Andrew Chan, author "Why Mariah Carey Matters"

 Welcome back, friends, to our podcast, Unlocking Your World of Creativity. And, when it comes to Mariah Carey, her star power has never been in doubt. She sold millions of albums, cut more chart topping hits than any other solo act in music, and that unmistakable, incomparable voice. But, there's so much more to her than the numbers.

And that's the topic with our guest today, Andrew Chan. He's the author of a new book, Why Mariah Carey Matters. Andrew, welcome to the

show. It's wonderful to be here with you, Mark.

What a provocative title, first of all. Every time I've read it, and I tell people about it, they put a question mark at the end.

Like, why Mariah Carey matters? But I think it really is a definitive statement that you're trying to make in this book. And let's just start right there. Despite her celebrity, maybe her musicianship or influence haven't been fully appreciated. Why do you think Mariah Carey should matter more?

First of all, I will comment on the title. This is part of a wonderful series called Music Matters that University of Texas Press puts out, and I had long admired the books in this series, particularly Karen Thompson's book, Why Karen Carpenter Matters. And when I thought about wanting to write something book length on Mariah which occurred to me during the pandemic after I had written a piece about her for NPR and thought that I could explore more.

This was the series that I knew would be a good home for the project. And I think to your question of why she should matter more, I think she, I wanted to write a book that gets away from talking about her chart successes. Of course a lot of her fans are very proud of her. triumphs as a record breaking solo artist.

has who basically defined the: 1990

It's no longer true that critics only care about or primarily care about rock music and singer songwriters who are primarily white men. So there has been a kind of reappraisal in recent years, I'd say probably the past decade, of musicians like Mariah. But I think still a lot of people don't realize that she has written and co written.

All of her major songs except for the covers that she does. And she has also produced and vocally arranged them. And and her sound is incredibly distinctive. So I wanted to write a book that uses her as a springboard to explore something that I find fascinating, which is what I call this transcendent ideal of the voice use.

She is an exemplar a master, a pioneer of using the human voice in Really quite strange and evocative and expressive and extreme ways. I'm fascinated that Someone who is testing the limits and the boundaries of the human singing voice. could have become such a, in ways that I feel are quite avant garde would become such a commercial juggernaut and a household name and the sound of her voice and the really radical things that she does with it have become so commonplace in households across the world.

But I also wanted to dig even deeper and build a case and an argument for her as a really personal musician, a deeply intimate songwriter who is unlike a lot of a lot of artists who came up and were molded. By the music industry to be these shining perfect divas who stand behind a microphone and just sing ballads.

She is quite idiosyncratic. If you listen beyond the hits, the 19 number one hits that she's had on the Billboard chart you'll realize that a lot of her album cuts are very autobiographical. She's exploring a lot of pain that she had in her childhood as a mixed race woman. And she's someone who is not afraid of expressing her insecurities and doubts and beyond just singing about the usual topics of love, romance and courage, survival.

Yes. Maybe we

can drill down on that. Certainly the voice is there, but you did mention the writer, producer, influencer side of this. She's a real. Contributor and collaborator in a lot of ways and touching on the her mixed race background of black. I believe Venezuelan father Irish American mother, but she was very influenced by gospel by hip hop, all of these influences mix in together.

How do you think from the standpoint of her influence and I guess and her fan base? How did all that contribute to what I mean, she's now ubiquitous. Everybody loves her all generations. You can hear it on every radio station you turn on and every playlist you might select. So how did that, wider influence shape her career and what we think of Mariah Carey now?

o she's, her career starts in: 1990

her husband and the head of Sony Music, her record label to be an adult contemporary artist, which is code word for, or code phrase for music that appeals to a certain subset of white women. And it's even if it has R& B stylings within it, it's coded as very mainstream and white suburban friendly music.

The kind of music that you would hear on a show like Delilah, for instance, if you remember that show. And all these years later, I've come to embrace that music. It's no longer necessary. necessarily bad music. It's a kind of music that was very popular in the 80s and 90s, but she was always interested in Trying out different sounds and was a huge R& B and hip hop fan Even in her teenage years and so her narrative of how her career has gone is that even though she was doing these big ballads and appealing to the broadest possible demographic, she really wanted to be seen as an R& B and hip hop star, and that was very much tied into her.

Wanting to be seen by the broad understood by the broader public as a mixed race woman as a black woman, which a lot of people didn't know that she was, as I say, in the book, the Los Angeles Times reported that she was a white woman singing R and B at the beginning of her career, and it was only later that the broader public came to realize that actually she is a black woman.

