When Mariah Carey married Sony Music's US president, Tommy Mottola, predictably unkind tongues proclaimed it a smart move. Never again need Carey worry about having her recording contract extended, now she was secure for life.
However, the real cynics took the opposite tack. How prescient of Mottola to wed the goose capable of laying multiplatinum eggs for his corporation. With more than 20 million albums sold in three short years, and no sign of her audience losing interest, the resultant earning power is not bad, as dowries go.
The 23-year-old singer has become accustomed to people doubting her love match, and no longer cares. “It's all out in the open now — let them say whatever they want,” is her retort to the rumour-mongering, and with a disinterested shrug of her thin shoulders she dismisses the subject, choosing to concentrate instead upon the various diamonds that decorate her two hands. One, a specimen so large it might give Elizabeth Taylor an attack of the vapours, overwhelms her engagement ring, while the others sparkle more discreetly from her wedding band: as symbols of everlasting union they speak for themselves and with loud, expensive voices.
It is the sheer scale of her success that makes Carey such an irresistible target for the disenchanted or downright jealous. She writes and co-produces her own material, sings it in a pitch-perfect, five-octave voice, then sells it on to the public with an ease that must make many other established names weep with-envy. Not only that, she does it again and again.
While it is the fashion for many artists to spend years labouring over their projects, Carey just keeps coming out with them. Music Box, released on Monday, is her third studio album since 1990, while the multi-million-selling MTV Unplugged EP was somehow fitted in between them. All have soared to Number One.
No female artist other than Whitney Houston has captured so many demographic bases with such apparent ease, and the parallels between the two are hard to ignore. Both are model-beautiful, with exceptional vocal capacity and a bravura, showboating style that makes the most of their gifts. Both have had their career launches masterminded by heavyweight figures within the industry — Arista Records founder Clive Davis, in Houston's case, Mottola in Carey's. And both have had to become adept at sidestepping media insistence that each is constantly looking over her shoulder to see what the other is doing.
“God, they make us to break us,” Houston commented to me in New York last winter, just before her version of Dolly Parton's “I Will Always Love You” began its record-breaking run on top of the world's charts. “I guess a lot of people would like to imagine that Mariah and I are fighting all the time, or that I'm unable to think of anything else but her every minute of my day, but of course it's not true. I enjoy other artists' successes, and I think the girl deserves hers. She came out with some hot material, the public wanted it — what's wrong with that?”
Today, slumped within a Mayfair hotel room wearing sports clothes and sneakers and fighting jet lag with hot, sweet tea, Carey follows a similar line. “Everybody loves a good scrap, but in this case they're mistaken,” she asserts. “I think she's a really good singer and that's that. I do what I do, and she does what she does, period.”
What Carey does is come up with extraordinarily efficient pop-soul songs. Her current chart single “Dream Lover” is an obvious example, but Music Box is packed to the gills with others; here a stirring hint of gospel music, there the trace of a hip-hop beat, everywhere another beautifully performed and insistently catchy hit-to-be.
“I guess I must be very irritating to write with,” is how she describes her way of composing within her head, then using help to translate her ideas into workable form.
“I'm not a technical person so I need that help, but I know exactly the sound and structure that I want. The songs come to me from some other place; it's not a conscious, mental thing at all.”
Proof, then, of an instinctive pop sensibility, honed by growing up in the shadow of an older brother and sister obsessed with the classic soul of the Sixties and Seventies. Thanks to the early ministrations of her mother, a vocal coach and former member of the New York City Opera company, she has more than sufficient vocal power to breathe life into the resulting compositions.
When she begins her first tour later this year, Carey will have the luxury of a crowded back catalogue from which to choose her set list. “Vision Of Love”, “Emotions”, “I'll Be There” and a string of other chart-toppers; a happy starting-point for any live performer.
“No doubt people used to think the reason I never toured before was because I couldn't cut it on stage, but the Unplugged EP pretty much stopped all that,” she notes with satisfaction. “It's just that I come from the background of being a writer who sang her own songs; that's all I concentrated on, so I didn't have even the experience of singing in clubs on the way up. I wanted to wait until I had the material and the confidence to give my audiences what they deserve.”
Her short but glittering chart history (and, doubtless, that perfect voice) mean Carey has no qualms about making a belated concert debut; after all, she points out, her first live performance as a known name was on the peak-rated Arsenio Hall Show, her next before the ranks of living legends fleshing out the front rows at the Grammy Awards.
“Success has made me a nicer person,” she considers, diamonds flashing as she examines her pale, elegant hands. “I no longer have to be obsessed with when it's all going to happen for me. My dream has come true, and I don't have to become another person to live the reality. The people who are my real fans want me to be myself. That's what I'm learning to be.”