey still can't quite conquer the urge to just throw back her head and belt out the song, "Vision of Love." With the kind of voice Carey's got, that's not hard to understand. "Mariah," says Tommy Mottola, president of CBS Records, "is one of the greatest singers ever." A little more than a year ago, Carey was graduating from high school in Huntington, Long Island; now people from the record company follow her to the bathroom, carrying Carey's Reeboks in case she may want to slip out of her heels. Next month, CBS will release her first album, MARIAH CAREY, which shows off the twenty-year-old's soaring seven-octave range. When she's ripping through a dance tune, Carey's soprano can sound like a sap-free version of Whitney Houston's; gliding through a ballad, Carey mixes the soul of Chaka Khan with the gospel of the Clark Sisters. In 1988, Carey had done some backup vocals for Brenda K. Starr, a CBS pop artist, and one Friday night in December, she and Starr went to a party crowded with record executives. Starr insisted on giving Mottola a demo tape of Carey's songs; Carey could manage only a shy hello. Mottola didn't think much about the encounter--until he got into his limousine and popped in the tape. After a few blocks, Mottola had the driver turn around and go back to the party. Carey's career may have actually started at birth. "I think my mother chose 'Mariah' because it would be a good stage name," she says with a laugh. Patricia Carey also contributed some musical genes: She'd come to New York from Illinois at seventeen to try to make it as a singer, everntually spending two years performing with City Opera. Now, on a Saturday afternoon in May, on a soundstage in Long Island City, Carey stands on a 40-square-foot platform looking both young-girl gangly and young-chanteuse sexy in a tight black off-the-shoulder Norma Kamali dress. The director, a veteran of George Michael's butt-shaking "Faith" video, studies a monitor. Carey's caramel-colored face, half covered by her curly brown hair, breaks into a smile that leaps off the screen. She looks like she could break some hearts, but that will have to wait: "Vision of Love" is coming up on the sound system again. Earlier, Carey explained that she'd written the song about realizing her dreams as a singer, not about any kind of romance. "Right now, music is my boyfriend" was how she put it. Too bad.

BUILING THE PERFECT DIVA

Mariah Carey has a hit LP and a Top Ten single, but whose 'Vision' is it? In a rehearsal, studio in midtown New York, Mariah Carey is singing "Vision of Love" -- over and over. her left hand moving at her side, she experiments with the harmonies, improvising a new arrangement with a pianist and two backup singers. In contrast to the lush production that dominates Carey's debut album, the trio provides a spare accompaniment, leaving plenty of room for her mighty voice to explore the shape of the melody. Why, she' asked during a break, didn't she record the song this way? "It wasn't my choice to do so much production," she answers quickly and goes back to work. If Carey had less control over her debut than she wanted, it's because of Columbia Records' immense expectation for her career. The label followed the June release of her album with a promotional blitz equal to the push given Bruce Springsteen in 1975. "We don't look at her as a dance-pop artist" says label president Don Ienner. "We look at her as a franchise." Only a month after the album's release, the expectations appear to be justified, MARIAH CAREY is the fastest-breaking LP this year, climbing in just four weeks to Number Fifteen on BILLBOARD'S pop-albums chart, while "Vision of Love" has moved to Number Five on the singles chart. Before the rehearsal, Carey talked over dinner at a chic Italian restaurant, watched by a chaperon from Columbia. The twenty-year-old singer was raised by her mother, a voice teacher and former New York City Opera singer who named her third child after a song from the Lerner and Loewe musical PAINT YOUR WAGON. Inspired by her older siblings' love classic soul and gospel, Carey headed for Manhattan the next day after graduating from high school to pusue a singing career. She wrote songs during the day and waited tables at night at a series of restaurants, getting fired frequently "for having attitude." It was perhas an abundance of attitude that enabled her, at a music-business party in 1988, to hand her demo tape to Tommy Mottola, who six months earlier had become president of the CBS Records Group, Columbia's parent company. "I said to myself, 'Great, another demo tape,'" say Mottola. but after he played it in his limo later that night, he was impressed enough to return to the party in search of Carey. In 1989, Mottola lured Ienner away from Arista Records, where he had helped build Whitney Houston's career. Mottola wanted him to take charge of restocking Columbia's roster with younger acts, and for Ienner, Carey was an "inspiration" to change labels. "For this particular time," he says, "she is my No.1 priority." Thanks to New Kids on the Block, Columbia was the Number One label of 1989, according to BILLBOARD'S year-end chart. And the label boasts a line-up of prestigious artists, such as Springsteen, Dylan, the Rolling Stones, George Michael, Billy Joel and Barbra Streisand, but they record infrequently. At a time when women have been dominating the charts, Columbia lacked a young female superstar. In selecting producers for Carey's debut, Ienner took no chances, tapping Narada Michael Walden and Ric Wake, who'd given him hits with Whitney Houston and Taylor Dayne, respectively. In early June, Columbia secured promotional appearances on THE ARSENIO HALL SHOW and arranged to have Carey sing "America the Beautiful" before the first game of the National Basketball Association finals, unusual opportunities for a singer whose debut album hadn't even been released. As further evidence of Columbia's corporate dedication, the first "Vision of Love" video was scrapped, and a new clip was commissiioned. An informed source places the combined cost of both videos at $450,000. Ienner dismisses this figure as "total bullshit" but says, "If we're gonna take the time and effort that we did with Mariah, on every level, then we're going to image her the right way. If it costs a few extra dollars to make a splash in terms of the right imaging, you go ahead and do it." And how did Carey, describes herself as strong-willed, feel about having her music so carefully monitored by Columbia? Initially, she says, she asked to produce the record with Ben Margulies, her longtime writing partner. "I wasn't open to working with a superstar producer," she says. She was also wary when asked to collaborate on additional songs with her producers and worried that Narada Michael Walden might make her music "too schmaltzy," an apparent reference to his work with Whitney Houston. "I'm sure she wants to do a lot more on her next album, make it more stark," Mottola says. "She deserves it," says Ienner. "She has a great feeling of what's right and what's wrong." Asked to evaluate what's right or wrong with her first, Carey answers diplomatically. "I wasn't used to working that way," she says. " I think it worked out okay in the end." But as she returns to her rehearsal, far from her label's supervision, Carey continues to rearrange her hit single the way she hears it.

