Those videos are incredibly, almost hilariously granular-and nerdy!-in the attentiveness of their listening. And maybe this is what led me to begin the book with an anecdote about me stumbling on YouTube videos that analyze Mariah’s vocal style and skills. At a certain point, the art has to be given space to stand on its own. Maybe this is rigid or old-fashioned, but I tend to think that, while it’s important to consider an artist’s intentions and her biography, that information should never crowd out the sensory, textural, emotional qualities of the aesthetic experience. I knew early on that I wasn’t interested in focusing on her celebrity persona or picking through the details of her personal life-except in the instances where those details could help illuminate something about how the music achieves its effects and how we respond to it. There weren’t any books that went into sufficient depth about her music, what it does, and how it does it. My book is primarily a work of criticism, and I was looking to fill a void that I felt existed in writing about Mariah. But I realized that what I wanted to do was very different. I did have some initial hesitation about doing this project because of how recently her autobiography had come out. I wanted to ask you about this choice to keep her at arm’s length.Īndrew Chan: I’m glad you picked up on this. What you’ve written is the story of why her musicianship matters. I know you started writing it in the wake of the publication of Mariah’s memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, and I’m interested in the fact that you included less biographical background in your book than some readers might expect. In the following conversation, we delve into the nature of these encounters-including the gifts and techniques through which Carey creates them.Įmily Lordi: I want to begin by saying frankly that I love this book-that as I was reading it, I just kept annotating it with exclamations of surprise and appreciation. Chan shows how fans have analyzed, emulated, and obsessed over her music in online forums, while also finding comfort and salvation in more private, intimate encounters with her voice: “I can’t separate my love from Mariah from the belief that her voice has saved lives, including gay ones like mine,” he writes. In a sense, the book tells a story about contemporary fandom by tracking Carey’s spectacular survival of the transition from the analog to the digital age. Whether he is describing the “leathery lows” of Carey’s voice, the “sly insouciance” of a track like “Fantasy,” or the nuanced meaning of “Candy Bling”-a song “poised precisely between bitterness and sweetness” that “acknowledges that some losses can never be restored”-he is explaining why Mariah matters to pop history and, more specifically, to her fans. When I first encountered Andrew Chan’s work nearly a decade ago, my response was akin to that of hearing a great new recording artist: Who is this?! He was writing about Jazmine Sullivan’s 2014 album Reality Show, and clearly listening to women artists with what James Baldwin, quoting Henry James, might have called “perception at the pitch of passion.” Since then, we’ve had a chance to talk about our love of pop divas, academic training in race and culture, and something more basic that I might call a sheer appetite for performance: as critics, we are trying to explain but also to generate a felt sense of what makes singers so moving.Ĭhan exercises this skill across Why Mariah Carey Matters (University of Texas Press, 2023).
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