WE ALL WEAR A MASK—EVEN RECORD-BREAKING, CHART-TOPPING QUEENS OF THE MUSIC BUSINESS. BUT MARIAH CAREY WEARS IT BETTER THAN ANYONE.
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Mariah Carey is, as usual, hiding in the open. Maneuvering through the main dining room at Nobu Malibu with a small entourage, she’s wearing large sunglasses and a leather jacket draped over her shoulders. Trailed by flashing camera bulbs and the dinner crowd’s murmurs, she sits with me at a barely-lit table on the restaurant’s outside deck, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
It’s a cool summer night, but the heat lamps radiate enough warmth that she discards the jacket, revealing, well, a lot—just not much in the way of clothes. There is a concise black skirt, an overwhelmed bra, and a wisp of a black top. Mostly, though, her look is all boobs and legs.
“I didn’t want to walk over without my jacket on,” she explains. “This ensemble’s a little see-through!”
Carey has made a career of divulging what she wants when she wants to—which isn’t often. After decades in the tabloid spotlight, she’s successfully walled off most of her life from the public. She’s notorious for canceling photo shoots and turning down interviews. A colossal financial success and a diva par excellence, Carey has riches that mere mortals simply can’t relate to—and an origin story to match. “I don’t have a birthday,” she jokes when asked about turning 46 in March. “I was just dropped here. It was a fairyland experience.”
So in many ways, Carey’s upcoming E! show, Mariah’s World, an eight-part docuseries slated for the fall, is a surprise. It promises the requisite look inside the celebrity bubble, including rehearsals for her European tour, the planning of her wedding to billionaire James Packer later this year, and her unrelenting campaign against unflattering fluorescent lighting. But it won’t be, according to Carey, a put-it-all-out-there show in the style of the Kardashian clan—who are, coincidentally, filming something in a private dining room 15 yards away.
“Some of us,” Carey says, casting a glance toward the room, “talk about other people and what they do and la la la. But I���m not that person.”
Still, Carey’s combination of glamour, curves, and shade, expertly delivered, should make Mariah’s World perfect reality TV. And that’s what some people are afraid of. Tabloids have quoted “insiders” worried that a reality show will prove embarrassing for her. Wendy Williams railed against the idea, citing Whitney Houston’s regrettable appearances in Bravo’s 2005 series Being Bobby Brown. Director Lee Daniels, whom Carey has been close to since they filmed Precious, went on SiriusXM to voice concern that verged on spilling tea.
“She is very fragile, and she has been through a lot,” Daniels said. “She has been used, she has been abused…. Some people don’t have that Teflon sort of thing that I do, so she masks it with this coquettish thing that is hiding her nervousness and her pain and her own family’s abuse to her. She is misunderstood.”
Days after Daniels’ lament, Carey posted his inevitable mea culpa to her IG and Twitter feeds. The subtext, though, was a clear admonition to all other critics of Mariah’s World. She’s been famous since she was 20 years old, when her self-titled debut exploded onto the charts in 1990. After 26 years in the spotlight, two divorces, a “breakdown,” and a “comeback,” all roadmapped by 18 No. 1 hits, concerns about her opening up in a public forum are dumb. After all this time, do you really think Mariah Carey doesn’t know her best angle?
How do you want it...how do you feel?
Carey is singing 2Pac. Specifically, she’s launched into K-Ci and JoJo’s hook on the rapper’s 1996 hit “How Do U Want It” as a means of explaining that, over a career in which she’s collaborated with Jay Z, Snoop, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Nas, the LOX, Rick Ross, and Jeezy, the MC she most regrets not having worked with is 2Pac.
Livin’ in the fast lane, I’m for reeeeeal...
“If I would’ve had a song like that?” she wonders. “C’mon—I live for that!”
Her exuberant rendition is a reminder that Carey’s frequent ventures into hip-hop helped shatter the pop princess bubble decades ago. Her 1995 “Fantasy” remix with Ol’ Dirty Bastard was a landmark record that paved the way for the rap/pop collaborations that still proliferate the charts. Back then, she fought for the ODB feature and won a concession from her label, Sony, whose execs saw it as an appropriative move rather than an acknowledgement that Carey was part of the culture. “They were like, ‘Oh, she’s interested in this little rap music,’” she remembers. “I was like, ‘No, I’ve grown up on this. You think it’s something new. You’re kidding me!’”
In hip-hop, Carey found the perfect foil for her hyper-perfect vocal runs. “I love the grimiest rappers in the world,” she says. “That’s my favorite.” Carey remembers driving around New York one night listening to Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones” when she got the idea for “The Roof,” an album cut from 1997’s Butterfly about fleeting romance. She was similarly inspired in 2002, when she heard Cam’ron’s “Oh Boy” and flipped the beat for her single “Boy (I Need You).” Carey flew Killa to the island of Capri to record; he returned the hospitality by giving her a guided tour of Harlem in his Lamborghini. When she pointed out landmarks that even he didn’t know existed, Cam realized she was just as comfortable uptown as he was.
Carey found that through her hip-hop collaborations she could flex as both the moll and the boss, navigating between the two impulses to do whatever she wanted. People remember her vamping on roller skates in the “Fantasy” video, but few remember that it was also her directorial debut—she rigged a camera to a roller coaster a decade before GoPros were invented. (Twenty years later, she’s still behind the camera: In May, she signed a three-picture deal to direct, executive produce, and star in original movies for the Hallmark Channel.) She’s hammed it up in roles as a gangster’s perennial arm candy (she was a high-maintenance drug courier in State Property 2 and the only girl in the “Roc Boys” video, for instance). But IRL, when renowned record exec L.A. Reid first took over at Universal in 2002, he asked Carey for advice on who should fill the president’s seat at subsidiary label Def Jam. Carey suggested her friend Jay Z—who just so happened to be waiting outside Reid’s office. “A lot of rappers don’t have to go through what I had to go through as a singer,” Carey says. “I was always in a bubble that they put me in, but I was always punching out. It was a tough line to walk.”
Pop diva is the most familiar veneer to Carey’s onlookers. One could roughly sketch the arc of her career just by describing what she wore at each major point: black bodycon dress (from the artwork for her eponymous debut album), Santa-red snow suit (from “All I Want for Christmas Is You”), Bond girl bikini (from “Honey”), diaphanous gold gown (from The Emancipation of Mimi).
But now that Carey’s fully embraced her hard-earned legacy-act phase (she launched a Las Vegas residency, #1 to Infinity, last year), its emblematic moments—the Mimi memes—have not all been flattering. There was the contentious American Idol run in 2013 that pitted Carey against Nicki Minaj in a weekly ego-off. Then, a year later, her disastrously off-pitch isolated vocals from a 2014 Rockefeller Center Christmas special somehow leaked after she’d reportedly been late to the show and held up production.
Since then, she’s been increasingly willing to make fun of her flaws, purposefully playing up her diva image to let you know she’s in on the joke. In April, she reportedly threw a Mariah Carey-themed party in Italy where guests dressed up in their favorite looks of hers. In June, she deigned to be interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel while both sat, fully clothed, in a bubble bath. The gag was a clear nod to her 2002 Cribs episode, MTV’s highest rated, which saw her mount a stair climber in stilettos and show off an entire screening room inspired by The Little Mermaid.
