How Mariah Carey Sparked (Another) Career Renaissance
Following that disastrous 2017 New Year’s performance, Mariah earned her 19th Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit — proving she is a marketing master.
We all remember that fateful night, almost four years ago. New Year’s Eve, leading into 2017. The feeling was something between watching a car crash in slow motion and seeing one of the most successful and impactful artists in music history violently fall from grace. Mariah Carey’s performance on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve 2017 was marred by a malfunctioning earpiece that she complained about throughout her rendition of “Emotions.”
“We didn’t have a check for this song, so we’ll just sing. It went to number one,” she said. “We’re missing some of the vocals, but it is what it is.” By the time she got to her record-breaking “We Belong Together,” the jig was up. Mariah had accidentally pulled the mic away from her mouth, revealing that she had been lip-syncing.
Mariah wasn’t the first artist to be caught lip-syncing, and she surely won’t be the last. However, not every artist is nicknamed “The Songbird Supreme.” With over 200 million records sold (excluding streaming equivalent sales), 19 Billboard Hot 100 #1 singles (the most of any solo artist in history), and a plethora of awards — including five Grammys — few artists, dead or alive, could hold a candle to Mariah Carey’s success. With that in mind, the disaster that was her unfortunate performance plunged her public image as a living legend into the depths of the internet’s wrath, as she became the premier (and literally, premiere) laughingstock of 2017. Within minutes of her unceremonious and visibly annoyed exit from the stage, Mariah became the #1 trending topic on Twitter. Users bashed her attitude, her performance, and her overall artistic and vocal ability. Needless to say, Mariah’s public image was a dumpster fire.
Yet, as we prepare to bring the year of 2020 to a close, Mariah has notched an additional Top 5 album, another #1 single, and become a TikTok sensation since that unfortunate performance. It was a steady four-year process, but Mariah Carey has not only recovered her public image and perception from New Year’s 2017, it truly seems that she is widely regarded and respected as the indisputable icon that she always has been.
How did she do it?
2017: Mariah’s Redemption
Mariah played it relatively safe and quiet in 2017, but she laid the groundwork for her rebrand by attaching her name and likeness to more current stars and trends without it feeling desperate or awkward. At the top of the year, she released “I Don’t,” a collaboration with YG, that fell in line with the pop singer-rapper collaborations that she helped pioneer, perfecting it back in 1995 with the Ol’ Dirty Bastard version of “Fantasy.” At the time, YG was coming off of one of the most important records of his career: “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump),” a song that became an anthem of protest during Donald Trump’s first run for the U.S. presidency and his subsequent election.
Mariah also released a remix of “I Don’t” additionally featuring Remy Ma. The timing of this was particularly sly; just a month prior to the release of the remix, Remy Ma dropped her bombshell “Shether”, a diss track directed at Nicki Minaj. A few years earlier in 2013, Mariah and Nicki were both judges on the twelfth season of American Idol. Their explosive fights on the panel dominated the story of the season and social media. By tapping Remy Ma, for the remix of “I Don’t,” Mariah subtly chose a side in the beef between the two rapstresses and simultaneously placed herself adjacent to a major pop culture moment without getting too involved. Later in the year, Mariah continued this trend of subtly aligning herself with major pop culture moments. She made a cameo in Girls’ Trip — a critical and commercial success that featured Tiffany Haddish who was having a watershed year in 2017.
Mariah also appeared on the official remix to French Montana and Swae Lee’s “Unforgettable.” It truly cannot be overstated just how massive this record was: the song peaked at #3 on the Hot 100 during its run, Billboard ranked it as the 15th biggest song of the chart year, it reached the Top 10 in over 15 countries, and it is currently certified 8 times Platinum by the RIAA to commemorate over 8 million units sold in the United States. Now, by aligning herself and her name to one of the biggest and most innovative songs of the year, the singer helped shift her narrative away from “washed up” and “irrelevant,” even if her version didn’t match the overall success of the original.