She is a mixed race woman. But it is fascinating how because of her massive stardom, she is able to bring a lot of the sounds of R and B and hip hop that In previous years had been relegated to what was called the urban charts into global awareness. And of course, I'm not saying that she is the first person to do this.

Even back in the: 1950

Her vast array of interests and her flexibility in terms of her musical sound that made her sort of a conduit for the globalization of. These sounds. Yes.

And you mentioned these other artists and certainly every artist acknowledges their influences, but the comparisons really did set some of these artists off.

It's one thing to say I was influenced by an artist, but to say how do you feel about being compared to Whitney Houston Celine Dion or Diana Ross and you mentioned Aretha Franklin, I watched an interview with Whitney Houston. It's like, how do you feel about sounding like Mariah Carey? It's I don't sound like Mariah Carey.

I sound like Whitney Houston. And yet these, and I guess it's the flourishes and it's the, range and all that of these artists. But, talk a little bit about what you learned about how they felt about these comparisons and almost people wanted it to be a competition rather than, I'm influenced and encouraged and supported by these other quote divas.

It's fascinating because the nineties really became a time when. Black women came to the fore in R& B and pop music. You didn't just have Whitney and Mariah, you had Toni Braxton, you had En Vogue, you had SWV, you had Brandy, Mary J. Blige. It was a real flourishing of a certain kind of Black women's R& B singing and the style and aesthetic that comes with it.

So it's very weird to look back and realize that. It's that the media, the studios wanted to pit these superstars against each other when really they, their sounds are not interchangeable. They don't even really sound alike, although they are all using the same kind of vocal aesthetics, the language of R& B, the musical language of R& B music and gospel music off of which it is based.

But. It's interesting if you were to go, of course it was, it must have been very irritating for Mariah to constantly be compared to Whitney because Whitney, a glorious, phenomenal, one of the greatest singers of all time, did not write her own songs. Whereas Mariah Carey, from the very beginning, was co writing all of her work and co producing.

And so this is something that as much as she professes to respect Whitney and to have been influenced by her, this is a distinction that you will see her, hear her make often when she's interviewed and asked about Whitney. But if you were to go to listen to the duet that Whitney and Mariah recorded, finally, in the late 90s, I'm forgetting the year, but I think it's .

98, probably. When you believe for the movie Prince of Egypt. Movie soundtrack, yeah. Yes, you will hear the very stark differences in their vocal style. And I want to say, and I don't get too deep with this in the book, but my feeling is that Mariah just got so sick of being compared to these other singers that it pushed her to develop a vocal style and aesthetic that really is incomparable and does not sound like anyone else.

The, what I talk about in terms of the evolution of her vocal sound, especially in the mid nineties, when she starts to use breathier tones, when she starts to sing much more rhythmically and in the cadences of a rapper. When she starts to float between the breathy register, wispy register of her voice, into the belting and the more resonant, powerful notes, and into her whistle register, which is the very topmost part of her range.

The way she blends These different textures and timbres and parts of her voice is really unlike anything that other powerhouse divas were doing, including Whitney. And and that's not to say one singer is better than another, but I will say that Mariah developed a style and a sound that was distinctly her own.

Very good. Andrew, we've been talking about the book. We've been talking about the artist, but why don't we delve into the book a little bit and begin by maybe having you read an excerpt if you have a favorite passage or two.

Sure, I will just read the beginning, a few paragraphs of the book from the first chapter.

When I was a child, I had a dream about living inside a singer's voice box. I couldn't explain this surreal vision, but I think it was a way of getting my head around something that's obvious to me now, that the singing that moves me most deeply, the kind that could make me cry even when I was too young to understand the words being sung, engages far more than just my ears.

Singers are always working, intentionally or not. At the level of texture and shape, which means that the sensations they evoke in us are not simply aural, but tactile. A few seconds into a performance, I might feel as if I've been caressed by a breeze, or wrapped in velvet, or sliced open by a surgeon's blade.

True virtuosos are aware of this power and are never content to just be heard. They create sonic environments and bid us enter with our whole bodies. The most ambitious among them treat the voice as a kind of palace, each note a room to be inhabited, each timbral effect a surface inviting us to touch.

Thank you. Thanks for sharing that. This is my guest is Andrew Chan is an author of a new book called why Mariah Carey matters. He's also written regularly about music, film and books for people like the criterion collection, film, comment, NPR, the New Yorker and reverse shot.

Andrew, now that we've talked about Mariah Carey, I'd like to get into the craftsmanship of the book a little bit. And just to highlight a word that you just read at that passage virtuoso, one reviewer said, virtuosos are a tricky subject because they can bespell you and shut you down. And you get so enamored with the artist that you start writing like a fan instead of a critic.

