![]() Which is to say, she didn’t need to record a Christmas album in 1994. 1 hits in half as many years, and each of her first three LPs, including an “Unplugged” album that she recorded, in part, to prove that she was not just a “studio singer,” sold millions of copies. The release of her self-titled début, in 1990, initiated one of the greatest creative and commercial runs in pop history. She was effectively quarantined, groomed for success. Carey worked service jobs and backup gigs before delivering a demo tape, when still in her late teens, to the music executive Tommy Mottola-who later became Carey’s husband and dictatorial manager. And, of course, there was her own determination to sing. What she had going for her, like Houston, was a talented mother, Patricia Carey, who was an opera singer and a vocal coach. Unlike Whitney Houston, whose gospel-pop pedigree seemed to overdetermine her success-her mother was Cissy Houston, one of her cousins was Dionne Warwick-Carey lacked industry connections. She was hard to place within her own neighborhood (the term “biracial” had yet to gain national currency), never mind along the usual axes of contemporary female pop stardom. These themes had long shaped Carey’s work, most notably her 1991 hit “Make It Happen,” but “Merry Christmas” marked a more extended bid for black belonging and fun.Ĭarey was raised on Long Island, in the nineteen-seventies, a mixed-race child of the working class. ![]() Precisely because the Christmas album was not driven by her own ballads of love and loss, it freed her to explore equally powerful themes of musical belonging, spiritual conviction, and joy. Unlike most pop pinnacles, where an artist’s seizure of creative control leads to a heightened authenticity (think Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”), Carey’s “Merry Christmas” is a glittering object lesson in the art of letting go. (She co-wrote “All I Want” with Walter Afanasieff.) Carey’s entire Christmas album, released in 1994, was a breakthrough. The distinction is important-not because it confirms the song’s iconic status (which is self-evident) but because it reminds us that Carey composed most of her own songs. This week, twenty-five years after its original release, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has reached No.
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