Mariah Carey, the cultural attaché of Christmas, offers a reissue of her 1994 album, which sounds as timeless as possible for music passed through the innocuous filters of mid-'90s adult pop.
Living by the adage, "Go where you're celebrated, not tolerated," Mariah Carey has established a veritable empire around Christmastime. There are the annual holiday concerts, the yuletide-themed children's book, the animated movie featuring her CGI likeness, the Hallmark movie she directed, and enough merch to fill a sleigh. The day after Halloween this year, she posted a video on Instagram to usher in the commencement of the Christmas season. There's something archetypical about her performed love of Christmas. Like horse girls, Carey's identity has absorbed her interest. She is the epitomized Christmas girl.
And to think it all nearly didn't happen. Carey said she initially balked when her future ex-husband/label boss Tommy Mottola presented her the idea of recording the Christmas album on which she'd eventually build her merry brand. Just a few years into her major-label career, it was too early, she thought, for such a legacy-artist flex. Once convinced, she threw herself into the process. In a method approach to recording, she kept a tree up for the majority of 1994 as she rifled through the Christmas canon, devising new arrangements for old classics, mashing-up secular with spiritual (a pop-house riff on "Joy to the World" was given a Three Dog Night injection), and writing three new songs alongside her longtime collaborator Walter Afanasieff.
The result, 1994's Merry Christmas, sounds as timeless as possible for music passed through the consciously innocuous filters of mid-'90s adult pop. Though constructed with a utilitarian hand to stand the test of time across demographics, Carey said the album gave her opportunity to dabble in areas her other albums hadn't; namely, gospel and overt retroism. At the time, her label saw her as a franchise and clipped her wings leading up to 1997's Butterfly. That a Christmas album was Carey's laboratory for experimentation says everything about the intensity of her struggle for creative control early in her career.
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Merry Christmas, Carey has released a two-disc Deluxe Anniversary Edition. The original album returns untouched, anchored by her perennial smash "All I Want for Christmas Is You", which is, at this point, a total cultural anomaly, a phenomenon unto itself, a singular sensation, if you will. It might be the happiest song about heartache. The joy of this indefatigable song casts Christmas both as an exacerbation of preexisting melancholy and a salve - Carey's yearning, belting narrator is fine by virtue of her yuletide surroundings. Snow makes a fine cushion. The song is a multivalent blur of sensibilities, yet simple enough for a child to understand, like Disney at its most optimal. Multiple in-depth dissections of its inherent appeal have yet to explain it adequately or sap it of its magic. It is the apotheosis of the nearly diabolical populist ambitions of Carey's early work. No mere chestnut of recurrent radio, it re-becomes a smash hit year after year, as it's propelled into the upper echelons of the Billboard Hot 100 alongside contemporary songs. (Last year, it hit a new peak: No. 3.)
It become the definitive Wall of Sound carol - Carey cited the legendary producer Phil Spector's influence in the initial press cycle for Merry Christmas (she generally referenced the Ronettes), though her riff is decidedly cleaner with a dynamic range that gives its parts even more room as they bounce off the song's walls. Carey's version must be just what the style sounds like to recent generations of listeners. An oft-cited study claims that when you remember something repeatedly, you don't actually remember the event, per se, but your last memory of it. Here's the musical equivalent, a flagrant copy that redefined the aesthetic of its source material. Further establishing this dominion are covers of Darlene Love's "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" and "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town."
And then there were the nonsecular songs. Unlike her predecessor Whitney Houston, Carey did not come up through singing in the black church, but her debt to its musical traditions had never been more explicit than on Merry Christmas. For the gospel-tinged songs like "Silent Night", "O Holy Night", and "Jesus Oh What a Wonderful Child", Carey showed up touting her signature melismatic flair and emotional acrobatics. Sure, she'd hit a sharp note so gleaming as to be objectively holy and she might really take it to church in a one-off praise break, but vocally, Merry Christmas was Carey doing her thing. The major musical shift occurred in subject matter and backdrop - organs, bouncy pianos, and choirs (Carey's handful of backup singers was itself a small choir that had the power of a midsize one).
Like the greatest snapshot Sears ever produced, the album is a holiday portrait of Carey's voice in its prime. She took words that had one syllable and gave them five. She hit the ground enraptured, attacking first verses with gusto, and then swung back around, aiming at the melody like she was attempting to cut off its head at an angle. She made it look easy, but at the same time, hard. The manner in which her pipes seized around a note, as if to cradle it as delicately as possible, telegraphed effort. Even back then, Carey was singing as if her career depended on each and every phrase coming out of her mouth.
Her aptitude and technique may have shifted over the years, but that fraught delivery stayed consistent, disc two of the Deluxe Anniversary Edition contests. Spread across the bonus disc are yuletide odds and ends Carey has recorded since the original release of Merry Christmas. Like a stocking filled by an overenthusiastic parent, it's teeming with stuff you don't really need. There's a mini-concert Carey performed at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine a few weeks after the release of Merry Christmas, back when she aimed to recreate verbatim live the vocals on her albums. On top of a muddy sound mix, there's simply not enough variation to make the live cuts essential. Most of the remixes are merely novel with the exception of David Morales' transcendent "Celebration Mix" of "Joy to the World", released the same year as Merry Christmas. It's a titanic slice of stomping gospel house somewhere between a track and a song that finds early Carey at her loosest. It's a true gift, this one.
The only strictly new thing here is the "Sugar Plum Fairy Introlude", 45 eccentric seconds in which Carey vocalizes along to "The Nutcracker Suite" selection mostly using her whistle register. It sounds like Christmas getting kicked in the shins. There are a handful of post-Merry Christmas originals, too - three songs from her 2010 follow-up Merry Christmas II You and some soundtrack cuts. Their inclusion telegraphs some attempt to collect all of the Christmas songs Carey wrote in one place, but there are things missing, like another Merry Christmas II You cut ("One Child") as well as "Where Are You Christmas", which Faith Hill recorded for the 2000 live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The affectation of completism is, in fact, half-assed.
Still, taken as a (near) whole, the thesis spread out over these 29 tracks is simple: Mariah Carey loves Christmas very much indeed. One repeating theme in her original compositions is the suggestion that Christmas is a group project largely defined by a collective attitude. Christmastime is in the air again, everyone is singing, the whole world is rejoicing, we gon' help the world become a better place, every year forever and ever, amen. While Carey's faith is explicit in much of her music, she remains fixated on the granular, secular aspects of Christmas: twinkling lights, mistletoe, the exchange of gifts. Given the amount of space these totems occupy in our world (arguably more than the religious ones), it's not illogical that an icon would rise up as a sort of cultural attaché, rounding out a holiday trinity. Santa Claus, Jesus Christ, and Mariah Carey: Father Christmas, the son of God, and the merry spirit.
(Pitchfork)
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