VISION OF LOVE

Number One / August 4, 1990 / Four Weeks Mariah Carey was born March 27, 1970, in New York City. Her mother Patricia named her after the song "They Call the Wind Mariah" from the Lerner and Loewe musical Paint Your Wagon. It's unlikely her mother was aware that on the day Mariah was born, the number one song in Britain was "Wand'rin' by Lee Marvin - from Paint Your Wagon. Mariah began singing early, when she was for years old. By six, she was writing poetry. Patricia was a vocal coach, a jazz vocalist and a singer with the New York City Opera, and Mariah's older brother and sister allowed their youngest sibling to listen to their Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Aretha Franklin 45's. When Mariah was 16, her brother paid for her to make a 24-track demo tape at a Manhattan studio. "We needed someone to play the keyboards for a song I had written with a guy named Gavin Christopher," Mariah remembers. "We called someone and he couldn't come, so by accident we stumbled upon Ben (Margulies). Ben came to the session, and he can't really play keyboards very well - he's really more of a drummer - but after that day, we kept in touch, and we just sort of clicked as writers." Margulies had a studio set up at Bedworks, his father's cabinetry factory in Chelsea. Mariah was still a high school student when she got together with Den and wrote their first song, "Here We Go Round Again." "It was this real Motown thing." Ben remembers. "She write all the verses out. We were very excited because she sounded incredible. That was the beginning of the collaborating." Mariah and Ben worked together for a couple of years on material, as she graduated high school and supported herself with jobs like waiting tables and checking coats. "The music kept us going," Margulies explains. "I didn't have much equipment, but we had a way of making demos sound incredible." A friend of Mariah's who played drums for Brenda K. Starr mentioned that a back-up singer had quit, and suggested Mariah audition for the job. "I really didn't want to do it, but I said it's gotta be better than what I'm doing now", Mariah recalls. "So I went to the audition, and Brenda was such a great person." She was not only hired, she become close friends with Brenda. Back in New York during a break in her tour, Brenda invited Mariah to attend a party thrown by CBS Records. Brenda handed Mariah's demo tape to CBS Records Group president Tommy Mottola, who listened to it in his limo on the way home. After hearing the first two songs, he went back to the party to find the singer. She had already lift, and there was no phone number on the tape. Tommy spent the weekend trying to track down Mariah, but Brenda's managers didn't know who she was and he had to wait until Monday. "I got this message that he hand called and they wanted me to come to CBS Records, and I was so excited," says Mariah. Rhett Lawrence, who had produced CBS artists like Johnny Kemp and Earth, Wind & Fire, was asked to fly to New York and listen to the demo tape. "They described her as a girl who was 18 and had the most incredible voice you've ever heard, "Lawrence reports. I literally got goose bumps on my arms when I heard her sing. I could not believe the power and maturity in her voice." Carey went to Los Angeles to work with Lawerence. He heard a rough version of "Vision of Love." a song Mariah and Ben wrote right after she signed with Columbia. Described by Mariah as not so much a love song but a celebration of her life at that time, the demo sounded very different from what would be the finished product; according to Lawrence, "it was a different tempo at the time ... a "50s sort of shuffle." Working with Ben and Mariah in the studio, Lawrence changed the tempo and used Mariah's vocals from the demo as a second vocal in the tag of the song. Released as Mariah's debut single, "Vision of Love" debuted on the Hot 100 the week of June 2, 1990, and was number one nine weeks later.