How were you able to discern that separate that a little bit because we all love Mariah Carey. But how did you keep this from being just a fan piece?

I love that quote from or that blurb from Ben Ratliff who is one of my favorite music critics. So I was really honored that he said that I was really conscious of that from the very beginning, even turning in the proposal for the book to the very end revising the book.

I did not want this to just be a love letter. It is a love letter. It's supposed to be a love letter. Everything, even the more critical passages in the book, are written with love. But I wanted to take her seriously as a musician. And I thought that this was a challenge because she really has not been written about in a really deeply serious musical way.

Even there have been smart things that have been written about her, but but I was really seeing a lack of that. And so to me, the challenge was how to take her seriously as an artist, as a musician. And with that comes a certain level of distance. That you need in terms of your critical analysis.

And I was also interested in using the writing of this book as an opportunity to fill in some gaps in my own knowledge. I wanted to learn about house music, which I didn't know a lot about. I wanted to enhance my knowledge of gospel and R& B history and hip hop. And I was interested in the milieu and the history.

That surrounds this artist and what it was that made her what was in the environment that made it possible for her to be the artist that she was? What were the influences that she was soaking up? And that gave me a little bit of distance, that made me, that helped me understand her as.

A human being who's soaking up music and responding to it in a really deep way, just as we do as listeners. Mariah talks about herself often as being a music fan first. She talks about how she soaked up the sounds of R& B and Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, Chaka Khan, all these amazing singers on the radio.

And that's how she learned to be the incredible pop music craftsperson that she is. And... So I think the challenge to not write about a virtuoso with just pure reverence and adoration can be met with the kind of seriousness and critical distance that comes with realizing that virtuosos are not just born duh dah dibbi and they don't just happen overnight.

They don't just materialize out of thin air. They are soaking up the influences and learning from the culture and the history that has preceded them. And that is part of what interested me and part of what fueled the project. And you

talked about what else you wanted to learn. I think people might be surprised.

There are pages of references at the end of this book. No, I'm not saying it's an academic study of Mariah Carey, but the fact that you had the rigor and the sort of wherewithal to actually cite references and, acknowledge where all this research came from. I'm curious as to the approach of writing the book with this kind of, I'm going to document this and I'm going to reference

this.

Yes, I am not a scholar by training. I did get a master's in cinema studies. So academia is not foreign to me, but I am a critic by trade. I don't even write primarily about music. My day job is in the film world. And so I really, as a freelance arts critic, I write about what I care about. And that doesn't, it doesn't matter to me whether It's poetry, or a novel, or a great arthouse film, or pop music.

And, but, I knew that I, that this was something different. I'm used to writing in the essay form, 1, words. A book is very different. You have to sustain a certain level of engagement and And seriousness for and fun on top of that for several more pages, so many more pages. So I really took that as a challenge and I didn't want the citations and the scholarly research aspect of it to overwhelm the heartfelt and personal.

tone that I was trying to capture. So it was always a balance for me throughout and wondering, Oh, am I going too deep into the weeds with this R and B hip hop history? Am I is this something that's for a separate book? So to me, I want to speak to general readers. I want to speak to readers who might not even care or think they care about Mariah Carey, because to me, this book uses her as a launching pad to talk about.

Things that many of us, most of us care about, which is our relationship to music. Why does it move us? Why does it feel so healing and sometimes wounding? Why does it take us to another place? So I was really using her as the jumping off point to explore. Yeah, those ideas.

Maybe this is a good place to double back at the outset.

We were talking about how this book is a part of a whole series of music matters Sinead O'Connor you mentioned Karen Carpenter, some real, artists that you say why they matter. I was curious as a writer Any special considerations or extra pressure or expectations that you say, this is going to be part of a whole series.

What, was there a style expectation or even, just the, I guess the the weightiness of the top, how would, did you have to approach it as a part of a

series? Beyond the requirement that it be around 40, 000 words, which is a pretty short book. It was actually a really good project for a first book.

There wasn't a lot, there weren't a lot of stipulations or requirements or things that my editors were looking for. They wanted something idiosyncratic and because I knew that This series had accommodated those kinds of really personal critical writing and sometimes eccentric critical writing.

I knew that this would be the home for the kind of book that I wanted to do. And I'm not saying, my book is nowhere near as idiosyncratic and autobiographical and memoristic as Karen Tonkson's Karen Carpenter book. But I knew that I wanted to be very intimate and I wanted to have, I wanted there to be room for personal writing because why does Mariah Carey matter?

