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Mariah Carey (born March 27, 1970) is an
American singer, songwriter, record producer, music
video director,artist and actress. Her debut was in 1990
under the guidance of Columbia Records executive Tommy
Mottola and became the first recording act to have its
first five singles top the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Following her marriage to Mottola in 1993, a series of
hit records established her position as Columbia's
highest-selling act. According to Billboard magazine,
she was the most successful artist of the 1990s in the
United States.
Carey took much more control over her image and music
following her separation from Mottola in 1997, and she
introduced elements of hip hop into her album material.
Her popularity was in decline when she left Columbia in
2001, and she was dropped by Virgin Records the
following year after a highly publicized physical and
emotional breakdown, and the poor reception of Glitter;
her film and soundtrack project. In 2002, Carey signed
with Island Records, and after an unsuccessful period,
she returned to the forefront of pop music in 2005.
Carey was named the best selling female pop artist of
the millennium at the 2000 World Music Awards, and she
has recorded the most U.S. number-one singles for a
female solo artist (seventeen). In addition to her
commercial accomplishments, she has earned five Grammy
Awards amongst thirty-three nominations, and is
well-known for her vocal range, power, melismatic style,
and extensive use of the whistle register. However, some
critics have said Carey's efforts to showcase her vocal
talents have been at the expense of communicating true
emotion through song.
Childhood and youth: Mariah Carey was born in
Huntington, Long Island, New York. She is the third and
youngest child of Patricia Hickey, a former opera singer
and vocal coach of Irish American descent, and Alfred
Roy Carey an aeronautical engineer of African American
and Venezuelan descent. She grew up in a Roman Catholic
family. As a multiethnic family, the Careys endured
racial slurs, hostility, and sometimes violence, causing
the family to frequently relocate throughout the New
York area. The strain on the family led to the divorce
of Carey's parents when she was three years old.
Carey had little contact with her father, and her mother
worked several jobs to support the family. Spending much
of her time at home alone, Carey turned to music as an
outlet. She began singing at around the age of three.
Her mother Patricia was her vocal coach; Patricia began
teaching her how to sing after Carey imitated her
practicing Verdi's opera Rigoletto in Italian. Carey
performed for the first time in public during elementary
school and was writing her own songs by junior high.
Carey graduated from Harborfields High School in
Greenlawn, New York although she was frequently absent
because of her popularity as a demo singer for local
recording studios; her classmates consequently gave her
the nickname "Mirage". Her renown within the
Long Island music scene gave her opportunities to work
with musicians such as Gavin Christopher and Ben
Margulies, with whom she co-wrote material for her demo
tape. After moving to New York City, Carey worked
numerous part-time jobs to pay the rent and completed
five hundred hours of beauty school. Eventually, she
became a backup singer for Puerto Rican freestyle singer
Brenda K. Starr.
In 1988 Carey met Columbia Records executive Tommy
Mottola at a party, where Starr gave him Carey's demo
tape. Mottola played the tape while leaving the party
and was very impressed with what he heard. He returned
to find Carey, but she had left. Nevertheless, Mottola
tracked her down and signed her to a recording contract.
This Cinderella-like story became part of the standard
publicity surrounding Carey's entrance into the
industry.
1990–1992: Early commercial success: Carey
co-wrote the tracks on her 1990 debut album, Mariah
Carey, and she continued to co-write nearly all her
material for the rest of her career. She expressed
dissatisfaction with the contributions of producers such
as Ric Wake and Rhett Lawrence, whom executives at
Columbia had enlisted to help make the album
commercially viable. With substantial promotion it
ascended to number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart,
where it remained for several weeks. It produced four
number-one singles and made Carey a star in the United
States, but it was less successful elsewhere. Critics
rated the album highly, and Carey won Grammy Awards for
Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance
(for her debut single "Vision of Love").
