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Mariah Carey (born March 27, 1970) is a Grammy Award-winning American pop and R&B singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress. She debuted 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 flesh 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/Def Jam, and after an unsuccessful period, she returned to the forefront of pop music in 2005.

In 2000 the World Music Awards named Carey the best-selling female artist of all time, and she has recorded the most U.S. number-one singles for a female solo artist (seventeen). In addition to her commercial accomplishments, she is well-known for her melismatic singing voice, vocal range, power, and use of whistle register. Critics have said that Carey’s efforts to showcase her vocal talents have been at the expense of communicating true emotion through song.

Childhood and youth
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 extraction, and Alfred Roy Carey (formerly Nuñez), an aeronautical engineer of Afro-Venezuelan heritage. As a multiethnic family, the Careys endured racial slurs, hostility, and sometimes violence, causing the family to frequently relocate throughout the New York and Rhode Island areas. 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 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.

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 its success elsewhere was limited. 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: 
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 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 slated 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 the late 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 LP 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” (with Boyz II Men) spent a still-record 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.

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”. 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’ Def Jam 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. 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: 
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.” Mimi became the year’s best-selling album in the U.S., won three Grammy Awards (including “Best Contemporary R&B Album”) and received some of Carey’s most favorable reviews in some time; The Guardian 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 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). By this count Carey is behind only The Beatles, who have twenty number-ones.

Carey began a concert tour, The Adventures of Mimi, in mid-2006. According to a backstage interview with Entertainment Tonight, she has already begun work on her next studio album, which is expected for release sometime during spring 2007. According to a November 2006 Reuters report, Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris has stated that Carey will release two albums in the next year. DJ Clue confirmed in an interview the following month that he will be contributing to one of the upcoming albums. Also in 2007, Carey will receive a “recording star” on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and be inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame. “Don’t Forget About Us” is nominated for two 2007 Grammy Awards: “Best R&B Song” and “Best Female R&B Vocal Performance”.

In December 2006 Carey threatened legal action on adult film actress and politician Mary Carey, who applied to have her similar-sounding stage name trademarked.

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), while 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, taking the role of a waitress who travels with her two brothers to find their long-lost father.

Voice
Carey can cover all the notes from the alto vocal range leading to those of a 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 erroneously 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. 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”.