Mariah Carey-core [+Spotify Wrapped]
Glitter, 9/11, and why Mariah should chill with the Christmas music
In honor of Spotify Wrapped week, I’m reposting my deeply irony-pilled analysis of the trend published in AmCon last year.
In other news, it should be no secret that the curator of this platform is a major Lamb. Mariah Carey’s name is dropped in our founding Manifesto. And I wrote about how I relate to her magnum opus Butterfly as a fellow child of divorce. Thus I feel that it was totally within my rights to write a hit piece on how Mariah is overdoing the Christmas schpiel and needs to cool it already:
Mariah Carey is among the hardest-working people in the music industry, and surely she deserves her flowers. But I think it’s time that someone says, respectfully, that the oversaturation of Christmas content has gotten out of hand, and that perhaps, it’s time for her to hang it up.
Before you come for me, let me defend myself: I’m a devout “Lamb,” and I only say this out of love for our Queen. My fear is that as she keeps harping on the yuletide spiel and riding the wave of her holiday music success in order to maintain her relevance, she runs the risk of occluding the greatness of her body of work—especially the earlier material—which is what makes her one of the greatest musical artists of our time.
read the whole thing in Daily Beast here.
Though Mariah is perhaps one of the greatest musical talents of our time, her career has had its fair share of ups and downs. The lowest of her lows happened on September 11th, 2001. No, it is not due to the 9/11 attacks. It has to do with the release of her album and biopic Glitter…whose total flops she blames on the attacks. Yet despite this false correlation, I do indeed think her embarrassingly horrifying film has much in common with the horrifying attacks that took place on that same day as its release.
In an essay for Countere, I explored the relationships between camp, artifice, capitalism, and American mythologizing, using Glitter and the 9/11 attacks as interpretive lenses. Here’s a preview:
Among the many images I’ve indulged in gazing upon is a GIF that pans up from an ad for Mariah Carey’s film Glitter above a subway entrance, toward the burning North Tower. Carey has been publicly ridiculed for attributing the flopping of her autobiographical film and its soundtrack, released on 9/11, to the terrorist attacks. The reality is that the atrocious spectacles of the film and the collapsing buildings share much in common on a deeper symbolic level.
The music video for the lead single off the soundtrack, “Loverboy (Remix),” is a highly decadent, lowbrow camp explosion sprinkled with artificial low-calorie sweetener. We find a greased-up Carey futzing around as a ditzy race car cheerleader as the weight of her overly coiffed hair, heavy makeup, tautly hoisted breasts, and skyscraper-high stilettos cause her to stumble toward her decline from stardom.
Carey’s career, especially during the Glitter era, is emblematic of a particularly American brand of decadence. She’s a performance artist, an insufferable diva who shrouds her natural artistic ability in layers of artifice: mainly foundation, eyeliner, and silicone. Glitter is campy performance art in the way 9/11 is: “It’s so bad that it’s good.” Surely this isn’t to say that anything about either spectacle is morally good. They’re only “good” in the way that a train wreck is: you know you ought not to indulge yourself in watching the wretched spectacle, yet you just can’t seem to look away.
Mariah’s series of public breakdowns under the sinister forces at work in the cutthroat music industry echo the breakdown of the towers, which many deemed to be symbolic of American imperialism and capitalism. Deception stacked upon deception can’t help but topple over at a certain point.
In the words of Mariah, “proceed with caution.” If you’re sensitive to stuff having to do with 9/11 (esp. if you lost a love one in the attacks), you might want to ready this piece with a grain of salt. It’s written with a playful sense of irony…though of course I as the author recognize there is nothing remotely funny about mass murder and losing loved ones to violence. But if you can take a step back and look at the phenomenon from a distance, you may be able to better appreciate my analysis here. Read the full thing in Countere.
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photo taken in midtown Manhattan.
How you attain being crudely holy in your accusation & admittance of sin is like life, a paradox. Now, do you think Mariah will sing in my Easter album?