1995: Mariah Carey, Daydream

By Angela Veronica Wong

Daydream reminds me the click and whir of my five-disc stereo changing CDs. I was excited to have a stereo with a remote control, a stereo my parents bought me so I could listen to Martha Argerich playing Mozart sonatas to prepare for piano competitions. And I did, along with filling the CD changer with rap and R&B and making mix tapes by recording songs off the radio, perfecting the technique to hit ‘stop’ just before the DJ cut in with radio call letters. I was on the cusp of adolescence, that in-between time most susceptible to the spun-sugar sweetness of “Fantasy” and yearning ballads like “When I Saw You” and “Melt Away,” where Mariah softly sings “you and me, in a cloud of reverie” and rhymes “rhapsodize” with “if you were mine.” I don’t remember credit being given to Mariah in the 1990s for being a hit-making songwriter in the same way that we would rightly celebrate Bey or Taylor for a decade or so later, but I always loved how Mariah rhythmically bedazzles her lyrics with multisyllabic words like “euphoric” and “incessantly” (in Rainbow’s “Heartbreaker”). 

Even now, Daydream sounds like summer to me, so much so that I was surprised to see it was released in early October. “Underneath the Stars” places me on a picnic blanket at dusk. Or maybe, in my mind, the album is inextricable from its music videos: in “Fantasy,” Mariah rollerblades and giggles through an amusement park in a black zip-up hoodie and cut-off shorts. Or “Always Be My Baby,” with its deliciously nostalgic video capturing young love at summer camp, an “American” experience I never had but had enviously watched in white movies and TV shows (Lindsey Lohan’s The Parent Trap, and Nickelodeon’s Salute Your Shorts, anyone?) and read about in books (Lurlene McDaniel). Like “Always Be My Baby,” the slower-paced, soaring ballad “Forever” recalls a 1950s and 1960s doo-wop sound. When I hear its memorable three-chord opening, I visualize the black-and-white music video for “Forever,” a compilation of her shows at the Tokyo Dome during her Daydream World Tour.

Critics often cite Mariah Carey’s fifth studio album as a turning point in her career. Before Daydream, Mariah was a pop singer with gospel and R&B influences and a label-approved image. With Daydream, she became an artist pioneering a new era of collaboration between female pop stars and hip-hop producers and rappers. Because of how carefully Mariah’s label controlled her racial presentation on her earlier albums, Daydream is a significant turning point in how she was (and continues to be) racialized in the U.S. But Daydream also provides a glimpse of the changing global relations in the 1990s, in part driven by the economic aspirations of globalized capital and U.S. culture as an international export. Mariah Carey is extraordinarily popular in Asia, and the “Forever” video is one of the few 90s U.S. music videos when I remember seeing East Asians being East Asians, not being dragon ladies or kung fu bros, though their inclusion is background and brief and all about Mariah. Still, as a young Asian American, it was exciting to see the words “Tokyo” in the videos’ opening shots, not to mention the floor-length leather duster she wore on stage, which would not be out of place on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

The 1990s presented globalism as a dominant liberal ideology, something that would be good for the whole world. Mariah’s love for Hello Kitty accompanied the shifting direction of popular cultural exchange. There used to be a U.S. without Hello Kitty and K-pop, a U.S. that held such cultural dominance that culture was mostly exported out, and any cultural import, like Nintendo, was crafted to cater to American tastes. For most of the 90s, Sanrio was difficult to find on this continent, and so my introduction to Hello Kitty came from my family outside of the U.S. As a child, I loved Hello Kitty fiercely, but it was a marker of cultural difference, so I learned to hide it. As children of immigrants do, I spent summers in the country my parents grew up in, Taiwan, where I replenished my Hello Kitty stash. Even there, the Sanrio items were expensive imports from Japan, and I was allowed one special Hello Kitty item to bring back to the U.S. I spent hours deliberating in the upscale department stores, luxuriating in their air conditioning while hiding from humidity of a Kaohsiung summer. 

Mariah, whose one-word album titles reflect her well-documented love of girliness (Daydream, Butterfly, Rainbow, and 2002’s Charmbracelet perhaps being the culmination), was an early champion of Hello Kitty—years before Avril Lavigne and Katy Perry. But where Mariah’s embrace of Hello Kitty was viewed as a diva quirk—and Avril’s embrace ironic and Katy’s embrace deliberately kitschy—I was teased for having a Hello Kitty pencil case. It was bittersweet to watch Hello Kitty ascend in the U.S. marketplace, like seeing a favorite local band playing arena world tours. And as I grew older, I would become frustrated by the white fetishization of Japanese culture and a stubborn inability for people in the US to acknowledge “Eastern” colonialism. But in the 90s, Mariah Carey’s exuberant and public embrace of Hello Kitty drew me closer to her. 

Daydream gave us Mariah’s industry-shifting “Fantasy” with ODB, but its most successful track on the charts was “One Sweet Day,” the collaboration with Boyz II Men. The 1990s brought a number of chart-topping pop songs on mourning across genres, including Eric Clapton, “Tears in Heaven” (1993), Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, “Tha Crossroads” (1995), and Puff Daddy featuring Faith Evans & 112, “I’ll Be Missing You” (1997). There was also Michael Jackson’s “Gone Too Soon” (1993), sung at Princess Diana’s funeral. Diana’s 1997 death catalyzed a week of public mourning. The mourning was global in scale, but the grief of the British public engulfed Buckingham Palace, forcing a royal reckoning and driving television programs to run constant b-roll of people weeping and endless layers of flower bouquets, plastic wrap shimmering in the muted sunlight of London skies. 

