Mariah Carey is zipping up to Harlem in Cam’ron’s purple Lamborghini when she suggests they ditch her security. It’s long past the middle of the night, they’ve outgrown the afters at her Tribeca penthouse and want some fun in the relative anonymity before dawn. Cam steps on the gas, gaining some distance on Carey’s detail in the SUV behind them, and speeds her to a brick church on 131st Street, where her great-aunt Nana Reese used to worship, and where her mother and father were married.
In Carey’s recounting, this moment occurs after the release of 2002’s Charmbracelet, her ninth album, and as a prologue to the creation of The Emancipation of Mimi, the massive 2005 release that would reinvigorate a career that, at that time, many in the music industry and media had left for dead. She had weathered the chaotic rollout of her 2001 movie Glitter, a commercial flop reviled by critics. Its accompanying soundtrack was released on 9/11, which Carey watched live on television from the communal room of a Los Angeles rehab facility. (More than a decade later, Carey would reveal she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.)
That July, she’d planned a stunt with MTV in which she rolled an ice cream cart onto the set of TRL to promote “Loverboy” and rambled a bit, calling it “my therapy session.” For the tightly controlled TRL, it was off-the-cuff and random, but after three decades of reality television, not that wild in hindsight. Yet host Carson Daly sniffed sensationalistically that “Mariah Carey’s lost her mind,” and the tabloids sneered that she was “crazy.” Her label, Virgin, paid her $28 million to leave its stable rather than put up with the flagging sales and negative press.
Charmbracelet, the result of a bidding war won by Island Def Jam, was layered and introspective but didn’t shoot her to the peaks she’d achieved in the past. Yet by the time she was joyriding in Cam’s Lambo, she had reached peace with what she had overcome—Glitter and a sexist, racist media culture trading on schadenfreude, but also the aftermath of her controlling and coercive marriage to former label boss Tommy Mottola and her fractured relationship with opportunistic family members. Outside the crumbling Harlem church, Carey contemplated her great-aunt and grandmother’s ownership of several brownstones despite their lack of formal education, meditated on the cumulative effects of the Jim Crow South, and recalled her devout Nana Reese, an “extra-crispy Christian.”
“So much of the pressure from the recent past had been lifted,” Carey wrote in her 2020 memoir with Michaela Angela Davis, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. “I had a new record deal. I had people who were excited and enthusiastic about my comeback. I had thought that Glitter would be the death of me, but it gave me new life. I took it as an opportunity to retreat, rest, and renew my purpose.”
At 35, Carey was primed to write The Emancipation of Mimi, named for a long-fought spiritual liberation and a nickname from her childhood. Though she had always considered herself a soul singer, Carey—a multiracial woman of Black American, Afro-Venezuelan, and Irish American descent—had been dogged by label suits demanding she remain in the “crossover” white pop space even after years of hip-hop-influenced singles and collaborations with rappers.
For the bulk of Mimi, Carey reunited with Jermaine Dupri, the So So Def super-producer who had worked on Charmbracelet, 1996’s “Always Be My Baby,” and produced her best remixes (“Honey,” “All I Want for Christmas Is You”). Their approach was contemporary, free, and in the moment, embracing Atlanta’s growing dominance in hip-hop and Carey’s desire to write bright and cheeky songs about love and relationships. At the same time, she was reinvesting in her spiritual faith, as manifested in one of Mimi’s most powerful songs, “Fly Like a Bird,” a gospel soul track that features Bishop Clarence Keaton, the leader of the Brownsville, Brooklyn church she began attending regularly during the rough years at the turn of the millennium. “Don’t let the world break me tonight,” she belts, clear and emphatic. “I need the strength of You by my side.”