MARIAH CAREY MEET A YOUNG LADY WHO SINGS MORE THAN JUST THE BLUES The soulful sounds of Stevie Wonder echo softly from a boombox, empty takeout cartons lay scattered across the only couch in the room, and a couple of guys hang back in the corner talking quietly. Still, the cavernous rehearsal studio is charged with anticipation. And a few minutes later we find out why, when Mariah Carey walks in. Despite being the hottest pop sensation since Whitney Houston, Carey, clad in a pair of worn jeans and simple white shirt, is unassuming, almost bashful, as she reaches for the microphone. "Mind if I just sort of play around a little?" she asks huskily. Soon the room is filled with a heart-wrenching rhythm-and-blues ballad as this lissome diva carries the listener away on a riveting seven-octave roller coaster of sound. From the moment she can "remember remembering," Carey says, she's always wanted to play around with sound. Which isn't surprising since the main influence of her youth was her mother, a New York City Opera singer. "I knew from watching and listening to my mom," explains the twenty-year-old, "that singing could and would be my profession. And besides, she had to tear me away from the radio each night just to get me to go to sleep." At seventeen, prompted by an unquenchable desire to sing, Carey left her home on Long Island and moved in with another struggling singer in New York City. It's here that the story takes on a Cinderella-esque twist. In between waitressing-- for just enough money to eat and pay rent-- Carey spent her time schlepping her demo tapes around town to music execs who rarely, if ever, agreed to see her. Then one night... fate stepped in. "I'd left my demo tape at this party," says Carey, "and Tommy Mottola, the president of CBS Records, picked it up. There was no phone number or anything on the tape, so the next day they tracked me down." Then her single, VISION OF LOVE, broke music-industry records by topping ALL the charts. Sounds as if the slipper fit, doesn't it?



CAREERWISE OR COUCHWISE, THINGS ARE LOOKING UP FOR POP'S MARIAH CAREY Mariah Carey is gazing out the window of her 21st-floor Manhattan apartment -- and complaining about the view, of all things. The height, she says sometimes makes me dizzy. That may well be, but these days there's pobably a better explanation for her spinning head. Three years ago Carey was sleeping on the floor of a shared apartment. Now, thanks to a debut album released last June, she's pop's top-ranking rookie diva, with three hits, including "Vision of Love" and the current "Someday," to her credit. To complete her upstart resume, she has five freshly minted Grammy nominations. Sudden success can be unsettling, but as Carey, 21, points out, it sure beats the alternative. "I would be frightened if this WASN'T happening," she says. "Some people don't find out what they want to be until they're 35. I knew when I was 4." By then Carey was already taking vocal lessons from mother Patricia, a onetime singer with the New York City Opera. Mom, of Irish ancestry, and Carey's dad, an engineer whose bloodlines are African-American and Venezuelan, had divorced a year earlier, and for the next 15 years Carey moved often as her mother sought work as a vocal coach. At 18, armed with a five-octave vocal range of her own, Carey set out to pursue a music career. For 10 months she waitressed and haunted New York City recording studios before winning an audition as a backup vocalist for R&B's Brenda K. Starr. "Most singers," says Carey, "would have said, 'Stay in the background and don't sing too loud.'" Instead Starr helped Carey land a record contract. Since MARIAH CAREY hit, Carey has kept the celebration modest, buying a Mustang convertible and moving into a one-bedroom East Side apartment complete with Marilyn Monroe posters, two cats -- and that view. Beginning work on a sophomore album, she insists that the professional heights, at least, are quite comfortable. "It feels amazing," she says. "And I don't let it go to my head at all." 'NOT ANOTHER WHITE GIRL TRYING TO SING BLACK'



