2005: Mariah Carey, The Emancipation of Mimi
By adrienne maree brown
The journey to diva consists of claiming oneself publicly and unapologetically.
Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle, Whitney Houston - our divas are our sang-down-the-house singers who also claim the space to be themselves, completely, shamelessly. Mariah Carey’s self is perpetually young, romantic, and definitively multiracial.
Mariah entered our collective consciousness in 1990 with her explosive “Vision of Love”, sung from a waterfall of curls and light-skinned curves. For a solid decade she gave us power ballad after pop ballad. Slipped between the high notes, she let us hear another sound, something playful, youthful, intimate, sexy, hip-hop, modern, something that made us chair dance. Over the years she honed a style that was conversational, humorous, petty, and earnestly romantic, with some of her biggest hits coming from collaborations with hip-hop artists including Bone, Thugs and Harmony, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Jay-Z and Puff Daddy.
She was consistent about the insecurity that she felt in life, in love. Alongside the ballads, almost every album had a song rooted in Mariah’s experiences as a mixed race girl and woman who was always just outside of belonging, outside of the life and love she desired. She wanted us to know her story, but as she dropped in to tell it, it looked like Mariah was getting stuck in time - she put out Glitter, both the panned campy movie only deep fans could love, and the soundtrack, followed by Charmbracelet. Neither album had the kind of big deal hits Mariah fans were used to, and there was concern that her once in a lifetime voice was damaged, or that Mariah was caught in a regression, unable to mature her sound and content as her fan base grew up.
She took three years before returning with The Emancipation of Mimi, and as a comeback album it was widely hailed as worth the wait. Mimi is the self Mariah lets friends see, an accessible diva, a throaty songbird who is enjoying herself. With Emancipation, Mariah Carey showed us how she was entering her diva phase - not just as a vocalist with an incredible five-octave range, not just as a biracial balladeer, but as a grown woman, in her dignity, in her confidence, in her own style: sensual hip-pop infused with power bottom dreams from a singer with a pure heart and a big vocabulary that she was unafraid to deploy. Yes she can sing any note we can imagine, but she isn’t going to just belt r&b, she’s not letting go of the white dance-pop influences, and she isn’t going to give up her rappers. She is going to offer up all of it.
The songs on Emancipation cover a wide range of Mariah’s gifts - she starts strong with “It’s Like That” - catchy, declarative and still somehow cute. Mariah may be the only adorable diva, and with this entrance to the album she is letting us know that she will be giving us batted eyes and sticky sweet vocals and she’s not sorry.
The second track, the biggest hit on the album, is the powerhouse heartbreak love song of “We Belong Together”, which is essential Mariah, a hybrid of massive ballad, high femme love story and multi-syllabic bop. She then guides us through dealing with haters and fuckbois with “Shake It Off”. This is the diva who will go on to give us a “reality” show mostly filmed from a chaise lounge. This is the diva who will get carried around on pillow pallets for her future concerts.
She is enjoying herself here. She is singing as connective tissue between the musical genres that she grew up hearing - there is pop here, gospel, soul, r&b, rap...she weaves it together to be light, to be fun, to be played on repeat.
Her middle range on this album is strong, so even though her soprano acrobatics and whistle register are available - shown in brief touches on “Circles”, “Joy Ride” and other tracks, she reminds us that she can still easily fill a room on “Say Somethin’” and “Stay the Night”.
On “One and Only” ( and deluxe bonus track “So Lonely”) she easily keeps up with Twista’s tongue while letting us feel her longing for love - Mariah has never been reticent about her desire to be known fully, to be a pursued beloved, but on this track and “Your Girl” we see her move from a passive object of pursuit in her love stories to the one who will pursue and make her desires known.
The sparkling champagne honeymoon love song “Joy Ride” is still a song I want to hear when I am in the depths of a new love. There were some years where I wondered if “Vision of Love” was a promise unfulfilled - but when Emancipation came out, I understood that “Joy Ride” is the promise fulfilled, the kind of floating-on-clouds-and-tumbling-down-like-wind-chimes love Mariah actually practices, vs the theoretical heart match of “Vision”.
I want to take a moment for the final song on the original version of this album, “Fly Like A Bird”, which posits Mariah against a gospel choir in the fashion of her early hit “Make It Happen” - here she talks to her god about rising up above the challenges that drag at her spirit. It is a song of unfolding and elevating surrender, and a perfect way to end this album, because it is again uniquely Mariah, bringing pop and gospel in contact.
The album wasn’t designed to please everyone, it was to free the artist. It was Mariah demanding to be accepted as herself, no compromises, no labels limiting her, no longer shrinking into any one else’s concepts of what she sound like. From here out, she’s Mariah. Take it or leave it, she’s gonna be alright, that’s what she has claimed for herself in these songs.
adrienne maree brown is a writer and podcaster living in Detroit.