For some years now it has been the fashion for American pop artists to lace their album packaging with personal thank you lists as long as their respective arms.
Depending on how publicly effusive the artists have been, they can be either fascinating or embarrassing to read. But repeated exposure to these roll-calls prompts two generalisations: the younger end of US showbiz has scant regard for punctuation, while retaining surprisingly old-fashioned values. God is a frequent list-topper, usually followed by Mom, assorted producers, songwriters, clothes designers and hairdressers.
Mariah Carey keeps her list sensibly brief but separates the divine and the maternal with a significant third party — the president of CBS Records, Tommy Mottola. “I'm so incredibly fortunate to have the benefit of your invaluable guidance, expertise and support,” enthuses a credit on the 20-year-old's self-titled debut album. “Thank you so much for believing in me.”
Carey's gratitude is well-placed. One of the most powerful men in the US music industry, Mottola took on the role of her Svengali after they were introduced at a party in New York. She handed him a demo tape of some songs, which he played while driving home that evening. By morning, he was on the phone offering her a contract. Less than two years later, her first single “Vision of Love” stands at the top of the American charts, and her album at number four. Both are about to repeat that success in Britain.
Without even hearing her sing, industry observers would draw parallels with the launch of Whitney Houston. A fashion model who happened to be the daughter of gospel singer Cissy Houston and niece of Dionne Warwick, she was groomed for stardom by another label boss, Clive Davis, founder of Arista Records. While he has signed the likes of Simon and Garfunkel and Springsteen, and rehabilitated falling stars like Carly Simon and Warwick herself, he still views Houston as his greatest triumph.
A cursory listen to Mariah Carey compounds that parallel; the production is similarly big and self-important, the performances as confident and bravura. Even the images are alike — that of a preternaturally sophisticated young woman being targeted straight at the lucrative 25- to 40-year-old market. But though the heavy duty industry backing behind each singer invites this ostensibly flattering comparison, closer investigation shows it does few favours for the remarkably talented Carey.
“I guess anything gets irritating if you're asked it often enough,” she says, anticipating the Houston question. “I think she's an incredibly talented singer, but I want to be respected in my own right as a singer-songwriter.”
The evidence is that she will achieve that. Her mother, an Irish-American vocal coach and former singer with the New York City Opera, gave Carey breathing and stretching exercises at a young age and she now has a formidable five-octave breadth, supplemented by her facility in the “whisper register”, a birdlike top range two octaves higher than the upper limit of her full singing voice. In addition, she has co-written all 11 songs on her album and produced its outstanding track, the simple piano-and-vocal of “Vanishing”.
Carey admits that this is her own favourite, but is not entirely convincing when denying that the expensive sheen given to the remaining mix of pop-soul, gospel, swing-beat and doo-wop by outside producers means her own vision has been hijacked by Mottola and his marketing men.
“Because I've co-written all the songs, there's not that much anyone else can do,” she hedges. “It's not as if other people's material has been thrust upon me. But I do like doing things by myself in the studio because it gives me more freedom. Sometimes you don't care how someone else thinks your songs should sound — you wrote it, and you know how it should be. I think this is a good first effort and I'm very happy with it, but further down the road…”
After run-ins with fashion editors who picture her in gold lame biker's jackets or hot-red stretch pants, the pragmatic Carey is learning to be similarly protective of her image. “You can wear stuff like that for fun before you have a record out,” she worries, “but once those photos appear in five magazines, you're painted as just a flash-in-the-pan, and that's not what I intend to be.”
So while hanging on to her own discreetly sexy Azzedine Alaia wardrobe, this frighteningly self-aware young woman is allowing herself little time to celebrate her good fortune. “I'm already at work on my second album,” she says, looking at her watch.