Carey conceived Emotions, her second album, as a homage
to Motown soul music (see Motown Sound), and she worked
with Walter Afanasieff and the dance group C&C Music
Factory on the record. It was released soon after her
debut album in late 1991, but was neither critically nor
commercially as successful; Rolling Stone described it
as "more of the same, with less interesting
material ... pop-psych love songs played with airless,
intimidating expertise". The title track
"Emotions" made Carey the only recording act
to have their first five singles reach number-one on the
U.S. Hot 100 chart, though the album's follow-up singles
failed to match this feat. Carey had been lobbying to
produce her own songs, and beginning with Emotions, she
would co-produce most of her material. "I didn't
want [Emotions] to be somebody else's vision of
me," she said. "There's more of me on this
album." She began writing and producing for other
artists, such as Penny Ford and Daryl Hall, within the
coming year.
Although she had occasionally performed live, stage
fright had prevented Carey from embarking on any major
tours. Her first widely seen concert appearance was on
the television show MTV Unplugged in 1992, and she said
she felt that her performance proved her vocal abilities
were not, as some had previously speculated, simulated
using studio techniques. In addition to acoustic
versions of some of her earlier songs, Carey premiered a
cover of The Jackson 5's "I'll Be There" with
back-up singer Trey Lorenz. Released as a single, the
duet reached number one in the U.S. and led to a record
deal for Lorenz, whose debut album Carey co-produced.
Because of strong ratings for the Unplugged television
special, the concert's set list was released on the EP
MTV Unplugged, which Entertainment Weekly called
"the strongest, most genuinely musical record she
has ever made ... Did this live performance help her
take her first steps toward growing up?"
1993–1996: Worldwide popularity: Carey and
Tommy Mottola had become romantically involved during
the making of her debut album, and in June 1993 they
were married.
Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds consulted on the
album Music Box, which was released later that year and
became Carey's most successful worldwide. It yielded her
first UK Singles Chart number-one, a cover of
Badfinger's "Without You", as well as the U.S.
number-ones "Dreamlover" and "Hero".
Billboard magazine proclaimed it as "heart-piercing
... easily the most elemental of Carey's releases, her
vocal eurythmics in natural sync with the songs",
but TIME magazine lamented Carey's attempt at a mellower
work: "[Music Box] seems perfunctory and almost
passionless ... Carey could be a pop-soul great; instead
she has once again settled for Salieri-like
mediocrity". When most critics slighted her
subsequent U.S. Music Box Tour, Carey said, "As
soon as you have a big success, a lot of people don't
like that. There's nothing I can do about it. All I can
do is make music I believe in."
After a successful duet with Luther Vandross on a cover
of Lionel Richie and Diana Ross' "Endless
Love" in late 1994, Carey released the holiday
album Merry Christmas. It contained cover material and
original compositions such as "All I Want for
Christmas Is You", which became Carey's biggest
single in Japan and in subsequent years emerged as one
of her most perennially popular songs on North American
radio. Critical reception of Merry Christmas was mixed,
with All Music Guide calling it an "otherwise
vanilla set ... pretensions to high opera on 'O Holy
Night' and a horrid danceclub [sic] take on 'Joy to the
World'". It became the most successful Christmas
album of all time.
In 1995 Columbia released Carey's next album, Daydream,
which combined the pop sensibilities of Music Box with
downbeat R&B and hip hop influences. A remix of
"Fantasy", its first single, featured rapper
Ol' Dirty Bastard. Carey said that Columbia reacted
negatively to her intentions for the album:
"Everybody was like 'What, are you crazy?'. They're
very nervous about breaking the formula." It became
her biggest-selling album in the U.S. and its singles
achieved similar success: "Fantasy" became the
second single to debut at number-one in the U.S. and
topped the Canadian Singles Chart for twelve weeks,
"One Sweet Day" (a duet with Boyz II Men)
spent a still-record-holding sixteen weeks at number one
in the U.S., and "Always Be My Baby"
(co-produced by Jermaine Dupri) led the Hot 100's 1996
year-end airplay chart. Daydream generated career-best
reviews for Carey and publications such as The New York
Times named it one of 1995's best albums; the Times
wrote that its "best cuts bring pop candy-making to
a new peak of textural refinement ... Carey's
songwriting has taken a leap forward, becoming more
relaxed, sexier and less reliant on thudding clichés".
