Like it or not, the Christmas season now begins in November. That’s a full sixth of the year earmarked for festivity. For fans, the music is a jolly harbinger of all to come. For those with less affection for the season (or, perhaps, its unreasonable extension and commercialisation), the most unavoidable component of the Christmas soundscape – Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You – is the psychoacoustic equivalent of being strangled with tinsel. It opens with twinkly toy piano arpeggios that introduce an almost choral sounding opening sequence, featuring Carey’s famously melismatic voice flanked by church bells. The transition section closes on an extended multi-tonal “youuuuuuuu” framed with hammering octave chords and the famed piano glissando that pulls us into the more up-tempo main body of the song. I don’t want a lot for Christmas ...
I love it. I am, in the parlance, a lamb – a Mariah Carey superfan. Carey’s songbook is the dominant soundtrack of my life. Her autobiography, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, was released a week before the due date of my firstborn. The audiobook, which is read and occasionally sung by Carey herself, became the unlikely ambience of those first months up half the night. I started inadvertently referring to my infant daughter as “dahhling” because that’s how Mariah addresses the reader throughout. It’s a sad book, about a life with a lot of hardship and unhappiness, but one delivered with Carey’s characteristic sesquipedalian prose and an almost jarring level of whimsy, given the details.
My introduction to the “dad joke” format came via mine’s response to my explaining my love for Mariah, imploring “she can hit the high C” (little did I then know, she could actually get up to G#7). “I’d send her to the high seas” was his response – testament to the failure of my exposure therapy attempt to convert him by singing her catalogue ad nauseam. Carey’s five-octave vocal range is breathtaking (only Guns N’Roses frontman Axl Rose has her beat, in the pop pantheon) and her tendency to use as much of it as possible simultaneously speaks to her somewhat complex relationship with virtuosity. She took the whistle register (a form of super-high auxiliary-register singing involving a complex physiology of the vocal folds) from an occasionally deployed vocal embellishment to a melodic centrepiece. When early critics claimed she couldn’t reproduce the vocal athleticism she delivered on albums, she recorded an MTV Unplugged set to show what she could do live. Her maximalist rendition of Emotions uses well over four octaves in one song.
Like Whitney Houston, the other vocal champion of her ascendancy era, Carey is daughter to a very serious singing mother. Mariah credits hers, Patricia Hickey, with imbuing with her a love of all things festive. As one might guess, Hickey was Irish-American. She was reportedly disowned by her mother, Ann Egan Hickey, when she married Alfred Carey, Mariah’s father, an African-American, Venezuelan-American aeronautical engineer. Mariah’s relationship with Patricia was complex, and her experience of racism as a mixed-race child in Long Island was extensive and damaging, but music forged connection: “Music was my escape. My house was heavy, weighed down with chaos. In singing, I also found a connection to my mother, a Juilliard-trained opera singer.”
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Mariah’s descriptions of her tough childhood and subsequent grá for all things Christmas are often framed with maternal detail. “Christmas carols sung in my mother’s operatic voice brought a feeling of spaciousness to our cramped daily existence.” Later, they collaborated on a gospel-meets-operatic rendition of O Come All Ye Faithful on Mariah’s second Christmas album, Merry Christmas II You.
She wrote All I Want for Christmas Is You at age 22, with recurring 1990s collaborator Walter Afanasieff, and she has often described writing it and wanting it to sound like a Christmas standard or something from the Great American Songbook. It incorporates a lot of typically Christmassy instrumentation and motifs. Amid perfect (V-I) cadences, diminished chords give the jazzy, chromatic sound that keeps it consonant with the 1950s pop that grounded so many modern festive greats. I hadn’t pegged it as a protest song, but was somehow not surprised to learn that it was played as the closing number at the recent protest outside Seoul’s National Assembly supporting the impeachment of the president after his martial law attempt.
There is unquestionably a timelessness to the song – it certainly doesn’t feel like a piece of 1990s music. Appropriately, Mariah is conspicuously philosophical about time: “I refuse to acknowledge time. Famously so. I’ve made a lot of jokes and memes about it, but it’s a very real belief for me ... I live Christmas to Christmas, celebration to celebration, festive moment to festive moment, not counting my birthdays.”
Over the last decade she has managed to establish herself as a sort of human avatar of commercial Christmas. Every year, at the stroke of midnight on October 31st, she publishes a new video of her singing “It’s time” (to start playing her Christmas music again). With that, she takes up her position in the ears of all humans for the following two months until it’s time to retire into a more mellowed existence amid the unquestioning and delighted worship of her superfans for the less festive 10 months from January to October. In establishing herself as the queen of Christmas, she has shrewdly managed to sidestep – one can sidestep while occasionally dipping a toe! – the desperate scramble for cultural relevance facing most divas as they age out of what pop has historically allowed as the prime phase of stardom (that said, the more conventional phase of her music career contains one of the most storied comebacks in pop history).
Unlike recent ill-fated pop renaissance attempts by erstwhile icons Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, Mariah seems to have settled into her cosy festive era, in which she can continue in perpetuity as a timeless warrior for Christmas.
Dr Clare Moriarty is a Research Ireland postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin
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