In the following conversation, we delve into the nature of these encounters—including the gifts and techniques through which Carey creates them. Emily Lordi: I want to begin by saying frankly that I love this book—that as I was reading it, I just kept annotating it with exclamations of surprise and appreciation. I did have some initial hesitation about doing this project because of how recently her autobiography had come out.
But I realized that what I wanted to do was very different. My book is primarily a work of criticism, and I was looking to fill a void that I felt existed in writing about Mariah. At a certain point, the art has to be given space to stand on its own. Those videos are incredibly, almost hilariously granular—and nerdy! And I think, like them, this book expresses a desire to get close to the music, to put our ears up to it. EL: I love that you emphasize, in the book, that this sound is not just the result of Mariah being born with a great voice, but that she arrived at it through experimentation and innovation.
You also make a point to not privilege her songwriting and production over her vocal genius. AC: Mariah is incredibly deliberate in how she creates her sonic world. Mariah has even said a few times that she thinks of herself primarily as a songwriter.
I understand this impulse. EL: Within African American literary studies, which is my first point of entry, I think of the work of Farah Jasmine Griffin, who talks about the practice of trying to legitimate Black artists through a Western-civ framework—Ralph Ellison gets compared to Herman Melville, for instance.
AC: Right. And this level of attention is evident in the way she talks about her music in interviews. In this way, she is fundamentally hip-hop. But, like many of the iconic hip-hop artists of her time, she does get a lot of her creative, compositional fuel from the quotation of preexisting music.