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Then came the grand finale for 2017. In October, Mariah wrote and recorded the titular track for the animated holiday movie The Star. The song received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Song. Her previous nomination at this awards show came in this same category, for her seminal 1999 duet with Whitney Houston, “When You Believe.”
In November, Variety confirmed that Mariah had split with her then-manager Stella Bulochnikov. Detested by her dedicated ‘Lambily’ fanbase, Bulochnikov served as the director for Mariah’s World, a poorly received one season E! docuseries that did more damage than good for Mariah’s image. Mariah then closed the year with a redemptive return to the Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve stage right before 2018. Closing her set with one of her trademark ballads, 1993’s “Hero,” Mariah had effectively redeemed herself from the previous year — but there was still more work to be done.
2018–2019: Mariah’s Still Got It
Having been redeemed, Mariah & Co. spent the following two years reviving her brand to become a current act. In 2018, Mariah would release her fifteenth studio album, Caution. The excellent album became her sixteenth Top 5 project on the Billboard 200 and was met with near-universal acclaim from critics and fans alike. The album launched with the lead single “With You,” which became her highest-charting, non-holiday single on the U.S. Adult Contemporary chart since “We Belong Together,” and her third-highest charting song ever on the Adult R&B Songs chart.
Remember, this is Mariah Carey, nearly three decades and fifteen albums into her career. Given radio’s notorious elitist and ageist tendencies, and that her last non-holiday radio hit being nearly half a decade prior, these were remarkable achievements. The year also saw Mariah broker a new deal with Live Nation, the avenue for her to continue and rectify her live performance image. The new deal launched with her Las Vegas residency, The Butterfly Returns, which was extended into 2019 and 2020.
In 2019, Mariah embarked on her acclaimed Caution World Tour in support of the Caution album. If 2018 was a year in which Mariah and her team sought to prove her viability as a modern act, 2019 was the year that they aimed to solidify her status as a legend in the consciousness of the general public. In May, Netflix debuted Always Be My Maybe, an original film inspired by Mariah’s 1995 classic “Always Be My Baby,” to over 32 million households in its first month of availability. Her 2009 hit “Obsessed” saw an unlikely resurgence after a viral video on TikTok revived the song’s popularity and made it one of the Songs of that year’s summer. (To date, the “Obsessed” sound on TikTok currently has 3.4 million videos.)
She was also tapped to write and record the theme song for Mixed-ish, a spinoff from ABC’s blockbuster series Black-ish. Mariah even nabbed an eye-popping $11 million-dollar contract from PepsiCo for a Christmas-themed commercial for Walkers’.
Which brings us to the most pivotal moment of Mariah’s 2019: after streaming was added as one of the main components of the Billboard charts formula, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” grew from a modern holiday classic to a historic record that has become the de facto Christmas anthem. Back in 2017, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” reached the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 10 for the very first time. A slew of unnecessarily complicated chart rules delayed the track’s inevitable rise to the top, but the holiday standard was a fighter. By January 2019, the end of the 2018 holiday season, “All I Want for Christmas” rose to a new peak #3 laying the groundwork for a massive campaign: Get “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to #1.
Mariah’s ‘Lambily’ fans knew what was at stake. Should the holiday classic reach #1, Mariah would break numerous records, but most importantly, she would raise her historic number of #1 songs from 18 to 19. For years, fans organized “buying parties” and “streaming parties” to help boost the song on digital platforms. They specifically curated viral tweets using lyrics or audio from the song to help it trend on social media. If anything, the relentlessness of her fans was representative of one of the biggest cultural trends of the last decade: musical artists have two promotional teams — the one that they hire, and their most obsessive stans. Mariah’s team and label took notice of the push for “All I Want For Christmas Is You” and put all their cards on the table for the 2019 holiday.
As Christmas approached, Mariah began the campaign to get the song to #1 on November 1. Mariah posted a video to her official Twitter account that showed her transitioning from a Halloween costume into the hostess of a winter wonderland. “It’s tiiiiiiiiime,” she crooned.
