All That Glitters

Mariah Carey will soon have more number 1 songs than the Beatles. That is the sobering, crazy-ass, nonsensical, completely fucked up news brought to us by the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones in her article "On Top" (thanks to the always entertaining Backwards City blog for the link).

Crazy, huh? Stupid, huh? Kinda takes away any faith you might have had left in the recording industry or the taste of Americans, huh? Kinda makes you want to dig even further into your e-music, KEXP hole and never come out again, huh? Me too. As I've said before in this space, H.L. Mencken was right about us idiot American people, and he never even lived to hear "The Emancipation of Mimi" or had the pleasure of watching Glitter.

Don't get me wrong. Glitter is a fantastic, entertaining train wreck of a movie. And if Mariah can sell that many records, then I'm mystified, but more power to her. The problem with this article is that Frere-Jones actually tries to suggest that Mariah's achievements somehow transcend the Billboard charts.

To give you some idea of how wrong-headed and misled this article is, let me share my favorite quote: In some ways, Carey resembles U2, another veteran act currently having extraordinary success late in a long career.

Mariah Carey = U2.

Um...where to start? I guess at the beginning. Frere-Jones starts with the basic, Ayn Randian hypothesis that since Carey has sold so many records, there must be some intrinsic value in her music, that she must have made some kind of important contribution to American culture. This is like saying that since McDonalds has sold so many little burgers, these burgers must be the best in the world.

In trying to make this argument, Frere-Jones goes to some pretty hilarious lengths:

Not all Carey’s achievements are commercial, though: she co-wrote one of the few worthy modern additions to the holiday canon, the charming "All I Want for Christmas Is You" (from Merry Christmas, of 1994, which also happens to be the best-selling Christmas album of all time, but never mind that). And when she sang her perky dance hit "Emotions" at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards, she reportedly sounded a G-sharp three and a half octaves above middle C, one of the highest notes produced by a human voice in the history of recorded music. (Party poopers say that the note was actually an F-sharp.)

Wha-wha-whaaaaaat? Co-writing "All I Want for Christmas is You?" Singing a, what was that again, g-sharp three and a half octaves above middle C? Really? Those are her significant non-commercial achievements?

If the article had stopped there, it might have made sense. Let's limit Mariah's contributions to these two dubious items and then just move on to how impressive it is that she's taken her ability to shriek in tune and her boobs and sold so many goddam records.

But, unfortunately, it doesn't stop there.

Frere-Jones goes on to celebrate another Mariah contribution to our culture: apparently, she's the reason crappy singers everywhere now feel the best way to get attention is to pull the microphone away from their mouths and screech up and down the scale. This is called "melisma" and Frere-Jones celebrates this contribution. At one point, she describes it in what I guess you'd call glowing terms, because I'm pretty sure she's not being ironic or sly (although, for her sake, I really hope I misread it), as a singing style in which "all" can be roughly transcribed as: "ah-ha-uh-uh-oh-oo-oh-ooah-ha-uh-uh-oh-oo-oh-oo-ah-oh."

Let me pull that out again, because I think the fact that Frere-Jones seems to think this is a good thing really says a lot about the where her head is at. In melisma:

"all" can be roughly transcribed as: "ah-ha-uh-uh-oh-oo-oh-ooah-ha-uh-uh-oh-oo-oh-oo-ah-oh."

Again, she seems to think that's good, that the world is better for the constant stream of painstaking "melisma" screeching through our radio airwaves. Anybody who has seen Jessica Simpson strain through her own constipated version of "melisma" might argue differently.

So here's the thing: Mariah Carey is famous for the exact same reason Ashlee Simpson is famous. She is famous for the same reason Kelly Osborne is famous. She has sold so many records for the same reasons N'Sync and 98 Degrees sold a shitload of records: somebody in some boardroom decided that they could move this product.

Actually, in Mariah's case it's pretty obvious who decided they could move this product: um, maybe Sony Music president Tommy Motolla, who liked this particular product so much that he not only pushed it down our throats, he married it.

Mariah has sold this many records (or I guess I should say songs, now) because Tommy and the rest of his Big Recording buddies decided we'd buy it -- and then they spent enough money on advertising, PR, product placement, corporate tie-ins, fucking happy meals -- to make goddam sure we did.

But Frere-Jones has another opinion about why people by Mariah Carey records:

Carey's freakish vocal ability explains part of her appeal. In the same way that people went to a San Francisco Giants game in order to see Barry Bonds hit a home run, people buy Carey’s records in order to hear her do things with her voice that no one else can do.

Really? Really? I don't think that's remotely true at all. If that was true, then Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan would have been the biggest recording star in the world. Then Yassou N’Dour would have starred in his own Senegalese version of Glitter and Emmylou Harris would be on the cover of Jane and Cosmo every single month.

All this striving to make sense of Mariah's success is just naïve. It's insulting. Embarrassing, actually. And blithely ignoring the fact that while she was selling a good portion of those records, she just happened to be married to the president of Sony records? I'm not a journalist, in fact I'm the opposite, but that's just bad journalism.

I'm not really bitching about the marketplace, either. I'm a good A-mur-can, after all. I've slogged my way through a few bullshit Ayn Rand books (why I can't put a book down after I've started it, no matter how fucking annoying it is, I have no idea). And sometimes the monetary scale actually works, like in golf, where players are ranked on the "money list," how much they've won in tournaments for the year. Makes perfect sense: if you've won more money than the rest of the guys, you're most likely finishing ahead of most of those guys, most of the time. And then you're probably better.

But that same logic can't be applied to music, or writing, or any form of art. Mariah Carey is going to sell more records than the Beatles. That's a fact. But the credit for that fact has to go, at least in large part, to the marketing team at Sony and whoever is selling those records nowadays, no matter how gracefully Ms. Carey might melisma up and down the scales.

I'll throw out the Usher Test here: can you sing a Mariah Carey song? One that's not "Fantasy," which stole the Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love" and included an inspired contribution by Ol' Dirty Bastard ("me and Mariah...go back like babies and pacifiers..."). Can you? Now can you sing a Beatles song?

The Beatles recorded their last album, Let it Be, in 1970. That's 19-fucking-70, 36 years ago, and I guarantee you know at least half the songs on that album.

Mariah Carey is a product. The Beatles were artists. I might be grumpy and out of touch, but I still believe there's a big fucking difference between those two.