Mariah Carey’s ‘Glitter’ Is the Single Most Underrated Pop Album Ever
In the annals of pop music flops, few names come to mind more immediately than Mariah Carey’s Glitter.
While it’s true that the movie of the same name mostly deserved all of the negative reviews it got, the same cannot be said for the album that accompanied that disasterpiece.
In fact, when you take all of the circumstances surrounding its production and release into account, I’d argue Mariah Carey’s Glitter is the most underrated pop album of all-time.
For starters, history has already accepted that, from an artistic standpoint, Glitter was an absolute banger that stands among the best albums in Mariah Carey’s catalog. If you haven’t been following the story in the 20 years since, please just know that it has since been written in stone that was not a bad album.
If anything, it was just massively ahead of its time.
Case in point, one of the criticisms back when it was released was that there were entirely too many guest appearances. Like how Busta Rhymes and Fabolous take up a bunch of space on her cover of “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”.
Except that song completely and totally slaps and having a whole bunch of guests on an album is the standard now. Imagining a world where pop and R&B albums aren’t absolutely filthy with collaborations and cameos is like trying to imagine a world without Chicken McNuggets.
Speaking of Chicken McNuggets, the Glitter movie is set in 1983, the year that tasty treat was first bestowed upon the public. This leads to another thing the Glitter album was criticized over. Mariah Carey caught absolute hell for covering a couple of ’80s songs without changing them up enough for some reviewers’ tastes (as if the original version of “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life” also had Busta Rhymes on it).
That is an entire industry now, but these days people just pass the song off as their own instead of admitting it’s a cover.
When you get past those old-timey concerns, what you’re left with is a consistently solid Mariah Carey album that included some of the best…
…and most personal…
…songs of her career.
But it’s more than just being a little ahead of its time artistically that makes Glitter so underrated. As mentioned earlier, you also have to take into account the circumstances under which it was recorded and released. This is the project Mariah Carey was working on when she famously suffered a nervous breakdown in the summer of 2001.
You know, that time she showed up on TRL and took off an oversized promotional t-shirt…
…to reveal that she was dressed like early-2000s Mariah Carey…
…and handed out ice cream on a hot day…
…and we all reacted like she popped a titty out and gave the kids oxycontin.
Here’s the thing, there are some people in this world who are just straight up owed an apology by the American public. For the treatment she received during what was a legitimate mental health crisis, Mariah Carey is absolutely one of those people.
She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder around this time, which is obviously very serious. Even worse, the situation was exacerbated by her shady family.
In her highly recommended memoir, The Meaning of Mariah, she goes into a lot of detail about what was happening within her inner circle when she was recording and promoting the Glitter project. She says the inciting incidents that led to her eventual hospitalization involved being overworked by her record label and not being supported by the people around her when she complained.
Worse than just not being supported, she was concerned her family was trying to place her under a conservatorship. Here’s a quote from her memoir:
“It was no coincidence that my mother and brother were working on the side of the record company instead of protecting me and advocating for my well-being, and that they just happened to claim I was unstable to try to institutionalize me immediately after I had signed the biggest cash record deal for a solo artist in history.”
On account of the hell Britney Spears went through trying to get out from under a seemingly abusive conservatorship, we all know now how legitimately perilous that situation could have been for Mariah Carey.
Unfortunately, 2001 was a very different time (especially the first eight months or so) and having the gall to be mentally unwell in public just made Mariah Carey a late night talk show punchline for months on end.
That she was able to crank out an album that history has since come to view as one of her best in the midst of all this is absolutely remarkable, but it’s also only half of the story.
Remember that time someone asked Mariah Carey for her opinion on a bunch of different singers and when they got to Jennifer Lopez she acted like she didn’t know who that was?
There is a damn good reason why that happened. Even though it was reported on plenty in the months after it happened, the fact that Mariah Carey’s sleazeball ex-husband, music executive Tommy Mottola, was actively conspiring to sabotage the Glitter project has kinda been lost to history.
Even worse, he was conspiring with none other than America’s cool tía, Jennifer Lopez.
It all centers around a song called “Firecracker” by a wildly obscure band called Yellow Magic Orchestra.
Mariah planned to sample that song on the lead single from the Glitter soundtrack.
But, as if by magic, Jennifer Lopez not only sampled that same very obscure song around the same time, but also managed to release her version first.
It’s very important to note that, in an interview from back when this controversy was happening, the publisher of the song “Firecracker” noted that, prior to Mariah Carey, no one had inquired about sampling that song.
