How do you turn a pop star into a movie star? Here is one formula: create a movie loosely based on the star's life. Let's say the hero is a poor kid blessed with virtuosic vocal abilities and chasing a dream of fame and fortune. The hero has problems with Mom — that's a good way to inject dramatic tension. To establish the importance of talent, there is a nightclub scene where the hero is handed a microphone and asked to improvise. And the movie ends on an ambivalent note: after a triumphant performance, the hero seems to walk away from the music industry, at least for the moment.
Last month, this formula seemed foolproof: 8 Mile, starring Eminem, helped turn a controversial rapper into a mainstream celebrity. But last year, the exact same formula derailed one of this era's most successful music careers. The movie was Glitter, and it was meant to be a star vehicle for Mariah Carey. Instead, the film and the accompanying album flopped, and the twin failures — accompanied by lurid reports about the singer's personal life — turned Ms. Carey into a laughingstock. Her record label, Virgin, was so spooked that it paid $28 million to release her from her contract.
Now Ms. Carey is ready for her comeback. She has a new record contract, and her new album, Charmbracelet (MonarC/Island Def Jam), is due out on Tuesday. It's an odd comeback attempt, because most people can't be sure exactly what Ms. Carey is coming back from. She has to make her fans forget a movie they probably didn't see and an album they probably didn't buy.
This is either a terrific time or a terrible time for Ms. Carey's revival. Her competition has thinned out, but so perhaps has her audience. The glamorous women with whom she once shared the spotlight aren't so popular anymore. Celine Dion put herself out to pasture in Las Vegas, Whitney Houston is trying to dig herself out of a deep hole, and Christina Aguilera may have just dug herself into one. Faith Hill and Shania Twain both have new albums, but they're not the dominant forces they once were. Right now, the country's most popular balladeer is probably what's-her-name, from American Idol.
Is there a vacuum waiting to be filled, or have people lost interest? So far, the signs suggest the latter. The lead single from Charmbracelet, “Through the Rain,” is the sort of self-help ballad Ms. Carey was singing a decade ago, but it hasn't been a hit with radio D.J.'s. So Island Def Jam has declined to release a retail version, and Ms. Carey is looking ahead to the second single, “The One,” an airy midtempo song produced by Jermaine Dupri.
Ms. Carey, 32, says she approached Charmbracelet in much the same way she approached her previous albums. “I didn't do it to answer people, or to justify my validity as an artist,” she says, sitting on a couch in a recording studio in Manhattan, where she lives. “It really was just about an emotional outlet for me. That's what writing and singing always is.”
Writing and singing is also big business, of course, and Ms. Carey surely knows that if she sells, say, only a million copies of her new CD, it will be considered a failure. But she also knows that her best bet for success is an old-fashioned Mariah Carey album; for better and for worse, the new disc hews closely to her tried-and-true approach. Her task is not to reinvent herself; on the contrary, it's to convince her fans that she is more herself than ever.
Anyone who rents Glitter in the hope of seeing the worst film of all time will be disappointed. True, it has the leisurely pace and linear plot of a mediocre television movie, as if it were made to be perused rather than watched. But it's no Battlefield Earth. And while the 1980's-inspired soundtrack did not have nearly enough catchy tunes, it did include a cover of the Robert Palmer hit “I Didn't Mean to Turn You On,” as well as a new song written by Rick James. (By far the most entertaining artifact from Ms. Carey's disastrous 2001 is David LaChapelle's garish — and hilarious — music video for “Loverboy,” a song from the movie soundtrack, in which Ms. Carey squeezes into a snug pair of shorts and waves a checkered flag at a bunch of car-racing rappers.)
The movie and the album would not have been so damaging if they had not been accompanied by an unfortunate series of news reports and public appearances. She had split up with her boyfriend, the Mexican singer Luis Miguel, and, during a giddy interview on MTV, did what was widely described as a striptease. The description was misleading although not quite untrue: Ms. Carey doffed an oversized T- shirt to reveal a characteristically skimpy outfit.
In July, Ms. Carey was rushed to a hospital after her mother called 911; she was treated for a condition that was described as exhaustion. She dismisses rumors that she attempted suicide. As she explains it, she was working so hard that hospitalization was her only option: “I just felt like if I went to the hospital and I went along with it and I actually could get some sleep, maybe everybody that worked for me would see the severity of the situation.”
These stories are becoming part of the myth of her life, a myth she feeds, and feeds off, but can't quite control.
Ms. Carey grew up in Huntington on Long Island. Her mother, Patricia Carey, a former opera singer and vocal coach, is Irish-American; her father, Alfred Roy Carey, an engineer, was half Venezuelan and half African-American. (He died this summer.) The couple divorced when Ms. Carey was young, and she lived with her mother through high school, then moved to New York City. Her dream of fame and fortune was pretty ordinary, but her voice wasn't, and she caught the attention of the executive Tommy Mottola, who signed her to Columbia Records and also began dating her.