The short but profitable Daydream World Tour augmented
sales of the album, which received six Grammy Award
nominations.
1997–2000: New image and independence: Carey
and Mottola separated in 1996. Although the public image
of the marriage was a happy one, she said that in
reality she had felt trapped by her relationship with
Mottola, whom she often described as controlling. They
officially announced their separation in 1997, and their
divorce became final the following year. Carey hired a
new attorney and manager soon after the separation, as
well as an independent publicist. She became a major
songwriter and producer for other artists during this
period, contributing to the debut albums of Allure and 7
Mile through her short-lived Crave Records imprint.
Carey's next album, Butterfly (1997), yielded the
number-one single "Honey", the lyrics and
music video for which presented a more overtly sexual
image of her than had been previously seen. She stated
that Butterfly marked the point that she attained full
creative control over her music, which continued to move
in a hip hop direction with material co-written and
co-produced by rappers such as Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs and Missy Elliott. However, she added: "I
don't think it's that much of a departure from what I've
done in the past ... It's not like I went psycho and
thought I was going to be a rapper. Personally, this
album is about doing whatever the hell I wanted to
do." Reviews were generally positive: LAUNCHcast
said Butterfly "pushes the envelope", a move
its critic thought "may prove disconcerting to more
conservative fans" but praised as "a welcome
change". The Los Angeles Times wrote:
"[Butterfly] is easily the most personal,
confessional-sounding record she's ever done ...
Carey-bashing just might become a thing of the
past." The album was a commercial success, and
"My All" (her thirteenth Hot 100 number-one)
gave her the record for the most U.S. number-ones by a
female artist. Towards the turn of the millennium, Carey
was developing the film project Glitter, and she wrote
songs for the films Men in Black (1997) and How the
Grinch Stole Christmas (2000).
During the production of Butterfly, Carey became
romantically involved with New York Yankees baseball
star Derek Jeter. Their relationship ended in 1998, with
both parties citing media interference as the main
reason for the split.That year saw the release of #1's,
a collection of her U.S. number-one singles up to that
point. Carey said she recorded new material for the
album as a way of rewarding her fans, and included
"When You Believe", an Academy Award-winning
duet with Whitney Houston; the song was from the
soundtrack of The Prince of Egypt (1998). #1's sold
above expectations, but a review in NME labeled Carey
"a purveyor of saccharine bilge like 'Hero', whose
message seems wholesome enough: that if you vacate your
mind of all intelligent thought, flutter your eyelashes
and wish hard, sweet babies and honey will follow".
Also that year she appeared on the first televised VH1
Divas benefit concert program, though her alleged prima
donna behavior had already led many to consider her a
diva. By the following year, she had entered a
relationship with singer Luis Miguel.
Rainbow, Carey's sixth studio album, was released in
1999. It comprised more R&B/hip hop-oriented songs,
many of them co-created with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.
"Heartbreaker" and "Thank God I Found
You" (the former featuring Jay-Z, the latter
featuring Joe and boy-band 98 Degrees) reached number
one in the U.S., and the success of the former made
Carey the only act to have a number-one single in each
year of the 1990s. A cover of Phil Collins's
"Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)"
went to number one in the UK after Carey re-recorded it
with boy band Westlife. Media reception of Rainbow was
generally enthusiastic, with the Sunday Herald saying
the album "sees her impressively tottering between
soul ballads and collaborations with R&B
heavyweights like Snoop Doggy Dogg, Usher ... It's a
polished collection of pop-soul."[36] VIBE magazine
expressed similar sentiments, writing, "She pulls
out all stops...Rainbow will garner even more
adoration", but despite this it became Carey's
lowest-selling album up to that point, and there was a
recurring criticism that the tracks were too alike. When
the double A-side "Crybaby"/"Can't Take
That Away (Mariah's Theme)" became her first single
to peak outside the top twenty, Carey accused Sony of
under promoting it: "The political situation in my
professional career is not positive ... I'm getting a
lot of negative feedback from certain corporate
people", she wrote on her official website.