“Fly Like a Bird” is the only blatant godly part of Mimi. Like R&B throughout its existence but especially in the mid-2000s, the two moods are love and the club. Mimi’s songs express the fun she’d been yearning for, making tactile the sound of an evolving woman who’d shook free from her albatross and kicked off her Choos. “When I see Mariah now,” Dupri told Joan Morgan at Essence in 2005, “I see her almost as a new person who’s lived a full life.” Carey’s new attitude paid off: Mimi became a colossal success, ultimately selling seven million copies in the U.S. Seven months after the album’s initial release, an Ultra Platinum Edition added an EP worth of remixes and songs, including the soon-to-be-everywhere, lush slow jam “Don’t Forget About Us,” which became Carey’s 17th No. 1 single and tied a record set by Elvis Presley (she later surpassed him). Untethered from the judgment of others, Carey returned with a vengeance.
From Mimi’s opening track, “It’s Like That,” Carey signals her desire to put an end to the past. Over Dupri’s whistling synths and drum machine, she sets a boundary, drawing the line at “stress” and “fights”: “Mimi’s emancipation/A cause for celebration,” she chirps. “I ain’t gonna let nobody’s drama bother me.” The drum machine has a dinky clink at first, a common tic in the crunk era, but it’s a proportionate amount of dink that allows Carey to soar between the kick drums and cowbell. On the triple-time verses, she telegraphs that no matter her superstar status, her ears are angled toward the club: “All the fellas keep lookin’ at us/Me and my girls on the floor like, what?/While the DJ keeps on spinnin’ our cut,” she sings, cocksure in a fashion that would inspire two decades of dancefloors to mimic her pose, before unforgettably rhyming “Caution, it’s so explosive” with “Them chickens is ash and I’m lotion.”
Carey was lotion, and she was a hair-flip. She flaunted her impassivity to drama on “Shake It Off,” the slinking, mid-tempo radio hit built on a piano-propelled lowrider bounce. As she reads a laundry list of a paramour’s indiscretions, including “this one and that one by the pool, on the beach, in the streets,” her voice is baby-oil smooth and almost slack to signify her breezy indifference: She can’t even bother to entirely enunciate consonants. The whisper quality of her background vocals—“I gotta shake, shake, shake you off”—sounds like salt thrown over the shoulder to prevent bad luck, a gentle internal monologue that gives the song its nimble quality. On “Say Somethin’,” another chrome-smooth single—and, alongside the jaunty “To the Floor,” her first time collaborating with the Neptunes—Carey bats her eyes and flirts with a coy low register, the smoky persuasion of Snoop Dogg as her rapper foil. (The album cut, however, remains slightly inferior to the sublime So So Def remix with Dem Franchize Boyz.)
These three singles, as well as the breakup dirge and gigantic hit “We Belong Together,” are notable for what Carey is not doing in them: She is not performing vocal gymnastics, she is not hitting impossibly high notes, she is not venturing anywhere near music that could be considered overly emotional or even treacly. It is easy to get caught up in the mere fact of Mariah Carey’s voice, which is impressive and beguiling but invites the listener to get over-jazzed by her technical razzle-dazzle—her four-and-a-half-octave range, her whistle register, her melismatic backflips. This prowess can elide the emotion within each song, and on Mimi especially, she is exercising a characteristic rarely cited in exaltations of her genius: her total restraint. “I’ve just never wanted to only belt,” she told the New York Times’ Lola Ogunnaike. “And when I sing breathy it feels more intimate.”
Her vocal self-discipline fit perfectly in a year when the biggest and most culturally resonant R&B hits—Ciara’s “1, 2 Step,” Amerie’s “1 Thing,” Kelis’ “Milkshake,” even Rihanna’s “Pon de Replay”—were sharp and contained. Those records played tight, streamlined production against simple, sometimes coquettish vocals, a response to the gospel-inflected power ballads that had dominated R&B in the ’90s, and Carey sat neatly within this zeitgeist. Her ability to convey the more sordid nuances of relationships—and assert herself as a much stronger woman finally having the best night on the town—was undeniable to fans old and new. Everybody loves a redemption narrative. Mimi was the best-selling album of 2005, ubiquitous on all radio stations and video channels, and remains the marker of when pop-R&B morphed irrevocably with hip-hop’s synthy shift (not to mention the mid-’00s dominance of the Korg Triton).