She matters because she speaks deeply and intimately to each of her listeners and I couldn't, I realized as objective and distanced as I wanted to be in my writing, I realized that there was no way that I could write this book without bringing myself a little bit into the conversation.

And so in terms of pressure I don't tend to write about people as famous as Mariah Carey. So that and this is the first book length work of criticism on her. There have been other more like celebrity persona focused books on her, but this is the first work. Book length work of criticism on her.

And so I really felt the weight of that. And I thought what I could bring to, I knew that I would be coming from a perspective that would be different from anyone else's this is really a book about singing and as much as I love and admire her achievements as a songwriter and producer and. Do my best to give those there give those aspects of her career their due.

This is a book about singing first and foremost and my love of listening to it. Even my background as a kind of failed singer myself, I go into that and what it's like to have yearned to be something and then to be looking up at this ideal of what you wish you could achieve, you that longing is I think suffuses this book.

Yes.

And on this podcast, so I always like to explore the ideas of collaboration and this is your first book. And and you've got a nice acknowledgement section, but more than that, I. I think we have this image, especially with authors of these lonely writers, working their apartments or workspaces or basements or addicts, and we're just tapping away and writing a book and all of a sudden it comes out talk about a little bit about the collaboration, the support, the mentorship, the, even the administrative side of really getting your work.

Yeah, I've worked in the arts for my entire career before I was an editor at the Criterion. Before I was an editor at the Criterion Collection, I was working in marketing at a film department in a performing arts venue called BAM in Brooklyn. And so I know what it takes to I know that it requires a team of really dedicated people to put out any kind of creative project and I was really well supported at University of Texas press.

I was just communicating with the publicist there, Joel, and my editors were wonderful and so supportive. But the collaboration even goes down to the books that I read to prepare. For the book. I really saw this as I didn't want to give the impression that I was the first person to write about Mariah Carey because that simply isn't I'm not the first person to explore R& B and house music and gospel. I'm drawing, I want to draw on the voices, the pioneering critical voices who have documented and engaged with this music. And also, I'm, as an Asian American writer, I wanted to draw specifically on the wealth of Black writing on Black music, which I thought was really important as well.

I think... Yeah, the books do not do not come, do not emerge out of a void, you are in conversation with the voices that have preceded you and you are communicating to an audience which includes your editors, which includes the publicist and includes, your friends. My friends who are big Mariah fans we call them lambs were very influential in the direction that I took with the project.

I appreciate you sharing that. Listeners, my guest has been Andrew Chan. He's the author of a terrific new book just out called Why Mariah Carey Matters from the University of Texas Press. Andrew, as we wrap up, talk specifically and very personally to a listener out there who's questioning their work.

Give us some inspiration of why blank, insert your name, and why your work matters. Because sometimes we forget that as creative and content creators and, people in the arts, whether we're musicians or authors or, any other creative craft. So why does our work

matter?

I love this question. Give me a moment to think about it. I, because I want to say something meaningful. And I have especially living in Brooklyn, I have a lot of artists, friends in different disciplines, painting filmmaking, singing, writing. And this question comes up all the time, especially in this moment.

in the world where things seem to be falling apart and climate, what does art matter in the context of climate change? All these big questions. It's hard to maintain this sense of scale. Needed when the pressures of the real world and history are bearing down on us. And I don't think those connections are irrelevant.

I I think we are, we make art out of a sense of needing to resist the pain and the anguish and the disappointment of living in the real world sometimes. And that's very real. Obviously art can, Emerge from joy too, but I think a lot of us create out of a sense of frustration and deep sadness and not to be too dark, but I think it, it matters because Ooh, I think, give me a moment.

I write because I want to create something that I want to read and I think that's true for. Any kind of artist. I think obviously you're communicating and expressing something to an audience, but it has to matter to you first, and it has to be something that you want to engage with first, and you're to me, as I was writing this book, of course I cared about the hands that it was going to fall into, but first to me, I was trying to explain to myself Why this artist had such, has had such a profound impact on my life.

And I couldn't find that explanation anywhere. And so I had to explain it to myself. And if for no other reason, that's why... It matters.

Yes. I love that. Thanks for sharing that. And thanks for the encouragement. Listeners, let's continue these conversations. We'll continue our around the world journeys, talking to creative practitioners like Andrew Chan that we've talked to today, really about how they get inspired with new ideas and how they organize ideas.

And most of all, as we've discussed today, how we make the connections and gain the confidence to put our work out into the world. And that's what it's all about. Andrew, thanks for joining us. And listeners, until next time, we'll be unlocking your world of creativity. I'm Mark Stinson, and we'll see you next time.

Thank you, Mark.