Day 9: Mariah Carey – Butterfly
Album art courtesy of Columbia Records
Happy Mariah day to all of those who celebrate! She just won the Video Vanguard Award, her first ever win at the MTV VMAs. It’s saying something about our current crop of talent that probably the most exciting win of the night is from an artist whose most active era was the 1990s, but that’s a discussion for another time. Today, I’m reviewing Mariah’s 1997 album Butterfly.
What Mariah was going through at the time is well reflected in the music. When she was 23, she married the 43-year-old music mogul Tommy Mottola. Even though Mariah was already famous and powerful outside of her home, she was powerless inside it – Mottola was controlling, and he monitored her 24/7 through armed guards that he’d hired and cameras that he had installed in the house.
When recording a remix of “Always Be My Baby” with producer Jermaine Dupri and rapper Da Brat, she and Da Brat decided to drive to a Burger King that was five minutes up the road. They returned to the armed guards pointing their guns at Dupri, who they felt was responsible for allowing them to leave. Da Brat spoke to her about the fact that she has sold millions of records but she’s not even allowed to go to Burger King, and she told Mariah to get out. A year later, Mariah and Mottola separated.
Butterfly came after that, when Mariah was finally free to make the music that she wanted to make. Mottola was obviously also the person who was in charge of her career – he was the one who discovered her, he signed her and he was also her manager – and he wanted her to be a traditional all-American pop singer, while she wanted to sing R&B. On Butterfly, she finally got to work with rappers and hip-hop producers and take some creative control of her own music.
The one thing that you can really hear on this album is that Mariah is the blueprint for so many singers who came after her, especially the ones I grew up on. However, none of them really reach her level when it comes to vocals. But the thing that really sets Mariah apart, even to this day, is that she’s a unique lyricist and has such a recognisable way of expressing herself in her songs. There’s something very visceral about both the lyrics and how she sings them.
There are some not-so-subtle references to her relationship with Mottola on this record, with the video for “Honey” featuring her escaping from a mansion she’s kidnapped in, while the title track seems to be about what she wished Mottola would have said to her. However, the best songs on the album are the ones about her affair with Derek Jeter, “The Roof” and “My All.” “Close My Eyes” is also among the best on the album. It’s a beautiful song about some worse aspects of her childhood and how they still reverberate as an adult. What she’s talking about is clearly dark, but there’s a softness to the song itself. She has said it’s one of the most revealing songs she’s ever written.
I would ride to war for Mariah. I love the divas and she reigns supreme. Some of these songs I had never heard, some I hadn’t heard since I was a kid. 8.5/10 for this one. It dips a tiny bit at the end, but it’s still great.