By 1993, when they married, she had already released a series of smash hit albums, and by the time they split up, a few years later, the failed relationship had become a central element in the myth of Mariah: she called her 1997 album Butterfly, and fans were welcome to assume that her now sexier image was a sign of newfound freedom. The split with Mr. Mottola gave Ms. Carey's music an added narrative power: “Honey,” a collaboration with Sean Combs and Ma$e, wasn't just a beguiling hip-hop song — it was a declaration of independence.
“When your career is you, and everybody around you treats you like a commodity rather than a person, it becomes detrimental to you at some point,” she says. If this market-driven process is the disease that afflicted Ms. Carey, it might also be the cure for her slumping career: to keep people listening, Ms. Carey incorporates episodes from her private life into her interviews and songs, creating a grand story of triumph over adversity. (When you hear her tell it, it could almost be… a movie.)
That's why Ms. Carey believes she can survive her recent troubles. By way of explanation, she paraphrases a letter she says she received from a 14-year-old fan. “I can identify with you even more now, because you're human,” the fan told her. “I just feel like it's brought me even closer to you.”
Not coincidentally, Charmbracelet includes a number of songs that address Ms. Carey's recent problems. “Through the Rain,” the single, is the kind of inspirational ballad that might seem self-centered if it weren't so vague: when she sings, “I know that I'm strong enough to mend,” she could be talking about anyone. Another song, “Sunflowers for Alfred Roy,” brings listeners into her father's hospital room: “Strange to feel that proud, strong man/ Grip tightly to my hand,” she sings.
While rehabilitating her image, Ms. Carey also had to reorganize her professional life. Glitter was her first and last CD for Virgin, which paid a total of $49 million to release the disc. Her new contract, with Island Def Jam, is worth $20 million, and it commits her to at least three albums.
Ms. Carey is known for her voice, of course: she can hit high notes that barely sound human, and few singers leap around the octaves as gracefully as she does. But as she tries to regain her audience, her greatest weapon may be her versatility: Ms. Carey also knows how to make a hip-hop hit by holding back and letting the beat shine.
Ms. Carey is credited as co-writer on every song on Charmbracelet, but she recorded with a number of producers, including Just Blaze, who had a hit with “Oh Boy” by Cam'ron — one of the year's best hip-hop songs. Ms. Carey liked “Oh Boy” so much that she recorded a new version, “Boy (I Need You),” with a verse by Cam'ron that he recorded with her in Capri.
Another high point is her version of the Def Leppard song “Bringin' On the Heartbreak.” It starts out as a piano-driven slow jam; then the chorus is interrupted by a dramatic chord progression, and soon Ms. Carey's precise, fluttery voice is turning a power ballad into something more delicate.
Charmbracelet is generally pleasant, although it's not always exciting, and a few of the collaborations go awry. (On “Irresistible,” perhaps it wasn't a good idea to let Ice Cube record his guest vocals “in his trailer on a movie set,” as it says in the liner notes.) There's a spirited kiss-off called “Clown,” which seems to be aimed at Eminen, who has boasted of a dalliance with Ms. Carey. And “Yours,” produced with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, is a delectable combination of breathy vocals and playful rhythms — it sounds like one long sigh.
One of the things that makes Ms. Carey's music appealing — and sometimes infuriating — is her commitment to frivolity. She has a whim of iron, an almost perverse attraction to sentimentality in its most risible forms. Even hardcore fans probably have trouble taking her recent album titles seriously: Butterfly, Rainbow, Glitter, Charmbracelet. The imagery doesn't seem to fit her music, which can be sublime, or her voice, which is invariably astonishing, or her approach to her career, which is decidedly unsentimental.
Ms. Carey's popularity depends upon precisely this mixture, unlikely as it is, of easy sentimentality, canny professionalism and brilliant singing. (She'll be releasing the new album through her own imprint, MonarC. The name refers to three things at once: her own initials, her status as pop royalty and her infatuation with butterflies.) It's always tough to figure out where the sincerity ends — or perhaps where it starts — but maybe that's the point. Few performers would attempt a straightfaced version of “Bringin' On the Heartbreak,” and even fewer would follow it with a tribute to a father who had recently died.
So is Mariah Carey more herself than ever? It certainly sounds like it, although her comeback is still far from a sure thing. But maybe success isn't what really matters to her — or maybe it's all that matters. It's not easy to tell. First, she explains that music is an “emotional release” for her, then she talks about the process of choosing a single, then she changes her tune completely. “It's not that serious — it's only a fluff entertainment business,” she says.
Who knows whether the important word is “fluff” or “entertainment” or “business”?