Since Christmas usually falls in the middle of the tracking week for Billboard, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” hits its peak anywhere from the week before Christmas to the first full week after Christmas (the first week of the new year). In the weeks leading up to those target weeks, Mariah did a Christmas interview with GQ (which opened with her singing the song a capella), collaborated with Amazon Music on a mini-documentary about the making of the song, and released a new Joseph Khan-directed video (the song’s third official music video) to commemorate its 25th anniversary.
Moreover, Mariah released a 25th Anniversary deluxe edition of her iconic Merry Christmas album which featured a staggering four versions of “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” in addition to the 2011 Justin Bieber duet version which was available on other holiday compilations. According to Billboard’s rules, all versions of the song count towards its chart placement, but, realistically, the original version accounted for the vast majority of the song’s traction.
The campaign paid off. For the three weeks beginning December 21, December 28, 2019, and January 4, 2020, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” opened at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song broke the record for longest climb to #1 (35 cumulative weeks) and helped Mariah become the only artist to achieve #1 singles in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s — a record only since matched by Beyoncé.
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Mariah has utilized the success of her self-penned holiday standard to not only achieve further chart and commercial success, but also permanently link her name to the holiday season. She has launched two Christmas albums, a Beacon Theatre concert residency titled All I Want for Christmas Is You: A Night of Joy and Festivity, and multiple holiday films, children’s books, and music videos inspired by the holidays. She has effectively become as synonymous with Christmas as Old Saint Nick himself.
Between the ultimate New Year’s redemption, a successful 2018, and a historic 2019… who could remember 2016 at this point?
2020: Mariah’s A Legend In These Streets… And Don’t You Forget It
So, here we are. Mariah kicked off the new year, and new decade, with her 19th #1 single, and an induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Most importantly, 2020 marked the 30th anniversary of Mariah’s debut single: “Vision of Love.” In commemoration of three decades in the music industry, Mariah announced the #MC30 promotional campaign. The campaign included commemorative EPs of previously unreleased material or live renditions of songs, organized by album era.
So far, Mariah has released an eye-popping 25 EPs celebrating her eponymous debut, Butterfly, Daydream, Emotions, Rainbow, and Butterfly albums. The #MC30 campaign came to a climax with the release of The Meaning of Mariah Carey and the The Rarities: the former is a memoir Mariah co-wrote with Michaela Angela Davis, recounting her most personal childhood memories, her side of her public life, and her overall journey. The latter is a double-disc release, the first side being a compilation of previously unreleased songs straight from the vault, and the second being a live recording of her performance at the Tokyo Dome during her Daydream World Tour.
Although #MC30 was mostly fan service, the promotional campaign served as a reminder for us all of just how legendary Mariah Carey is. She’s sustained an inimitable voice and talent for over thirty years — in one of the most gruesome industries imaginable. Currently, there is no artist that toes the line between legacy and current act as well as Mariah.
Through carefully curated promotional campaigns over the course of three years, Mariah has reached the sweet spot between a genuinely revered legend and a modern act that is still tapped into current musical and cultural trends. Not many artists that debuted in 1990 can say they have the cultural capital that Mariah Carey holds in 2020, but getting to this spot was no easy feat.
In America, in general, we are fickle with celebrity. As a general public of consumers, we could not wait to drag Mariah down after that New Year’s Eve performance — but the right branding campaign and genuine talent can prevail against almost anything. Mariah has proven that.
Looking ahead, Mariah is poised for another stay at #1 with “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” She has Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special coming out on Apple TV+, complete with appearances with Tiffany Haddish, Ariana Grande and Jennifer Hudson, among others.
It’s great that Mariah has the resilience and the intuition to make the right moves and tap the right people to help secure her legacy, but this should be the ultimate reminder to give our legends their flowers while they can still smell them. Sure, it gave us a lot of content, and she knows how to play the game, but it shouldn’t take a multi-year campaign to remind us and convince others, that the Mariah Carey is a living legend.
