Last year this time, Mariah Carey was busy enjoying her incredible debut success — and fending off the notion that musically, she was a clone of Whitney Houston. Funny, you don't hear that much anymore.
The 22-year old Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter has turned the corner. Today, for the most part, Mariah Carey is appreciated simply for being well, Mariah Carey.
When “Vision of Love,” Mariah's first-ever 1991 single was released, Whitney Houston was pop music's hottest female vocalist, and her phenomenal success cast a shadow on virtually every new female singer who came after her. When Columbia Records launched Carey's career, the Houston comparisons didn't seem out of line, for several reasons. Number one, in choosing producers for Carey, her label called upon Narada Michael Walden, who produced Whitney's multi-platinum albums. At about the same time, a key Arista Records exec, on hand at that label for Whitney's debut, was enlisted by Columbia, further painting the picture that Columbia was interested in building a Whitney Houston of their own. Finally — and most importantly — it didn't help that Carey, aparently a Houston fan, on occasion sounded a whole heck of a lot like Whitney.
Mariah took the comparisons on the chin. The press, particularly the Black press, perhaps feeling that a newcomer was aiming to tread on their pop princess, bought up the Houston/Carey thing often. Also at issue, to a lesser degree, was Carey's ethnic background. Though in the press she freely discussed her mother being white and her father Black, occasionally there was the implication that Mariah had been instructed by Columbia to conceal her roots. It didn't help that, to many in the Black community, a heartfelt acceptance speech at a televised music awards show came off sounding condescending.
And then there were other forces at work. Except for some performances on those TV awards shows, Carey had never toured. Despite the powerful voice on her two albums the self-titled debut and her current Emotions (the title track of which was involved in a quiet legal skirmish involving the song's co-writers, the C+C production team of Cole and Clivilles, and Earth, Wind and Fire producer Maurice White, who suggested that Carey's #1 hit sounded a lot like “Best Of My Love,” which he co-wrote and produced in the '70s on the sibling girl group the Emotions), there was talk that maybe Mariah was simply a video vamp, a pretty face who relied on lushly crafted recordings and expensive videos to get over.
And then came the MTV “Unplugged” EP.
A year ago, the 24-hour music channel introduced “Unplugged,” a regular series that invited rock, pop and rap acts to perform live in front of an audience. The catch — and the show's premise — is that the performer's only musical luxury is a rhythm section, preferably acoustic, and maybe some background singers. No synthesizers, samples or other musical gimmicks that have become commonplace in pop music performances.
Mariah Carey assembled a band, some background vocalists, did the show and blew everyone away. Not only were renditions of her hits such as “Someday” and “Vision of Love” better than the original recordings, Carey's booming, emotional vocal was live for all the world to hear.
Columbia, smart enough to know a good thing, had recorded the concert, and released the results — including the first single, an impassioned rendition of the Jackson 5 classic, “I'll Be There” — on a mini album, or EP The success of the “Unplugged” session has gracefully established Mariah, once and for all, as a true artist and singer that, considering that she's only made three recordings, can only get better with time. Mariah's detractors often fail to mention that, unlike some other female newcomers, she is an accomplished songwriter, having co-written and co-produced most of the material on her albums. And now Mariah has added another title behind her name: mentor. She's currently in the studio, producing the debut Sony album of one Trey Lorenz, the singer who accompanied her on the “I'll Be There” single.
So now it seems that Mariah Carey is truly doing everything she's dreamed of. The young artist is staking her own claim, and those comparisons to you-know-who are getting leaner with every hit record.