It's hard to fathom, but Mariah Carey is one of our last true pop stars. Maybe the significance of her success is obscured by the fact that she's consistently given us top-notch music throughout the last three decades (though she famously does not recognize the concept of time). It can be easy to take her for granted. But it's one thing for music to simply be good, or popular, and it's another for its influence to span generations.
Twenty-five years ago this week, Mariah Carey was, in a way, reborn. Though she was already a global superstar riding high off the success of her previous five albums (and fresh out of a controlling marriage to her ex-husband Tommy Mottola), her sixth studio album, Butterfly, has come to represent a seismic shift in her musical catalog. The 12-track album, which went on to sell more than 10 million copies, saw Carey switch the narrative on, well, everything. She leaned further into the music that truly inspired her — R&B and hip-hop — after teasing audiences with a new sound in previous records like “Fantasy,” with the late ODB. She also enlisted the likes of Diddy (then Puff Daddy), Missy Elliott, and more to help bring out layers of herself that no one had witnessed before. Butterfly was the start of a new Mariah — one who was more sensitive, sensual, self-aware, and, most importantly, more honest.
While the album saw Carey embrace a more mature sound, it also captured her at her most vulnerable. She sung about heartbreak, of course — the project began production in the midst of her separation from her then husband — but she also explored her identity as a biracial woman and articulated the stakes of emotional and sensual freedom. (She famously wrote in her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, that multiple songs from the album, including “The Roof” and “My All,” were about the sensual bliss of her post-separation fling with Yankees star Derek Jeter.) With Butterfly, she finally had full reign over not just her career, but also her life.
“[The record] is something that was written and recorded in such a pivotal moment in my life. It was a turning point where I was leaving a difficult, to say the least, relationship, a very controlling relationship, and it was time for me to get out of that. I literally had to do it to save my own life,” Carey tells BAZAAR.com. “I was completely entrenched in the creation of that album, because that's really all that I had. These are all songs that represent a very specific point in time. The symbolism of the butterfly and what I had to go through to get there… it's about metamorphosis. I had to transform internally to become strong enough to leave that relationship and to be empowered enough to fly — metaphorically speaking — as a grown woman on my own.”
When she went her own way romantically, Carey shifted gears creatively as well. Butterfly was far more an R&B album than it was pop or adult contemporary, something that she remembers her label at the time having reservations about. The album's lead single, “Honey,” featured Puff Daddy, Mase, and The Lox in the famous music video and official remix. Fan-favorite track “Breakdown” was a game-changing collaboration with members of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. (It's considered by fans to be one of her best vocal performances, and she agrees, calling it “timeless” and perfectly produced.)
These days, we're used to seeing pop stars collaborating with mega rappers, but Carey helped create that formula, and she's never really received proper credit. She had to fight for those features to appear on her albums. But she's hesitant to take responsibility for the popularity of the pop hip-hop collab.
“My actual fans would give me that [recognition], but look, I started [experimenting] even way before that. ‘Dreamlover,’ for example, which people hear as a pop record, was based on an often-used hip-hop loop from a Big Daddy Kane record. And then, of course, there's ‘Fantasy,” which is built on the Tom Tom Club record. And now this year, we had the ‘Big Energy’ remix with Latto and DJ Khaled, which was, like, the third incarnation,” she explains. “It shouldn't have been shocking to people. I typically would be more like, you know, ‘Let's make the corporates happy.’ But I didn't really do that with the Butterfly album. It was just my own. My first kind of emancipation pre-The Emancipation of Mimi, if you will.”
Mariah's metamorphosis didn't take place only in the studio, however. With a fresh sound came a fresh wardrobe too. She enlisted the likes of Versace, Gucci, and Tom Ford to debut a new look that included ultra-mini miniskirts (pre-Miu Miu), sultry slipdresses, and cutout gowns. Her newfound sound and look were clear messages to the public that she was in control now.
The star has always been open about considering herself a songwriter as well as a singer. (She was recently inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame earlier this year — a feat that had her fans across the globe collectively saying, “Finally.”) This is the woman who is your favorite artist's favorite artist after all (and, yes, we're talking about Beyoncé).
“It was tough starting so young in an industry dominated by a very select group of powerful men. At that time, a lot of the female songwriters weren't also the artist, or they weren't looked at as this whole [package]. You were either the ‘songbird’ thing that they loved to use back then to explain me, or the diva,” she says. “People didn't look at you as a serious artist unless you were sitting behind a guitar looking a little bit more disheveled, or behind a keyboard.
“I think the issue that some people in the industry had when Butterfly came out… they were like, ‘Why is she doing this? Why isn't she just doing, like, all the ballads? She should be making standards!’ And I'm like, ‘Because that's not where I'm at!’” she laughs. “I think that it helped pave the way for a lot of other collabs, if you will. At the time, there were people who even disrespected me publicly for doing what I did in terms of the direction that I went with — my music and that album and the videos and all that. But I was like, ‘Well, this is what we're doing. Sorry if it offends you that I'm being my own creative self.'”
Despite the tribulations that occurred throughout the production and press tour for Butterfly, the album remains dear to Carey. The singer, who always loves a reason to celebrate, is marking the anniversary with a number of special “moments” for her fans, including an upcoming documentary about the making of the “Honey” visual, limited-edition merch, and remastered music videos and vinyl records. It's the least she could do for her Lambs (Carey's name for her fan base) who still sing the album's praises on the daily. “Mariah” tends to trend on Twitter regularly not because of controversies, but simply by her just being herself.
“Creating Butterfly wasn't just life imitating art, it was art giving me life,” Carey reflects. “I had to make that record. I was literally fighting for my life and my freedom, and for me, it just feels like such a focused body of work. To this day, I still love it. It's still my personal favorite.”