Mariah Carey
Butterfly

THE REVIEW

In the past, I've had the opportunity to express my lack of particular adoration for Mariah Carey, a character of enormous stature in the Nineties and thus subjected to deflation in the following decade. Her limited affability, her moderate musical evolution over the years, the syrup oozing and dripping from every studio production, and that virginal diva aura swiftly transformed into a glamour queen and heartbreaker of the pseudo bosses running major record labels have never completely convinced me, even though I swim in the most crass, redundant, colorful, and varied commercial pop ever to appear on the face of the Earth. Raised on bread and ballads in the most sappy and romantic era of the late millennium, a child of the various Titanic and Bodyguard of the time, Carey more or less shared that charming trend with illustrious colleagues Celine Dion and Whitney Houston, who also indulged in sugary melancholy, mares & mountains, yet they were behind productions that repeatedly surpassed those of the lovely Mariah.

Mimi's biography still today marks a mathematical function that struggles to stabilize above a constant. Achieving success in 1990, barely twenty, with the single Vision of Love and the eponymous debut album backed by her mentor, Sony Music Entertainment's chairman Tony Mottola, Carey literally swept the discographic "box offices" - especially in the US - of the Nineties, producing a long stream of hits, such as Hero, One Sweet Day, My All, Dreamlover, Heartbreaker and Fantasy, besides gifting the Christmas merchandise industry and department stores with the album (Merry Christmas) and the anthem (All I Want For Christmas Is You) par excellence. After a failed marriage with talent scout Mottola and leaving Columbia (a label under Sony's aegis), Mariah fell into a whirlwind of failures (the film Glitter, its soundtrack, and the studio work Charmbracelet) and depressive crises that relegated her to the darkest hallways of international show biz until her resurrection in 2005 with The Emancipation of Mimi. In recent years, Mrs. Cannon (newly married to Nick) seems to have lost again - though not drastically - the verve of the golden era and her recent rebirth, and has offered albums like E=MC2 and Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel which have added little to the already laden table of the artist.

Until the mid-Nineties, miss Carey was oscillating between the anti-Celine Dion and the pink Santa Claus, but with the impending divorce from Mottola (and Columbia), Mariah attempted to enrich and modernize a repertoire that neither delved deeply into soft-black music nor stayed in stasis in the storeroom of pop soundtrack-like tracks with a box of tissues on the side. Daydream and Butterfly forged the current R&B diva, the eminent lady of contemporary Rhythm & Blues with seductive and graceful vocal cords in full harmony with refined living room tones. Butterfly, in particular, is considered by the author herself as the personal "magnum opus" of her career, a genuine turning point, a bridge between the hyper-sweetened past of orchestral ballads and the mischievous future of hip hop.

The tracklist, in fact, is engaged in the sweet-spicy dialectic: Honey is an excellent R&B track with mild electronic fragrances, My All rises to a ballad worthy of its predecessors, while The Roof (Back In Time) and Fourth of July possess notable modern soul vibrations with vivid retro scents. Still, the nostalgia of theatrical-melancholic 90s is perceptible in Close My Eyes, Butterfly, and Whenever You Call, the latter in antithesis with the acid jazz/house/lounge of Fly Away and the soft hip-hop of Breakdown.

I emphasize again that Miss Mariah is not particularly likable to me (though it's a debatable judgment), and her extensive resume, although foundational to pop in recent decades, has rarely sparked significant interest for me, except for a few singles here and there (It's Like That, We Belong Together, Obsessed, Get Your Number...). Yet, listening to this important production, the heart of Mimi's entire discography, my indifference towards the haughty "doll", the incurable and untouchable extravagant diva, has somewhat softened into a faint curiosity. So here you have a good soft-romantic-light-relaxing work just enough, to maybe listen to during those last melancholic summer days of finished vacations, looming returns to the office, and visions of a gray, foggy autumn before starting to hum, panettone in hand and eyes turned to the starry sky, the joyful notes of All I Want For Christmas Is You.

Mariah Carey, Butterfly

Honey - Butterfly - My All - The Roof (Back In Time) - Fourth of July - Breakdown - Babydoll - Close My Eyes - Whenever You Call - Fly Away (Butterfly Reprise) - The Beautiful Ones - Outside.