The Jennifer Lopez camp reached out a month later.
Somehow, it actually gets worse. Remember the “I’m Real” remix? The one that featured Ja Rule? The one that people actually liked?
One of the things people really loved about it was the sing-songy interaction between J-Lo and Ja Rule. With that in mind, have a listen to “If We” from the Glitter soundtrack.
That was set to be Ja Rule’s first appearance on an R&B song, but Tommy Mottola heard it and, in the name of sabotaging Mariah’s passion project, rushed to record and release a nearly identical song for Jennifer Lopez. This is not conjecture or conspiracy theory or anything of the like. Several involved parties have admitted it happened.
If this all took place in, say, 2021 instead of 2001 and news of it got out, careers would be ruined. A woman singer collaborating with the abusive ex-husband of another woman singer to sabotage said abuse victim’s passion project based on her own upbringing? In the #MeToo era? That would be a PR catastrophe of the highest order that Jennifer Lopez would probably not survive.
Instead, it all happened in 2001 and Jennifer Lopez gets to headline Super Bowl halftime shows over far superior musicians…
…while the public still views Mariah Carey as kind of a crazy person.
When you take Tommy Mottola’s campaign against this album into account along with his massive influence within the music industry, I think it’s fair to question how honest those scathing reviews of the Glitter album really were.
I’m not accusing anyone of anything and obviously can’t prove anything, but I will say that this review from a fairly well-respected music critic seems remarkably harsh, and the part where he positions Jennifer Lopez as Mariah Carey’s new arch rival within the first couple sentences is highly suspicious in retrospect.
I was very much alive and listening to music at the time. Not even once do I remember anyone pretending Jennifer Lopez and Mariah Carey were rivals when it comes to music.
Also, the line about how Glitter shows that Mariah “needs some kind of guiding force” is gross whether he was motivated by external sources to write it or not.
It is an extreme take on an album that, by the reviewer’s own admission, isn’t that far removed from her previous album. And then he brings it all home by comparing her to Jennifer Lopez once again.
Listen, if you think Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez should even be mentioned in the same paragraph as comparable singing talents, everything you’ve ever written about music should be scrubbed from existence. That is a demonstrably absurd take. One of them is a singer. The other is an actor who sometimes plays the role of singer. They are not remotely the same.
Oh, and we haven’t even mentioned that other huge factor that went into Glitter failing the way it did. It was released on 9/11. Yes, THAT 9/11. While that same fate had a way less noticeable effect on similarly huge albums from Jay-Z and Bob Dylan, neither of those efforts were followed up a few days later by the release of a legendarily bad movie.
When paired with that and a very public mental breakdown, the Glitter album never stood a chance of being evaluated as a separate and much better work the way it deserved to be.
On the bright side, as mentioned a few times earlier, public opinion has since shifted when it comes to Glitter. That was on full display when, on the eve of the release of her most recent studio album, the hashtag #justiceforglitter started trending. That led to an unexpected climb up the iTunes Top 100 charts and a whole bunch of renewed respect and attention for the album.
There was another sorta silver lining to the J-Lo thievery debacle. It forced Mariah Carey to rework the album’s first single using a different sample. She settled on a sample of the funk classic “Candy” by the band Cameo (who also feature on the single). That version of the song went on to be the best selling single of 2001.
This all comes up in The Meaning of Mariah, but Jennifer Lopez is never specifically named. I have my suspicions that it might be a non-disclosure agreement thing. While it ended up being the first album released as part of her new deal with Virgin Music, Glitter was supposed to be Mariah Carey’s last album for Sony Music. Instead, she was let out of her contract one album early and signed with another label. The speculation at the time was that she leveraged knowledge of a Sony executive actively sabotaging a Sony artist to get released from her deal early.
If that’s true, she almost certainly had to sign a NDA, which in turn would explain the “I don’t know her” line about Jennifer Lopez.
Speaking of lines about Jennifer Lopez, while she clearly can’t name her by name, it is made very obvious in that autobiography who’s being talked about, as evidenced by this quote (all caps mine):
“And after all that sh*t, ‘Loverboy’ ended up being the best-selling single of 2001 in the United States. I’M REAL.”
So, hey, if you like a good pop music album, do yourself a favor and give Glitter the chance it has always deserved. It’s way better than history would have you believe.
Originally published at https://adamtodbrown.substack.com on October 10, 2022.
