Begin as You Mean to Go On

Lambs: Happy 2020!

The year is off to a great start for me and I intend to rededicate myself to the blog this year. At least a post a month seems reasonable, right? I mean, at least! I have so much to bestow uponst thou.

Mariah is having an epic 2020. "All I Want for Christmas Is You" went to number one after TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, and she also became the first artist to have a number one on Billboard's Hot 100 in FOUR DECADES: the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s. My girl is flowing and growing.

But as longtime (lol) readers will realize, this isn't a blog about MC news but rather a meandering, free associative, interdisciplinary exploration of her oeuvre. With that in mind, I'd like to relate a little anecdote from earlier this week.

As many of you may know, I have a Mariah Spotify playlist I'm rather proud of (dm me for the link). Clocking in at six hours and 52 minutes, it's a carefully curated musical document containing only her best works (sadly Glitter is not currently on Spotify so gems like "Reflections" and "If We" are absent. May this please manifest in 2020). As I was driving along, I was treated to one of my faves, "Underneath the Stars."

Was there a better moment in 1995 than when MC sang:

And I lay in bed all night and I was

Drifting, drifting, drifting, drifting

There was not.

And then, through some cosmic intervention, the playlist gifted me "Angel (the prelude)" (touched upon lightly in this post).

Separated by 12 years, the two tracks offer an amazingly undiluted artistic vision, consistency of tone, appeal to our ethereal souls, habitation among the stuff of cloud wisps, vocalization of the essence of starlight -- etc etc. They are not the same; rather they call to each other over the years and hear an echoing response.

It's tempting to call this simply a maturation/evolution of style. Case in point: Piet Mondrian's "The Gray Tree" from 1912, compared to his famous "Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue" from 1942.

The early work clearly shows the Cubist struggle Mondrian was exploring as he applied the style to representation, a struggle that dissolved in the purity of the later abstractions. I would argue that the distinction between an artist's maturation and the process at work in the above Mariah comparison is real, and important. I posit that Mariah's work from Daydream onwards (pre-Daydream was unfortunately overly Mottola-controlled ("Mottrolla"? Heh.)) is less an evolution than a series of episodes of completed arrival, form fully expressed. There is no "forward motion" in this oeuvre, unless we subscribe to the Gregorian calendar and a linear concept of time (sooooo 2015). Rather there are continued mature explorations of expression. Glitter is as perfect as Charmbracelet  as Me. I am Mariah. 

In a nod to Truman Capote, Mariah's post-1995 body of work can be heard as One Voice, Many Rooms. Happy new year, and here's to more fully-fledged MC masterworks this year.

AIWFCIY

Lambs: It's been a while. Welcome back! As the holidays are upon us, and since so many of you have been drawing my attention to the numerous mentions of Mariah in the media as of late, I thought I would give you the ULTIMATE GIFT by blessing you with my very important perspectives on perhaps our only modern-day Christmas classic, "All I Want For Christmas Is You" (AIWFCIY).

First, let us take to the literature.

Some people think it is SO FUNNY to take Mariah/AIWFCIY "seriously;" the joke however is on them. Even when they know the joke is on them, the joke is still on them. Because as this article from The Atlantic on the song as "historical dialectic" points out, AIWFCIY has grossed $50 million since its 1994 release. That is more than all the readers of this blog will earn in our collective lifetimes.

This AV Club piece takes a deeper (and less tongue-in-cheek) dive, trying to pin down exactly what combination of melody, lyrics, and je ne sais quoi has landed AIWFCIY at the top of holiday airplay lists with the predictability of a four-hour Christmas afternoon nap. As track producer and longtime Carey collaborator Walter Afanasieff notes in the piece, "'It’s not like no one writes Christmas songs—everyone is trying to get a Christmas song. But for whatever reason ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ just became that song. It’s kind of something you never would have thought, and you can’t really explain why, and we feel lucky, because it was the last major song to enter that Christmas canon, and then the door slammed shut. It just closed.'" (Sorry not sorry Ariana Grande.)

Leave it to the Times to strike the correct tone: respectful, awed, and thankful. Pointing to her non-flashy turn in 2009's Precious, the piece gives a nod to the legitimacy of her acting career even while noting the loonier moments of her recently-aired Hallmark special, A Christmas Melody. However, the (deserved) permanence of AIWFCIY still sits at the piece's center, despite assessments such as: "She’s become to Christmas what the pumpkin spice latte is to fall: nutmeg, foam and caffeine. Meanwhile, her determination to be mandatorily anti-blues makes her a human flu shot."

Now, let us uncover some of the AIWFCIY gems which the Internet has to offer.

Here is AIWFCIY put through a MIDI converter then back through an mp3 converter. It recently brought a friend to tears.

Here is AIWFCIY in a minor key.

Here is AIWFCIY on Chatroulette.

I don't know what this is.

Here is an ASL version.

Finally, did you know that Mariah herself is responsible for (at least) EIGHT versions of the song? Jezebel put together this rundown. Special props to the So So Def Remix:

I "rediscovered" Mariah's 1994 Christmas album a couple of years ago; even as a lamb, I never really gave it much time until I put it on while writing cards one year and was blown away. So what do I think about AIWFCIY? Catchy, obvs. The vocals are weirdly far back in the mix in a way that the rest of the album (and her output at that time generally) was not, which I think plays into the retro sound that Afanasieff refers to in the AV Club piece. And I have to wonder if its debut before the advent of the Internet with all of its cynicism and instant ruining-of-everything/exaltation-of-everything is part of what has guaranteed its longevity. It is a vision of lost cultural self-love. And that is all that you've given to me.

ANYWAY. What's the big deal? Everyone knows that "O Holy Night" blows AIWFCIY out of the water.