1999: Mariah Carey, Rainbow
By Kortney Morrow
I was seven years old when the Rainbow tour began. In a promo video for the show, Mariah Carey and Da Brat ride around Las Vegas in the back of a stretch limo. Da Brat’s stud style is sprawling in an oversized tee and baggy jeans, with a pager at her waist. Mariah Carey glows in her signature diva shades and tight white tank, yelling out the window to her fans. They’re supposed to be counting down their favorite spring break performances on TRL, but something else is pressing.
“Man, what we gon get to eat?”
Cut to Da Brat sinking her whole mouth into an In-and-Out cheeseburger, swag dripping down the sides. MC turns over her shoulder, staring into the camera, giving us a wave. This video makes me fall in love with each of them for their own idiosyncrasies, and I can’t help but to admire their friendship.
In The Remarkable Rise of So So Def, MC, Da Brat, and Jermaine Dupri tell the story of the first time they met. In 1995, MC invited them to her studio at ‘Sing Sing’—her chosen nickname for the estate where she was living with her husband and the head of her label, Tommy Mottola. Everything about Mariah’s life was heavily surveilled, but Da Brat and Jermaine Dupri didn’t know the extent of it at that studio session. Wine was pouring freely, the laughter was steady, and soon, a track was laid. The mission became a meal. MC rode shotgun in her pink caddy as Da Brat drove to Burger King to get some french fries. Da Brat recounts “It was like she was having the time of her life. I turned the music up, and we was laughing, hair blowing in the wind, just having a good old time.”
But then she got a message.
“Yo. It’s JD. Get yo ass back here right now. They are going crazy.”
Mottola’s security team had already pulled guns on him, questioning Mariah’s whereabouts. When they got back to the house, it was Da Brat who had MC’s back, coming to her defense. This whole event sparked the start of their now decades-long friendship. Mariah Carey would go on to divorce Mottola in 1998, and then release her seventh studio album, Rainbow, in 1999. She was only 29 years old upon its release.
***
Of course, I didn’t know any of that in the first grade, all I knew was that the “Heartbreaker” video was premiering.
As soon as Mariah pulled up to the movie theater to spy on her cheating boyfriend, my eyes glued to the gap between the low-rise denim at her waist and her barely-there knit top. I didn’t know if I wanted to be with her or be her, all I knew was that I was buzzing watching MC bounce around.
And all that energy had to go somewhere.
Typically a super shy kid with anxiety brewing under my chewed up fingernails, I started to re-choreograph the “Heartbreaker” video for the school talent show, using movement to explore sides of myself I had no words for. At aftercare, this woman who must have been an other mother, saw my nervousness and opened up the doors to a separate room so I could practice my choreography away from the eyes of the other kids. I spent hours in that tiny room dancing on a gymnastics mat. When I would get stuck on a part of the routine, she would show me a quick move to bridge two concepts, or a different way to get out of a position and into another. As if generations of wisdom could be embedded in my body, as if motion itself was a type of freedom.
***
Free of Tommy Mottola and with her girls by her side, Rainbow shows more shades of MC than ever before. The album features an unprecedented amount of hip-hop collabs including Da Brat, Jay-Z, Jermaine Dupri, Master P, Missy Elliott, Mystikal, Snoop Dogg, and Usher. There’s power ballads like “Can’t Take That Away From Me” and breathy slow jams like my personal whistle-filled favorite “Bliss.”
But the changes didn’t rest in the sound alone. Columbia Records has often been accused of fashioning Mariah’s early-90’s image to be more racially ambiguous in order to sell more albums. But Rainbow was different. MC shed the subtle black dresses and creamy-white foundation, instead displaying this bronzed-up, sensual presentation of the self. The front cover of Rainbow features MC in a pair of white briefs and a ribbed tank with a rainbow airbrushed across her chest. On the back she’s holding a heart-shaped lollipop, smirking, her butt cheeks peeking out.
If this was girl power, I wanted in.
The rest of America? Not so much. Rainbow was not a chart-topping success like her previous albums. Many critics say that this was the start of the end for Mariah; that she shed her sophistication for a youthfulness that was out of character and cheap. But all you have to do is look at the video of Da Brat and Mariah riding around Las Vegas to know that this wasn’t the end for MC. That she was reclaiming all the moments she had lost. That she was just starting to take control over her own narrative, making it up as she went along.
So often, we as Black women, girls, and femmes have to make it up as we go along, re-choreographing our lives, re-fashioning our bodies through blank spaces, through thin air.
***
As a kid, I used to imagine myself split into two halves, never whole, grappling with what it meant to be half-black and half-white. When a boundary was crossed with my body at a young age, I imagined all the sensual energy in me splintered off into a foreign object, floating through the ether, traveling away from me indefinitely. After trying so hard to reclaim what I thought I’d lost, I feared the distance too great.
But at the top of 2020, my best friend who’s known me since the fifth grade, said maybe the energy was not floating away but rather buried inside, and I could do work to uncover it. Creating a map of my relationship to pleasure, I back tracked all the times I’ve leaned into the fullness of creativity and all the times I’ve cut it off.
Throwing away all my notebooks convinced I was no longer a writer, it was my best friend in New Orleans who showed up at my door with a new notebook, encouraging me to put it all on the page. In a deep depression, it was my best friend from college inviting me over, holding space for me even when sometimes I would barely say a single word. When I shaved all my hair off in attempts to recover the essence of myself, it was my photographer friend who allowed me to see myself through her lens. I remember now, that being a kid was full of joy too, of hanging out with my childhood best friend, practicing dance routines in our living rooms—movement and motion, my first creative instinct. And through all this remembering, I remembered this album and the energy it held. & When was the last time I danced?
A few weeks ago, I pulled the shades on my studio apartment and pressed play—letting my body move through a space where all the words still haven’t reached yet. Coming back into my own intuitions, into seeing myself in every shade.
An energy awakens, like dust being blown off the surface of my own possibilities.
***
Back on TRL, MC and Da Brat make it to the number one video, capping the night off with an elaborate spread of desserts. Da Brat reaches over MC to take an invisible bite of the crème brûlée
and MC responds, “you like this, don’t you?”
And how could we not?
Indulging in all that sweetness. Watching the certified-platinum pop diva sit side-by-side with the first solo female rapper ever to go platinum, holding each other down in the same way Black women, girls, and femmes have been holding each other down for centuries. Always there, in the face of many heartbreaks, ready to tell each other to just keep on coming back, incessantly.
Kortney Morrow is an emerging writer and editor from Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has received support from Hugo House, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, and Winter Tangerine. She is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at The Ohio State University.