A few years after Diana’s death, 9/11 would spur widespread public mourning in the U.S., though a mourning giving way to fear and aggressive patriotism. Though the two events differed greatly, both Diana’s death and 9/11 demonstrated how moments of public mourning render private grief into a declaration of unity. Too often, the unity is marked by being against with limited self-reflection—against the cold, unfeeling royal family, against the voracious, never-satisfied paparazzi, against Muslims, against immigrants—and always as an assertion of national belonging. 

At Princess Diana’s memorial service, Mariah and Boyz II Men performed “One Sweet Day,” in which a speaker addresses a lost loved one and laments taking their time together for granted. They co-wrote the song after experiencing personal loss and in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. Despite its theme of loss, the music and lyrics are ultimately uplifting and celebratory.  When released, “One Sweet Day” topped the Billboard charts for a record-breaking sixteen consecutive, holding onto this record for over a decade. It’s hard to see an equivalent song of mourning capturing so much of our attention now, even as we live in the present of global tragedy. In the U.S., there has been an eerie vacuum of public acknowledgment of tragedy, let alone public mourning.

In public mourning’s absence, we found ourselves enthralled with another affect—collective nostalgia. In late July, The New York Times ran an article about nostalgia in the time of Covid. During the lockdown, for a certain professional class, nostalgia kept us from succumbing to fear, uncertainty, and anxiety. Nostalgia for the 90s has been a fashion trend for years, with high-waisted acid-wash jeans, oversized T-shirts, slip dresses, fanny packs, and neon popping up on Instagram feeds and runways. For years, the internet, thanks to the infinite scroll of entertainment streaming services and the ease of recycled content, drove a sense of temporal unboundedness like we live in an anti-gravity time machine—there is no direction of past or future, but the present is a cement mixer of everything. 

The Times article quoted clinical psychologist Dr. Valentina Stoycheva: “Trauma takes away our gray areas. It divides our timeline into a before and an after.” Our Covid timelines and experiences are splintered. There is, in common parlance, a Before Times and After Times, but the dividing line is fuzzy. Many identify the NBA suspending their season or Tom Hanks contracting Covid as when they first realized a global pandemic on the horizon. But if you, like me, have family in Asia, your awareness of Covid’s potential devastation might have preceded many other Americans, not only because of Covid’s earlier presence in Asia, but also because your families lived through SARS in the early 2000s. If you were in Washington state or California in early 2020, your Before Times might have been earlier than most in the U.S. For some, awash in conspiracy theories and lack of national leadership, the state of denial refuses any delineation. In everyone’s current times, as states continue on different paths depending on ideology, everyone juggles multiple timelines of health concerns versus economic concerns versus how our friends and family feel versus our own mental and emotional health. These multiple timelines, perhaps, might even lead to nostalgia for one aspect of the spring lockdown: despite the horror waking up to the daily numbers of Covid hospitalizations and deaths and stories of PPE shortages at hospitals, the pervasive unnatural quiet held the comfort of togetherness and possibility. It was possible then what is impossible now—to imagine that we would act to protect each other and control Covid’s spread. 

It has been a year of loss, a relentless cascade of events that deserve a public acknowledgment and mourning yet to fully materialize. U.S. Covid deaths will likely surpass 500,000. Those who participated in public mourning of those lost in the centuries of violence enacted on Black people, as well as indigenous and POC people, at the hands of the state faced a fractured but forceful backlash urged on by many holding political power. If nothing else, this year has demonstrated how our individual and institutional responses to national tragedies trace the boundaries of national belonging by demonstrating what, and who, the nation values. 

The same week that we lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I first noticed reviews of Mariah Carey’s memoir trickling in. Her memoir recalls a childhood of violence at home and of racism and describes her abusive marriage with a controlling Tommy Mottola. I knew none of these things when I listened to Daydream in 1990s. I knew only of Mariah’s amazing voice, a voice I wish I had, and of the pop star that seemed such a perfect image of American-ness, something I knew I would never would be. 

I still have a Hello Kitty Caboodle that I bought in middle school, a red plastic make-up case decorated with a chipper-looking house and yellow flowers and featuring a mouthless cat who is, apparently, actually a girl living in London. My Caboodle has housed my embroidery thread for friendship bracelets and organized my office supplies. It is one of many Hello Kitty items from childhood that I cannot bear to consciously uncouple myself from, items that have traveled with me to college and stayed with me as I grow into adulthood. Most of these items are buried in cabinets or closets, no longer seeing me realize their use value. Sometimes, I find them when I’m looking for Christmas ornaments or a sweater I forgot about. Each re-encounter with these objects, like when I listen to favorite albums from my past, provokes nostalgia and maybe even a moment of mourning for who I used to be.

Angela Veronica Wong is a writer, artist, and educator living in New York City. She is the author of two full-length books of poetry including ELSA: AN UNAUTHORIZED AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Black Radish). She has published several chapbooks, most recently ANIMAL SUICIDES (Sixth Finch). Her performance work has been featured in independent galleries in Buffalo, Toronto, and New York City. She is on the internet at http://www.angelaveronicawong.com and on Twitter at @avwusesherwords.