2001–2004: Personal and professional struggles:
After receiving Billboard's "Artist of the
Decade" Award and the World Music Award for
"Best-Selling Female Artist of the
Millennium", Carey parted from Columbia and signed
a contract with EMI's Virgin Records worth a reported
US$80 million. She often stated that Columbia had
regarded her as a commodity, with her separation from
Mottola exacerbating her relations with label
executives. Just a few months later, in July 2001, it
was widely reported that Carey had suffered a physical
and emotional breakdown. She had left messages on her
website complaining of being overworked, and her
relationship with Luis Miguel was ending. In an
interview the following year, she said, "I was with
people who didn't really know me, and I had no personal
assistant. I'd be doing interviews all day long, getting
two hours of sleep a night, if that." During an
appearance on MTV's Total Request Live, Carey handed out
popsicles to the audience and began what was later
described as a "strip tease", removing a
large, baggy t-shirt to reveal a halter top and Daisy
Dukes. By the month's end, she had checked into a
hospital, and her publicist announced that she would be
taking a break from public appearances.
Critics panned Glitter, Carey's much delayed
semi-autobiographical film, and it was a box office
failure. The album Glitter, inspired by the music of the
1980s, generated her worst showing on the U.S. chart.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch dismissed it as "an
absolute mess that'll go down as an annoying blemish on
a career that, while not always critically heralded, was
at least nearly consistently successful", while
Blender magazine opined, "After years of trading
her signature flourishes for a radio-ready purr,
[Carey]'s left with almost no presence at all."
"Loverboy" reached number two on the Hot 100
thanks to a price cut, but the album's follow-up singles
failed to chart.
Columbia released the low-charting album Greatest Hits
shortly after the failure of Glitter, and in early 2002
Virgin bought out Carey's contract for $28 million,
creating further negative publicity. Carey said her time
at Virgin had been "a complete and total
stress-fest ... I made a total snap decision which was
based on money, and I never make decisions based on
money. I learned a big lesson from that." Later
that year, she signed a $20 million contract with Island
Records and launched the record label MonarC. To add
further to Carey's emotional burdens, her father, with
whom she had had little contact since childhood, died of
cancer that year.
Following a well-received supporting role in the 2002
film WiseGirls, Carey released the album Charmbracelet,
which she said marked "a new lease on life"
for her.[40] Sales of Charmbracelet were moderate, and
the quality of Carey's vocals came under severe
criticism. The Boston Globe declared the album as
"the worst of her career, revealing a voice no
longer capable of either gravity-defying gymnastics or
soft coos", and Rolling Stone commented:
"Carey needs bold songs that help her use the power
and range for which she is famous. Charmbracelet is like
a stream of watercolors that bleed into a puddle of
brown." Singles such as "Through the
Rain" failed on the charts and with pop radio,
whose playlists had become less open to maturing
"diva" stylists such as Carey, Whitney Houston
and Celine Dion.
"I Know What You Want", a 2003 Busta Rhymes
single on which Carey guest-starred, fared considerably
better and reached the top five in the U.S. Columbia
later included it on the remix collection The Remixes,
Carey's lowest-selling album. That year, she embarked on
the Charmbracelet World Tour and was awarded the World
Music Chopard Diamond Award for selling over 100 million
albums worldwide. She was featured on rapper Jadakiss'
2004 single "U Make Me Wanna", which reached
the top ten on Billboard's R&B/Hip-Hop chart.