DAUGHTER OF BLACK FATHER AND WHITE MOTHER IS HOTTEST NEW ARTIST MARIAH CAREY has a score to settle. Last summer, soon after her debut recording started racing up the record charts, she says a music critic referred to her as "another White girl trying to sing Black." Carey, indisputably the hottest new artist of the year, was infu riated. And now, here at a luncheon at Lola's restarurant in Manhattan, she has the perfect opportunity to set the record straight and "tactfully" correct the erring critic. "I'm not a White girl trying to sing Black," the 20-year-old singer says in an interview soon after. "My father is Black and Venezuelan, my mother is Irish. That makes me a combination of all those things. I am a human being, a person. What I am not is a White girl trying to sing Black." Though barely out of her teens, Mariah Carey is indeed her own woman. She grew up in New York with her mother, Patricia Carey, a vocal coach and former singer with the New York City Opera. Her parents divorced when she was three, and Carey had an "on-and-off" relationship with her father, Alfred Roy Carey, an aeronautical engineer in Washington, D.C. (She has a brother, 29, and a sister, 30.) "Some people look at me and they see my light skin and my hair," she says running a slender, neatly manicured hand through her long, semi-curly, honey-colored tresses for emphasis. "I can't help the way I look, because it's me. I don't try to look a certain way or sing a certain way. I'm just trying to be me. And if people enjoy my music, then they shouldn't care what I am, so it shouldn't be an issue." Carey says she has always loved to sing, and she gives credit and thanks to her mother for the "genes." Her mother started giving her vocal lessons when she was four years old, and she spent considerable time around her mom's musically talented friends, soaking up the sounds of Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. As a kid, she also spent a lot of time listening to the radio and her sister's records. The soulful sounds of Gladys Knight, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and Al Green were constant companions. She sang along and studied the lyrics and arrangements. By the time she was in high school, Carey was writing her own songs, several of which appear on her recording. Gospel music was also a great influence. On occasion, she accompanied her paternal grandmother, who is Black, to a Baptist church. Even today, she says, "I get up and go to bed listening to gospel music." Her favorites include the Clark Sisters, Shirley Caesar and Edwin Hawkins, in addition to Aretha Franklin and Al Green. Because she and her mother moved often, she didn't have many close friends or get involved in high school music programs. Instead, she spent after-school hours writing songs and making demo tapes with longtime acquaintance Ben Margulies. In 1987, right after finishing high school at age 17, she moved from her mother's home on Long Island into a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan with two other strugging performers. During this exceptionally lean period, she slept on a mattress on the floor and worked as a waitress, hat checker and restaurant hostess to make ends meet. Before and after work, she diligently shopped her demo tapes from record company to record company, but was basically ignored. Eventually she began singing backup to Brenda K. Starr, and she was regularly doing studio session work. "We became good friends, and she helped me out a lot," she says of Starr. "She was always saying, 'Here's my friend Mariah, here's her tape; she sings, writes....'" It was Starr who took Carey to the CBS party where she was discovered. At the party, Carey gave CBS (now Sony Music Entertainment) president Tommy Mottola a demo. In return, he gave her a "Great -- another demo tape" smile, and Carey assumed it was another dead end. But on leaving the affair, Mottola popped the demo into his limo's tape deck. He liked what he heard so much that he immediately returned to the party to find Carey. But she had already left. Having no address or telephone number did not deter Mottola from tracking her down. Ironically, another record company had expressed mild interest in Carey, and a bit of a bidding war evolved. In December 1988, she signed with CBS' Columbia Records. Within a week she wrote "Vision of Love" for her debut album. In fact, she wrote lyrics for all 11 songs on her self-titled LP, and she even produced "Vanishing." Columbia went all-out to promote the lissome artist with the clear, passionate seven-octave voice, flexing a little clout to get her the coveted task of singing "America The Beautiful" at the 1989 NBA finals, where she was exposed to 16 million people. Both "Vision of Love" and "Love Takes Time" have gone gold, and the album has sold more than two million copies. Ironically, Carey wrote "Love Takes Time" for a second LP. But when Mottola heard of it, he insisted on stopping the presses and adding the song to her debut album, even though some recordings were already in record stores. Carey says she was just as startled as anyone that "Vision of Love" hit so big because "it isn't hip-hop music, it isn't house music, and it isn't rap. But I am so glad and thankful," she says. "That song really represents everything in my life. It is a song from the heart." Consider the lyrics:



