Just when you think you know a superstar like Mariah Carey, everything changes!
“Thirty years into an epic career,” opens journalist Allison P. Davis in a new profile of the superstar for New York Magazine‘s Vulture vertical, “Mariah Carey is still trying to explain herself.” And along the way in this fall preview feature piece first published on Monday morning, the Dreamlover singer explains everything else, too!
Related: Celebrate Mariah Carey’s 50th Birthday With Her Five Most Iconic Music Videos!
It’s hard to believe it’s been thirty years since Carey’s music first came out, but 15 studio albums and 34 Grammy noms later, here we are! Now, the superstar songstress is opening up the vault a little bit while promoting her upcoming project MC30, which includes never-before-seen footage, an album of previously-unreleased songs and demos, and even an upcoming memoir!
Oh, and along with all THAT, the All I Want For Christmas Is You icon has a LOT to say about it… and about her career, her love life, her family, and much more! Ch-ch-check out some of the highlights from this brand new, feature-length Vulture interview (below)!
Ellen DeGeneres
On their infamous 2008 interview:
“The current moment does seem to keep giving new context for her experiences. For example, the conversation surrounding Ellen DeGeneres’s reportedly toxic workplace behavior led to a clip of an interview with Carey resurfacing on Twitter. It’s from 2008, when there were rumors Carey was pregnant. DeGeneres, apparently determined to get Carey to confirm the speculation, challenged her to drink Champagne. Carey was forced to announce her pregnancy. She miscarried soon after. ‘I was extremely uncomfortable with that moment is all I can say. And I really have had a hard time grappling with the aftermath,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t ready to tell anyone because I had had a miscarriage. I don’t want to throw anyone that’s already being thrown under any proverbial bus, but I didn’t enjoy that moment.’ Carey goes on to say that there is ‘an empathy that can be applied to those moments that I would have liked to have been implemented. But what am I supposed to do? It’s like, [sings] ‘What are you going to do?'”
Eminem
On reportedly **NOT** including the rapper in her memoir, Allison wrote:
“She’s been teasing this memoir for more than a year, mentioning it at a Genius Q&A during the press tour for her last album, Caution, but thinking about it for ten. It’s 300-plus meaning-packed pages, and, yes, what she didn’t include has meaning too. Eminem, who was reportedly ‘stressed’ over what Carey might say about their rumored 2001 fling, doesn’t have to worry. ‘There’s some songs that I can sing in response to that, but I will not do it,’ she’ll say when I ask. And then, with a roll of her head: ‘If somebody or something didn’t pertain to the actual meaning of Mariah Carey, as is the title, then they aren’t in the book.’
“Oppressive” Ex-Husband Tommy Mottola
On the anxiety she still feels regarding the record exec:
“Her anxiety around Mottola sits just under the surface. She writes candidly about the security cameras she says were always watching her and the security team she felt was reporting her every move. ‘He was like this oppressive humidity,’ she says. She could never escape. She could never talk about it, even if she was, in her own way, always talking about it. When she first discussed Mottola during a Zoom call we had the week before, she started to cry: ‘It ignites the triangle in my stomach.’
In his own memoir, Hitmaker: The Man and His Music, from 2013, Mottola denied being restrictive or controlling but deemed their involvement ‘wrong and inappropriate,’ by way of apology, and takes credit for his part in her early success. Carey suspects he tried to sabotage her career after they divorced. More than suspects, she says, referencing a 2017 interview on Desus & Mero in which Murder Inc. co-founder Irv Gotti confirmed Mottola boosted a J.Lo and Ja Rule duet to mess with Carey. ‘It’s out there,’ she says. She also knows he might be angered by her perspective, though she hopes he’s not. ‘I could have gone harder,’ she says, suggesting she could have painted him as a monster. ‘And I didn’t. I give him credit where credit is due.'”
Raising Dem Babies
On giving her children (with ex Nick Cannon), Moroccan and Monroe, a better life than she had growing up:
“Providing this for her children is just one way she ensures that they have a better life than she did. ‘They’re not running around with matted locks,’ she says when asked how her own childhood has shaped how she parents. ‘They know that I’m here for them. They know that if they want to talk with their father, he’s a phone call away,’ she goes on. ‘They have stability. That’s what I didn’t have. They will never have a holiday that’s not happy unless something I can’t do anything about happens. They understand that they are Black. They have a whole lot of self-esteem and self-worth that I never had. And I probably still don’t now. I know that I still don’t.'”
Estranged Siblings
On her “ex-brother,” Morgan, and her estranged sister Alison:
“‘Alison and Morgan both believed I had it easier than they did,’ she writes. She hasn’t spoken to Alison since 1994, though she maintains a relationship with the son Alison had at 15. Mostly, Carey constantly worries that they’ll go to the tabloids again, as she says they have done in the past. She doesn’t want them to see her as an ‘ATM machine with a wig,’ she says. (Recently, Alison has made headlines for accusing their mother in a court filing of forcing her into sexual acts and satanic rituals as a child.)
‘Here’s the thing: They have been ruthlessly just heartless in terms of dealing with me as a human being for most of my life. I never would have spoken about my family at all had they not done it first.’ Even still, you have to wonder how Alison will feel if she picks up the memoir of her estranged superstar sibling and reads how her sister learned a hard lesson about what self-worth should be during the baby shower for her teen pregnancy. I ask Carey if there is any chance of reconciliation with her ex-siblings in the future. ‘I have forgiveness in my heart,’ she says, ‘and so I forgive them, but I am not trying to invite anybody to come hang out over here. I think they’re very broken, and I feel sad for them.'”
Wow…
Growing Up As Multi-Racial
On being a light-skinned Black woman in the music industry:
“‘The truth is I will never say I had the same experience as a darker-skinned woman,’ Carey starts in. She acknowledges the privilege in her being accepted by white audiences and a white-run music industry, but to her, it also means ‘having a white mother, and being forced to live in white neighborhoods, and feeling ashamed that there is nobody visibly Black there … and I’m being so real right now that I want to edit myself,’ she pauses.
‘Believe you me, I’m not thrilled to be this skin tone all the time.’ Then she launches into the questions she has asked herself her whole life and maybe continues to ask: ‘How was I supposed to fit in? I was, like, the only one that’s this weird mutant, mutt — using an antiquated phrase that I’m not asking anyone else to ever use again, but I’m embracing it — mulatto girl. I’m not even embracing it. It’s a horrible way of defining somebody. It actually means ‘mule.’”
Well, there you have it! What’d U think, Perezcious readers?? Still stanning this music icon, or what?! And that passage about Ellen, especially in light of all the TV host has been through the last few months… YIKES!!!
Carey discusses plenty more beyond what’s in these blurbs, too; to read the full Vulture feature, CLICK HERE. Let us know where you’re at on this one! Sound OFF with your take on everything Mariah down in the comments (below)!!!
[Image via Apega/WENN/Avalon/Instar]
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