2005–present: Return to prominence: Carey's
ninth studio album, The Emancipation of Mimi, was
released in 2005 and contained contributions from
producers such as The Neptunes, Kanye West and Carey's
longtime collaborator, Jermaine Dupri. Carey said it was
"very much like a party record... the process of
putting on makeup and getting ready to go out... I
wanted to make a record that was reflective of
that." The Emancipation of Mimi became the year's
best-selling album in the U.S., won a Grammy Award for
Best Contemporary R&B Album and received some of
Carey's most favorable reviews in some time; The
Guardian reviewer Caroline Sullivan defined it as
"cool, focused and urban ... [some of] the first
Mariah Carey tunes in years I wouldn't have to be paid
to listen to again". The second single, "We
Belong Together", held the Hot 100's number-one
position for fourteen weeks (her longest run at the top
as a solo lead artist) and was the biggest hit of 2005
in the U.S., while "Shake It Off" made Carey
the only solo female artist to occupy the Hot 100's top
two positions simultaneously. "Don't Forget About
Us" became her seventeenth number-one in the U.S.,
tying her with Elvis Presley for the most number-ones by
a solo act according to Billboard magazine's revised
methodology (their statistician Joel Whitburn still
credits Presley with an eighteenth). The Beatles had
twenty number-ones.
Carey has also had success on international charts,
though not to the same degree as her native America.
Thus far, she has had two number-one singles in Britain,
two in Australia, and six in Canada. Carey's
highest-charting single in Japan peaked at number-two.
Carey began a concert tour, The Adventures of Mimi Tour,
in mid-2006. She appeared on the cover of the March 2007
edition of Playboy magazine on a non-nude photo session.
In early 2007 she was featured with Bow Wow on the Bone
Thugs-n-Harmony single "Lil' L.O.V.E.".
Later in the year Carey will receive a "recording
star" on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and be inducted
into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (on October 21).
According to an interview with Entertainment Tonight in
mid-2006, she had already begun work on her next studio
album. According to a November 2006 Reuters report,
Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris has stated that
Carey will release two albums in 2007. It has also been
reported that Carey booked a whole month in Anguilla's
largest villa, and had a studio built in it.
Acting career: Carey began to take professional
acting lessons in 1997, and within the coming year, she
was auditioning for film roles. She made her debut as an
opera singer in the romantic comedy The Bachelor (1999)
starring Chris O'Donnell and Renée Zellweger, and CNN
derisively referred to her casting as a talentless diva
as "letter-perfect ... the "can't act"
part informs Carey's entire performance".
Carey's first starring role was in Glitter (2001), in
which she played a struggling musician in the 1980s who
breaks into the music industry after meeting a disc
jockey (Max Beesley). While Roger Ebert said
"[Carey]'s acting ranges from dutiful
flirtatiousness to intense sincerity", most critics
panned it: Halliwell's Film Guide called it a
"vapid star vehicle for a pop singer with no
visible acting ability", and The Village Voice
observed: "When [Carey] tries for an emotion—any
emotion—she looks as if she's lost her car keys."
Glitter was a box office failure, and Carey earned a
Razzie Award for her role. She later said that the film
"started out as a concept with substance, but it
ended up being geared to 10-year-olds. It lost a lot of
grit ... I kind of got in over my head." The film
has consistently been ranked as one of the worst of all
time in user voting at the Internet Movie Database.
Carey, Mira Sorvino and Melora Walters co-starred as
waitresses at a mobster-operated restaurant in the
independent film WiseGirls (2002), which premiered at
the Sundance Film Festival but went straight to cable in
the U.S. Critics commended Carey for her efforts: The
Hollywood Reporter predicted, "Those scathing
notices for Glitter will be a forgotten memory for the
singer once people warm up to Raychel", and Roger
Friedman, referring to her as "a Thelma Ritter for
the new millennium", said, "Her line delivery
is sharp and she manages to get the right laughs".
WiseGirls producer Anthony Esposito cast Carey in The
Sweet Science, a film about an unknown female boxer who
is recruited by a boxing manager, but it never entered
production.
Carey was one of several musicians who appeared in the
independently produced Damon Dash films Death of a
Dynasty (2003) and State Property 2 (2005). Her
television work has been limited to a January 2002
episode of Ally McBeal. In 2006 Carey joined the cast of
the indie film Tennessee (2007), taking the role of a
waitress who travels with her two brothers to find their
long-lost father.