Prayed through the nights Felt so alone Suffered from alienation Carried the weight on my own Had to be strong So I believed And now I know I've succeeded In finding the place I conceived
Just why would such a seemingly tender womanchild write these words of despair and sing them with such deep passion? "Well, just because you are young doesn't mean that you haven't had a hard life," she says with a knowing little smile. "It's been difficult for me, moving around so much, having to grow up by myself, basically on my own, my parents divorced. And I always felt kind of different from every one else in my neighborhoods. I was a different person -- ethnically. And sometimes that can be a problem. If you look a certain way everybody goes, 'White girl,' and I'd go, 'No, that's not what I am.'" Carey chose to express her innermost feelings in her songs rather than become depressed and bitter. "You really have to look inside yourself and find your own inner strength, and say, 'I'm proud of what I am and who I am, and I'm just going to be myself.'" And for Carey, that translates into being a "respected" singer and songwriter. But her phenomenal success has not inflated her head or her bank account, for she has yet to realize any monies from the album's success. The days when she and two struggling roommates stretched out a boxed macaroni dinner for a week are still too vivid, she says. "And, no, I don't let stuff like this go to my head, because success isn't a scale for talent," says the singer. "I don't want to be a 'big star,' but I want to be respected as an artist. I'm delighted and very thankful" [that people like her work]. "This is my love," she says emphatically. "I want to sing for the rest of my life." At the point, she sings every chance she gets. In the studio. During promotional stops. In the shower. Around her one-bedroom Upper East Side Manhattan apartment. To the boyfriend/singer she's known since high school. To her two Persian cats. "Singing makes me incredibly happy," she says. "Music makes IMMEASURABLY happy."

