All My Friends Are Fictional’s Reviews > Why Mariah Carey Matters > Status Update

“Time passes, and I still experience Mariah's singing as an ever-renewing shock to the system. For me, her voice embodies not just a manner of singing but an ethos: she's one of pop's reigning transcendentalists. Like the diva geniuses in whose footsteps she follows, she's serious in her belief that a voice — her voice — can put us in communion with the sublime.”

“While it's true that many pop stars' legacies have been cemented with little more than naive love songs and party anthems, the search for profundity persists, and remains inextricable from the experience of long-term fandom. The artists we let into our lives may not always be able to give us wisdom or transcendence, but now and then we seek assurance that something real is at stake — for them and for us.”

“I was responding from the outside of the song … as a nerdy, closeted gay boy projecting his life onto a glamorous … idol. It wasn't until years later that I'd find poignancy in this collision of social realities, but when I was young, I felt the connection to be intimate and private from her heart to mine. Mariah made my outside feel like an inside. I knew if a voice were a place, I'd call hers home.”

“When you live in a closet, you learn to look out for signs. Signs of danger. Signs of rescue. Signs of what Wayne Koestenbaum calls, in his book The Queen's Throat, "the pleasure gardens on the other side of trauma."
Mariah's vocals seemed to be saying that the ultimate voice could also be the one that resonated on the queerest frequency. The most beloved voice could be the most freakish.”

“Knowing all her records by heart means that, at any given point, on any album, I hear the ghosts of Mariah's past as well as intimations of the ones to come. I revel in these feats of self-transformation, recognizing in them the artist's desire to leave no stone unturned, no trick untried.”

“Maybe so many serious music lovers find virtuoso pop singers distasteful because they assume that … to make a spectacle out of one's voice is to commit an act of vanity unrelated to the noble aims of art. Such disdain goes hand in hand with the widespread underestimation of singers' creative agency, and it has dogged many pop divas, including those who made it big in the ‘90s…”