Artistry: Carey has said that from childhood she
was stimulated by R&B and soul musicians such as
Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Gladys Knight, Aretha
Franklin, Al Green and Stevie Wonder. Her music contains
strong influences of gospel music, and her favorite
gospel singers include The Clark Sisters, Shirley Caesar
and Edwin Hawkins. As Carey began to imbue her sound
with hip hop, speculation arose that she was making an
attempt to take advantage of the genre's popularity, but
she told Newsweek, "People just don't understand. I
grew up with this music". She has expressed
appreciation for rappers such as The Sugarhill Gang,
Eric B. & Rakim, the Wu-Tang Clan, The Notorious
B.I.G. and Mobb Deep, with whom she collaborated on
"The Roof (Back in Time)" (1997).
Carey's debut album received criticism for being too
similar in style to the work of Whitney Houston, and
throughout her career, her vocal and musical style,
along with her level of success, has been compared to
Houston and Céline Dion. Carey and her peers, according
to Garry Mulholland, are "the princesses of wails
... virtuoso vocalists who blend chart-oriented pop with
mature MOR torch song". In She Bop II: The
Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul (2002)
writer Lucy O'Brien attributed the comeback of Barbra
Streisand's "old-fashioned showgirl" to Carey
and Dion, and described them and Houston as
"groomed, airbrushed and overblown to
perfection". Carey's musical transition and her use
of more revealing clothing during the late 1990s were in
part initiated to distance herself from this image, and
she subsequently said that most of her early work had
been "schmaltzy MOR". Some have noted that
unlike Houston and Dion, Carey co-writes all of her own
songs, and the Guinness Rockopedia (1998) classified her
as the "songbird supreme".
Voice: Carey is said to be able to cover all the
notes from the alto vocal range leading to those of a
coloratura soprano, and her vocal trademark is her
ability to sing in the whistle register. She has cited
Minnie Riperton as the greatest influence on her singing
technique, and from a very early age she attempted to
emulate Riperton's high notes, to increasing degrees of
success as her vocal range expanded. According to most
sources, she has a five-octave vocal range, though some
credit her with seven or eight octaves. In 2003 her
voice was voted the greatest in music in MTV and Blender
magazine's countdown of the 22 Greatest Voices in Music
she placed first. Carey said of the poll, "What it
really means is voice of the MTV generation. Of course,
it's an enormous compliment, but I don't feel that way
about myself."
Carey's voice has come under considerable scrutiny from
critics who believe that she does not effectively
communicate the message of her songs. Rolling Stone
magazine said in 1992, "Carey has a remarkable
vocal gift, but to date, unfortunately, her singing has
been far more impressive than expressive ... at full
speed her range is so superhuman that each excessive
note erodes the believability of the lyric she is
singing." The New York Daily News wrote that
Carey's singing "is ultimately what does her in.
For Carey, vocalizing is all about the performance, not
the emotions that inspired it ... Does having a great
voice automatically make you a great singer?
Hardly." Some interpreted Carey's decision to
utilise what she described as "breathy" vocals
in some of her late 1990s and early 2000s work as a sign
that her voice had begun to deteriorate, but she has
maintained that it "has been here all along".
An article in Vibe magazine indicated that Carey's
singing style highlights weaknesses in other aspects of
her music: "The impressiveness of her voice—as
well as her tendency to oversing—make the blandness of
her material all the more flagrant".
Themes and musical style: Love is the subject of
the majority of Carey's lyrics, although she has also
written about themes such as racism, death, world
hunger, and spirituality. She has said that much of her
work is partly autobiographical, but TIME magazine
wrote: "If only Mariah Carey's music had the drama
of her life. Her songs are often sugary and
artificial—NutraSweet soul. But her life has passion
and conflict."
