Throughout the past 10 months, the pioneers of hip-hop have been celebrated for 50 years of contributions to the culture, from language to fashion trends, to innovations in music production. As important as it may be to celebrate the Biggies, Dr. Dre's and Lil' Kims of the industry, there is still a lack of recognition of the unsung heroes of hip-hop – one of them being Mariah Carey.
The 90s pop diva with 19 No. 1 singles, the most by a solo artist in chart history, MariahCarey has maintained respect and relevancy in the music industry for over 30 years. The ever-reigning “Queen of Christmas” solidified herself as a pop music powerhouse with the 1990 release of her self-titled debut album and went on to release 14 more studio albums along with several compilation albums, soundtracks and extended plays. MiMi’s iconic discography has had an indisputable influence on contemporary pop music, and has earned her over 100 music awards from Billboard, the Grammy's, MTV and more.
Throughout her career, the same discography evolved to include an R&B sound which has played an important role in helping hip-hop to break through to mainstream audiences. Somehow, this contribution to the most popular genre in the United States remains underappreciated. MC’s popularity among mainstream audiences grew from the success of her first few ballad-heavy, pop albums that flaunted her five-octave vocal range, ranking her among the likes of Celine Dion and Whitney Houston. Mariah’s sound and girl-next-door image helped to make her a household name, but only at the cost of expressing her authentic identity.
“She was known for years as just a pop singer, and her racial identity was manipulated,” Arizona State University Professor of African American and Women and Gender Studies Mako Fitts Ward said. “Her proximity to whiteness allowed her to be a pop mainstream singer that any audience could relate to.”
Though she is of African American, Afro-Latino and Irish descent, Mariah was not marketed as a Black woman in the beginning of her career, which was heavily influenced by her then-husband and music executive, Tommy Mottola, who signed the singer to Columbia Records in 1988.
After Mariah and Mottola separated in 1997, the artist debuted a new sound with the release of her “Butterfly” album and took control of her image, giving her the space to embrace and express her Blackness.
“That 1997 album, it almost felt like a multiple coming out,” Dr. Ward, the Director of the Social Transformation Lab at ASU said. “It was a, ‘Yes, I am a pop star, but I am also an R&B singer. Yes, I might be mixed race and present as racially ambiguous, but make no mistake about it – I am firmly rooted in my Black culture and Black cultural production.’”
During this emancipation, Mariah established herself as a pioneer of the remix, straddling the line between pop and hip-hop music that was rarely ever crossed at the time.
Though Mariah had dabbled in remixing and hip-hop sounds before, most notably in the 1995 release of “Fantasy” featuring Wu-Tang Clan’s ODB, Dr. Ward considers the 1997 “Butterfly” album as “the pivotal moment where the hip hop community, specifically hip-hop producers and rappers, really embrace Mariah Carey, as part of that community of Black cultural production.”
Mariah went on to continue collaborating with producers like Babyface, Sean “Diddy” Combs and Jermaine Dupri and collaborated with some of the biggest hip-hop artists of the late 90s and early 2000s, including Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Da Brat and Missy Elliot. Blurring the lines between pop, R&B and hip-hop, Mariah established herself as one of the most versatile artists of our time, and by 2003, Mariah released “The Remixes,” a full body of work that consisted of her biggest hits, remixed and re-recorded.
“That early 2000s period in hip hop was such an important moment for the extended mass appeal of hip-hop music and the solidifying of rap music as the dominant genre amongst the global industry,” Ward said. “We have to consistently thank, to a certain extent, singers like Mariah Carey, who had a global audience, and more importantly, had the power of the mainstream music industry behind her.”
“She was transgressing that industry, and she was forcing that industry to have to see her as a Black woman and have to engage with her vis-a-vis Black, cultural music,” Ward said.
Twenty years later, remixes, samples and artist collaborations continue to act as staples in contemporary music and elements of hip-hop music are fused into almost every genre. Today, Mariah Carey’s influence can be heard coolly in the work of today’s pop and R&B biggest artists from Ariana Grande to Beyonce, and explicitly in the sounds of rappers like Latto, who sampled Mariah’s “Fantasy” in her own 2022 “Big Energy” (for which the young Atlanta rapper impressively “got MiMi on the remix.”)
As hip-hop’s 50th anniversary comes to a close in the next couple of months, Mariah deserves to receive a note from us all that reads, “Thank God I Found You.” From her always imitated but never duplicated whistle tones to her bodacious vocabulary, the musical contributions of the “elusive chanteuse” have helped shape contemporary music as we know it today, and without her, who knows where hip-hop would be today.