THE POP-GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARIAH CAREY Mariah Carey has the air of an ambitious teen-ager who was forced to grow up too fast. One-half diffident youth, one-half brusque sophisticate, she seems to be a woman who doesn't believe in wasting words. And her shyness is only partly concealed by the determined set of her jaw. One day last July, the 21-year-old singer, who had been up until 6 in the morning, was back in the studio by 2 in the afternoon, helping mix final vocals on her new album. She was clearly relishing her workhorse schedule. For, appearances to the contrary, Ms. Carey did not magically ascend from nowhere 15 months ago to the top of the pop charts. "Most people don't think I've paid any dues," she said during a break at Right Track Recording in midtown Manhattan. "But I condensed 10 years of work into 3. It was like fast-forwarding. I worked around the clock. I would waitress until midnight, then go to the studio and work till 7 in the morning on the album, then sleep, then do the whole thing again, day after day. No one helped me out, and I lived on very little money." That debut album, "Mariah Carey" -- one of the most intensively promoted in Columbia Records history -- has sold more than five million copies and won Ms. Carey a Grammy for best new artist of 1990. The follow-up, "Emotions" (Columbia 47980; all three formats), to be released Tuesday, arrives less than a year and a half later. Coming so soon on the heels of her megahit, the release cuts against conventional wisdom in the record business. Most pop stars wait two to three years between albums. "I discussed it with everyone," she said. "We decided I should put out a new album soon, because I was growing so much from the last album. "I wanted 'Emotions' to be more sparsely produced than the first one," she continued, "and for the most part it is. I also wanted to use the influences of all the music I loved, like Motown stuff and Stevie Wonder. I felt the uptempo songs were a little overproduced on the first record." Both records feature Ms. Carey's technically impressive and impassioned pop-gospel singing. Few vocalists in any musical genre have voices as flexible as Ms. Carey's nearly four-octave instrument. The new record should mute critical dismissals of Ms. Carey as a Whitney Houston vocal clone, even though their albums have been made by many of the same hands. In the last year, Ms. Carey has succeeded in stealing some of Ms. Houston's thunder. Sales of "Mariah Carey" have exceeded those of Ms. Houston's third and latest record, "I'm Your Baby Tonight," by some two million copies. Ms. Carey is uncomfortable discussing the comparisons. But Walter Afanasieff, who helped arrange Ms. Houston's three albums and co-produced several tracks on "Emotions" with Ms. Carey, is not. "Mariah is a songwriter and prducer as well as a singer," he said. "Whitney doesn't write songs and doesn't produce. She usually comes in and sings at the last stage of the recording process. Whitney has a beautiful voice, but Mariah has infinitely more control. Mariah will 40 ideas of what to sing on a particular lick and choose the best. I think 'Emotions' will show a total separation between the two." Although most songs on "Emotions" stick to the pop-gospel format of the first album, Ms. Carey's profile has been dramatically sharpened with leaner, springier arrangements. And her vocal trademark -- in which she leaps into a high coloratura register and swings like a virtuoso trapeze artist -- is showcased much more effectively on "Emotions." If Ms. Carey's sonic feats are comparable to those of Yma Sumac or Minnie Riperton, what distinguishes them is a rhythmic charge. At the opposite extreme, Ms. Carey's dark lower register is showcased powerfully for the first time in "If It's Over," a collaboration with Carole King that harks back to Ms. King's late-60s classic, "A Natural Woman." Here and there, Ms. Carey's singing takes on a raw, rockish edge that recalls the soul belter Teena Marie. And on the album's final cut, "The Wind," she moves promisingly into the realm of jazz-torch singing. The song was discovered by Mr. Afanasieff on Keith Jarrett's "Paris Concert" album. Ms. Carey added her own lyrics. The only sign of pop immaturity on "Emotions" can be found in Ms. Carey's lyrics, which describe the rapturous highs and desperate lows of romance in blunt, strung-together pop cliches, with minimal rhyming. "You've got me feeling emotions," go the opening lines of the album's title song. "Deeper than I've ever dreamed of/ You've got em feeling emotions/ Higher than the heavens above." Ms. Carey, who seems much too practical to be the tortured romantic her lyrics suggest, insisted that her writing does not mirror a tempostuous love life. "Sometimes the inspiration is more real life than romance, but I make it about love because it's easier to write about, and more people can relate to it." Ms. Carey's no-nonsense attitude reflects the pragmatism of someone who has always viewed herself as independent. Her parents were divorced when she was 3. Her father, an aeronautical engineer, is black and Venezuelan. Her mother, Patricia Carey, who is of Irish descent, is a vocal coach and opera singer who was a soloist with the New York City Opera in the late 60's and early 70's. Her brother and sister, who are 9 and 10 years her senior, left home by their late teens. Beginning at age 7, Ms. Carey said, her only baby sitter was a little radio. "My mom and I almost grew up together," she said. "We were like a team. She used to bring me with her everywhere, and I was like a young adult at 5 or 6. Because she sometimes worked during the day and at night, I often had to stay home alone. It was what gave me my independence." The family moved 13 times, though at least during her teens Ms. Carey was able to stay in one place, Huntington, L.I., long enough to make friends. While most of them went off to college, she moved to New York to pursue her career. Obsessed with pop music since she was a toddler, Ms. Carey began songwriting at 13. Through friends of her brother, she met Ben Margulies, her first impotant collaborator. Together they wrote six songs for her first album, including the No.1 hits "Vision of Love," "Someday" and "Love Takes Time." The two are now estranged because of a business dispute. "When we met she was 17 years old and I was 24," Mr. Margulies recalled the other day. "We worked together for a three-year period developing most of the songs on the first album. She had the ability just to hear things in the air and to start developing songs out of them. Often I would sit down and start playing something, and from the feel of a chord, she would start singing melody lines and coming up with a concept. "I'm looking forward to getting back to together in the not too distant future and working again like we used to. Hopefully, art will prevail over business." Through Manhattan's musical network, Ms. Carey landed a job as a backup singer for Brenda K. Starr, a dance-music performer who became her outspoken champion. It was Ms. Starr who, at a record-industry party, dragged Ms. Carey over to meet Tommy Mottola, the president of CBS Records (now Sony Music Entertainment), and gave him her tape. Mr. Mottola made Ms. Carey his protegee and served as executive producer of both records (published reports have linked them romantically, though neither will discuss their relationship publicly). The personalized star treatment undoubtedly jump-started her career, but it's likely her phenomenal gospel voice would have propelled her to the top of the charts anyway. Though Ms. Carey sounds as if she grew up singing in a Harlem church, she discovered gospel in a roundabout way. "When I was a little girl, my brother and sister were listening to records by Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight," she said. "When I got older, I found out that Al Green and Aretah Franklin had recorded gospel records, and I went out and bought them. From ther I discovered the Clark Sisters, Shirley Caesar, Mahalia Jackson, Vanessa Bell Armstrong and whoever. I love that style because it's so free and real and raw." She was never tempted to study opera, although she has the voice for it. "I respect incredibly all the years of vocal training you have to sing that way," she said, "but it's just not me." Still, without her mother's example, she probably wouldn't have become a professional singer. "Because my mom did it for a living when I was young, I knew it could be more than a pipe dream," she said. "My mom always told me, 'You are special. You have a talent.' She gave me the belief that I could do this." If Ms. Carey is a major pop celebrity, she is the temperamental opposite of a star like Madonna, who demands attention, revels in controversy and loves performing. Although she has yet to embark on a tour. Sooner or later, she realizes, she will have to make the leap. "I'm not a Broadway type of person," she said. "I'm something of an introvert, who is happiest when I'm creating in my own little world in the studio. I'm not into performing. I have to make myself do it because it comes with the territory. If I toured, I wouldn't have had another a l b um out for at least another year. It's so hard on my voice. I need a lot of sleep, and my songs are all strenuous. Because I'm not a dancer-slash-singer, when I go out there people don't want to hear me just breeze through them. They want to hear every note. I'm definitely not going to do a full-out tour for this album either. "I don't want to be about hype and media," she continued. "I don't want to put myself in everyone's face and make them sick of me at this early stage of my career. I make pop music. That's what I do, and it makes me happy. I want to be around for a while."