Carey's output makes great use of electronic instruments
such as drum machines, keyboards and synthesizers. Many
of her songs contain piano music, and she was given
piano lessons when she was six years old. Carey said
that she cannot read sheet music and prefers to
collaborate with a pianist when composing her material,
but feels that it is easier to experiment with faster
and less conventional melodies and chord progressions
using this technique. Some of her arrangements have been
inspired by the work of musicians such as Stevie Wonder,
a soul pianist whom Carey once referred to as "the
genius of the [20th] century", but she has said,
"My voice is my instrument; it always has
been."
Carey began commissioning remixes of her material early
in her career and helped spearhead the practice of
recording entirely new vocals for remixes. Disc jockey
David Morales has collaborated with Carey several times,
starting with "Dreamlover" (1993), which
popularized the tradition of remixing pop songs into
house records and which Slant magazine named one of the
greatest dance songs of all time. From
"Fantasy" (1995) onward, she enlisted both hip
hop and house producers to re-imagine her album
compositions. Entertainment Weekly included two remixes
of "Fantasy" on a list of Carey's greatest
recordings compiled in 2005: a National Dance Music
Award-winning remix produced by Morales, and a Sean
Combs production featuring rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard. The
latter has been credited with initiating the pop/hip hop
collaboration trend that has continued into the 2000s
through artists such as Ashanti and Beyoncé Knowles.
Combs said that Carey "knows the
importance of mixes, so you feel like you're with an
artist who appreciates your work—an artist who wants
to come up with something with you". She continues
to consult on remixes by producers such as Morales,
Jermaine Dupri, Junior Vasquez and DJ Clue, and guest
performers contribute frequently to them. The popularity
in U.S. nightclubs of the dance remixes, which often
sound radically different from their album counterparts,
has been known to eclipse the chart success of the
original songs.
Philanthropy and other activities: Carey is a
philanthropist who has donated time and money to
organizations such as the Fresh Air Fund. She became
associated with the Fund in the early 1990s, and is the
co-founder of a camp located in Fishkill, New York that
enables inner-city youth to embrace the arts and
introduces them to career opportunities. The camp was
called Camp Mariah "for her generous support and
dedication to Fresh Air children", and she received
a Congressional Horizon Award for her youth-related
charity work.
She is well-known nationally for her
work with the Make-A-Wish Foundation in granting the
wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses, and
in November 2006 she was awarded the Foundation's Wish
Idol for her "extraordinary generosity and her many
wish granting achievements". Carey has volunteered
for the New York City Police Athletic League and
contributed to the obstetrics department of New York
Presbyterian Hospital Cornell Medical Center. A
percentage of the sales of MTV Unplugged was donated to
various other charities. In January 2007 it was reported
Carey had volunteered to teach music production at a
school Oprah Winfrey opened in South Africa.
One of Carey's most high-profile benefit concert
appearances was on VH1's 1998 Divas Live special, where
she performed alongside other female singers in support
of the Save the Music Foundation. The concert was a
ratings success, and Carey participated in the 2000
special. She appeared at the America: A Tribute to
Heroes nationally televised fundraiser in the aftermath
of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and in December 2001
she performed before peacekeeping troops in Kosovo.
Carey hosted the CBS television special At Home for the
Holidays, which documented real-life stories of adopted
children and foster families, and she has worked with
the New York City Administration for Children's
Services. In 2005 Carey performed for Live 8 in London
and at the Hurricane Katrina relief telethon Shelter
from the Storm.
Carey has participated in endorsements for Intel
Centrino personal computers. In early 2006 she launched
a jewelry and accessories line for teenagers,
"Glamorized", in American Claire's and Icing
stores. Later that year it was announced she had signed
a licensing deal with the cosmetics company Elizabeth
Arden to release a fragrance in 2007. During this
period, as part of a partnership with Pepsi and
Motorola, Carey recorded and promoted a series of
exclusive ringtones such as "Time of Your
Life". According to Forbes, Carey is the sixth
richest woman in entertainment, with an estimated net
worth of US $225 million. |
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