About 25 years ago, in her home city of Houston, Texas, a young Beyoncé Knowles heard the single that made her resolve, there and then, to become a singer. The song? Mariah Carey's Vision of Love, a sizeable hit in 1990, and a track that should really be lauded as one of the most influential of all time. Rihanna also credited it as a major inspiration, as did Christina Aguilera.
It was Carey’s debut single, and she set herself quite an act to follow. Seventeen number-one hits later, the 46-year-old chanteuse remains the diva’s diva, adored by her peers but treated with far less reverence by much of the press and public, curiously.
Local fans will get the chance to see her perform when she headlines the Dubai Jazz Festival on Thursday. But it is exactly the sort of high-profile appearance that tends to polarise onlookers.
Knowles, for example, remains a major fan: she was an enthusiastic spectator at Carey’s recent Christmas shows, then waited patiently to hang with her hero afterwards. Others seem to revel in her occasional onstage catastrophes.
“When they start acting stupid on her, she doesn’t deserve that,” said Mary J Blige, another long-term admirer. “Mariah Carey’s music saved little ghetto children’s lives: songs like Vision of Love gave us hope, and we would sing those songs and try to hit every note like Mariah.”
But negative vibes date back decades, fuelled by wild rumours of extremely demanding backstage behaviour and her marriage in 1993 to Sony executive Tommy Mottola, which suggested industry favouritism.
The latter issue, at least, ignores one vital factor: her undeniable talent.
Blige suggests we should perhaps be more respectful of that voice: it is one of the most extraordinary instruments in the music industry. Carey has a five-octave range, which is remarkable for a pop singer.
It is showcased best on another of her early singles, Emotions. In that 1991 chart-topper she moves from a throaty growl to an extraordinary operatic shriek, one of the highest notes ever reached in a pop song.
Carey attributes her rare range to the nodules she suffered as a child, which left her voice high but husky – and enduringly inimitable.
Her gifts also extend to songwriting. Far from being a manufactured star, Carey wrote or co-wrote much of her glittering canon, from Vision of Love to her most widely popular single, All I Want for Christmas Is You. That song is now such a standard, it is often mistaken for a cover version.
Modern R&B stars also appreciate Carey’s career path, which involved some bold artistic risks at the height of her fame.
Keen to kill her squeaky-clean image, she ignored nervous record label bosses and hired Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the late Russell Tyrone Jones (of Wu-Tang Clan), for a cool US$15,000 (Dh55,090), to rap on a remix of her 1995 single Fantasy. It was money well spent – that shift helped rap and R&B to merge and paved the way for the later reinventions of Rihanna and others. The increasingly confident singer also personally directed that track’s video.
Carey has continued to take admirable risks, but chiefly in her surprise second career: film actress. The glamorous superstar was an unlikely choice for the role of a weary social worker in Precious, Lee Daniels’ devastating movie about a troubled teen. But Carey knuckled down, won the part and earned several awards. She took on a similarly gritty role in Daniels’s 2013 slave drama The Butler.
Her latest role? The voice of Gotham City’s mayor in The Lego Batman Movie. That vocal range keeps evolving.
It is almost as though there are two Mariah Careys: the down-to-earth character actress, and the ludicrously extravagant pop and reality-TV star.
This does raise the question: would she gain more respect as a singer by ditching those garish, skimpy, often seemingly gravity-defying outfits?
The example of Tom Jones, who will perform at the Jazz Festival on Wednesday, might suggest so: a 1960s sex symbol much-mocked for trying to maintain the same youthful image several decades later. He eventually ditched the leather trousers, stopped dying his hair and was suddenly taken a lot more seriously. Now, it is all about the voice.
But as several generations of R&B stars would attest, Carey knows best. Enjoy her Dubai Jazz Festival performance, then, and do shout out for Vision of Love. It might just change your life.
• Mariah Carey takes to the Dubai Media City Amphitheatre stage at 10.30pm, Thursday, February 23. Tickets from Dh395 at www.dubaijazzfest.com
artslife@thenational.ae
