Terrorism, Misogyny, Racism, Sabotage, Stigma, and “Glitter”
Twenty years ago, music superstar Mariah Carey released her film debut Glitter. The film and its soundtrack were a critical and commercial failure that nearly derailed her career. But how much of the fallout from Glitter was really about how bad the film and soundtrack were and how much was about the confluence of societal forces and circumstances that included the 9/11 terrorist attacks, mental health stigma, career sabotage, and pervasive misogyny and racism?
Pre-Glitter
Between 1990 and 2000, Mariah Carey amassed a degree of success that had arguably not been achieved on that time scale since The Beatles blasted to superstardom a few decades before. Over the course of those 11 years, she released 9 multi-platinum albums (1990’s Mariah Carey, 1991’s Emotions, 1992’s MTV Unplugged EP, 1993’s Music Box, 1994’s Merry Christmas, 1995’s Daydream, 1997’s Butterfly, 1998’s #1s, and 1999’s Rainbow), which collectively spawned15 #1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 (third only to Elvis and The Beatles at the time; she now has 19 and is second only to the Beatles).
During much of this time that she was attaining unfathomable success, she was personally struggling. In particular, her already precarious marriage to powerful Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola began to disintegrate in the mid-1990s…