(bron: New York Times, 15 september 1991)

STILL IN LOVE WITH LOVE Her debut album, "Mariah Carey," held at No.1 for five months last year and has been in the top 20 ever since. She won two Grammy Awards, had what seemed like an endless series of hit singles (from "Vision of Love" to "I Don't Wanna Cry"), and sold five million albums in the United States alone. When voice reached that inhumanly high note, dogs came running from miles around and goose bumps appeared on even calloused skin. She was clearly not just another romantic pop singer, but who'd have thought Mariah Carey had still more vocal range? On her second LP, "Emotions" (Columbia), the 21-year-old Carey displays additions to her vocals simply by letting herself go -- from the sexy "mmm's" that open the 10-track record to the belting abandon at the end of "Make It Happen," a latter-day "Amazing Grace." Both her albums are stylized pop-gospel, and both are riddled with hits. But, whereas her debut was slick and heavily produced, "Emotions" uses simpler arrangements so that the voice is showcased as the most important instrument. Midway through the first single, "Emotions" -- one of four songs she co-produced with C+C Music Factory's David Cole and Robert Clivilles, and No.11 with a bullet on Billboard's Hot 100 Singles chart last week -- Carey doesn't just rach her signature high note; she works it. and on the final cut, "The Wind," a jazz instrumental from the 1950s for which Carey has written monving lyrics, she infuses a torchy and breathy croon witht the sort of genuine passion that was completely missing from the first album. Lyrically, Carey is still hopelessly romantic -- at times cliched, at times too sentimental -- but then so are the 3,000 people (predominantly young girls) who rushed to her promotional appearance at the Sam Goody in Rockerfeller Plaza last Tuesday. Carey, genuinely if incredibly innocent, is cunning enough to know the idealized, old-fashioned romance -- the same sort used in such Hollywood blockbusters as "Pretty Woman" and such Madison Avenue ad campaigns as Barney's current ode to Katherine Hepburn -- sells. The surprise is "If It's Over," a collaboration with Carole King that saunters slow and strong, on which Carey confronts disenchanted lover. "Baby, I don't really need to wait around/ If the feeling's gone," Carey sings in a low, insistent voice that's just discovering its freedom.

(bron: Newsday, 1991)

SINGER/SONGWRITER "I'm a definite night person," she says, "I hate getting up before 2 in the afternoon." Carey's phenomenal rookie recording --multiplatinum, four No.1 singles, two Grammys-- sure makes a case for staying up late. "I just sit in bed and write," she relates. "There's something about the night. It inspires even when you don't want it to. Like, sometimes when I'm trying to sleep and these words come into my head, and I go, 'Oh, no.' I have to get up and write." She goes "Oh, no" in a different way when critics compare her with Whitney Houston ("I've written all my songs, Whitney is not a writer"). Worse was one critic noting that she "is being marketed as the white Whitney Houston." While Carey's mother is of Irish descent, her father has African-American and Venezuelan ancestry. Carey considers herself a "multicultural, interracial person who'll only make a point of it if I choose to, when people are misrepresenting or misinterpreting me." (Bron: People, 1991)


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