In retrospect, Mimi feels like a pointed assertion of Carey’s relevance in the third decade of her career. She was catwalking out of the ’90s into a wiser, more authoritative iteration of herself—as signified by the futuristic album cover, where she stood gilded and celestially glowing, infinite golden leg aslant. Her exhortations to the physical world situated her within the moment too, as she sang about using the answering machine or changing the terrestrial radio station, technological concerns that would be dustbinned within a decade. (The last-call jam “Get Your Number” also places her firmly there, courtesy of Jermaine Dupri’s extremely 2005 delivery, though their playful good time at least gave us Michael Ealy as its video club hook-up.)
Behind the pop juggernaut, though, resides an extremely enduring soul record. Strip away the memory of hearing Hot 97 and MTV Jams play “We Belong Together” 12 times an hour, and it’s affecting how in the pocket Carey was. On “Stay the Night,” a newly famous Kanye West revs up the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow,” while Carey makes being a side chick sound like the most angelic pursuit in the world, singing in a rasp alongside the pops of the sampled record. On the chorus, when she belts “niiiiiiiight” and “liiiiiiight,” she mirrors the pure, planetary timbre of a very young Michael Jackson (a reminder that she covered “I’ll Be There” for her 1992 MTV Unplugged EP). On “Mine Again,” with its flourishes of Rhodes and flute, Carey channels Diana Ross without ever sounding like anyone but herself. “Circles” hearkens to classic Philadelphia soul with its warm bass guitar, sax, and other live instrumentation, showcasing Carey’s most kaleidoscopic talent: the way, when she harmonizes with herself, it evokes infinity mirrors in the most glamorous discotheques, so glittering as to be hallucinogenic.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, the initial reception to Mimi was lukewarm, and still marred by the negative reception of the Glitter era. (One 2005 interview with Carey in the New York Post began, “Everyone knows Mariah Carey is crazy,” as if the writer felt obligated to preemptively disclaim his praise.) Nonetheless, as Andrew Chan points out in the book Why Mariah Carey Matters, Emancipation brought in scores of new listeners who hadn’t grown up on “Vision of Love” or “Emotions,” maybe hadn’t even been born when those songs were released. To longtime fans, the initial critical reaction didn’t seem to matter, and the astronomical sales eventually nudged a reluctant critical establishment to come around. Carey’s attunement to what was popping on the streets showed, and her fealty to soul and self shone through. “There are so many intimate, special, inside, almost intangible details that are specific to me on that album,” she wrote in The Meaning of Mariah Carey. “You can actually feel my authentic emotions; there are no dramatic, overproduced ballads to appease label executives. This was pared down, simple, real shit.”
Mimi’s best song is one of its simplest. The beat for “Your Girl” is based on the Kanye-style, sped-up soul record trend that was aflame at the time, but it was made by Scram Jones and samples an acoustic guitar from “A Life With You,” a 2004 song by the New Zealand R&B duo Adeaze. The premise is classic: a shy young woman makes up her mind to seduce a man she’s had her eye on for ages, asserting herself in his presence for the first time. The chorus is an exercise in exhilaration that arrives in a high-registered delirium—“You’re gonna know! For! Sure! That! I should be your girl!” Carey’s ecstasy is premised less on the potential for love and more on the rush of finally going after what she wants. It’s a transcendent moment so bright it’s nearly blinding.
There’s a Diplomats remix, too, which circulated on the DJ mixtapes—physical CD mixtapes, the kind procured from disinterested guys running tiny stalls on Canal Street—featuring Juelz Santana and Cam’ron at the peak of their fame. “Roll that purple and pop that Crissy/We the ’05 Bobby and Whitney, yo mami you with me?” Cam raps in the intro. “Forget security, you hopped in the whippy/We left the block at 160/Cops couldn’t get me/I’m gone.” The elusive chanteuse hums feather-light vocal runs around his verse, as if lost in thought behind her knowing smile, in ascension while the wind whips through her hair.
