Every pop star must, at some point, confront career mortality. For some, the end comes suddenly and without warning, while others experience a slow, bewildering decline into mediocrity. After two decades of nearly uninterrupted chart dominance, one figures that Mariah Carey has spent some of the last year dwelling on the end of her reign. Her 13th album, Me. I Am Mariah… The Elusive Chanteuse, comes on the heels of her most trying period since the infamous Glitter bomb of 13 years ago. The rollout for I Am Mariah kicked off in earnest almost two years ago with a single called "Triumphant (Get 'Em)", and three other singles followed—one of which, "The Art of Letting Go," has been relegated to bonus track status—with only the strummy, Miguel-powered "#Beautiful" climbing up the charts. But even that song peaked outside the top 10 of the Billboard's Hot 100, which is basically unheard of for a major single from a Mariah Carey album.
Yet, despite the circumstances, I Am Mariah is not an album that sounds desperate. It makes an argument for Mariah letting pop stardom come as it does— or doesn't—and the record seemingly acknowledges her increasingly murky future by looking back at loves and sounds of the past. She is not Jennifer Lopez or Madonna, leaving smudged fingerprints on the zeitgeist; I Am Mariah does not bend toward the whims of the radio. The album sounds exactly, defiantly like Mariah, acknowledging her place in the pop ecosystem both implicitly and explicitly without chomping at the bit.
The album was executive produced by Jermaine Dupri and Bryan-Michael Cox, a duo who helped jumpstart Mariah's career the first time it flagged. It was Dupri and Carey who wrote "We Belong Together", the impossibly huge smash that reestablished Mariah as a pop titan in 2005, the last time she risked fading away. Cox pitched in on "Shake It Off," the breezy summer follow-up that cemented that status. On I Am Mariah, the three of them circle back to the ethos of The Emancipation of Mimi—the album that held those songs—using classic, stately R&B as a sort of gold-threaded cocoon.
That's not to say that I Am Mariah is reductive; on the contrary, the record pares her sound down to its essence while simultaneously subtly expanding its parameters. Two tracks feature contributions by James "Big Jim" Wright—also a holdover from the Emancipation era—and those songs are ballads that weave the slurred organs of gospel into the album. "Cry." opens the record with Mariah's vocals suspended over a soft cloud of pianos; though she sings about angels' tears in typically dramatic fashion, the track highlights her ability to strike a vocal balance between restraint and power. "One More Try", a faithful and fantastic cover of the George Michael song, pushes the track from the mist of the '80s into the filtered sunlight of church, giving it a glow while still retaining its throbbing ache.
The Dupri and Cox cut "You Don't Know What to Do" is a straight up disco song with rippling guitars and strings that swoop down like birds. (As always, it's best to ignore Wale here.) The song recalls her untouchable roller-rink jams like "Heartbreaker" and "Fantasy" while also feeling like a logical extension of post-Pharrell disco revivalism. This trio of tracks are the implicit acknowledgement of her age: gospel and disco are traditionally genres where middle-aged women can thrive, and Mariah—a legendarily strong voice—fits in unsurprisingly well. There are a few tracks that don't work—"Heavenly (No Ways Tired/Can't Give Up Now)" hauls in an over-the-top choir, and the Q-Tip-produced "Meteorite" is a gloopy scoop of Cher schmaltz—but largely, the record finds Mariah easily settling into what could be her post-pop phase.
And yet, I Am Mariah is definitely not post-pop. The album's other major collaborator is the G.O.O.D. Music secret weapon Hit-Boy, who helms three of the album's strongest tracks. "Thirsty" is a bleepy take-off of "Niggas in Paris", but his style meshes well with Mariah's: she can carry a club track, obviously, but the chorus here is an ethereal puff that melts his signature icy minimalism. "Money ($ * / ..)" clips a greasy horn riff into a loop you could imagine hearing on today's pop radio, but Mariah floats over it gracefully. These tracks, along with the washed-out Mike WiLL Made It elegy "Faded," show that Mariah can still conversate with pop music, even if pop music doesn't talk back.
Still, the two best tracks on I Am Mariah make more explicit references to time passed. "Supernatural" features "Ms. Monroe & Mr. Moroccan Scott Cannon a.k.a Roc 'N Roe", which is Mariah's very theatrical way of saying "my kids". The ballad, a Dupri and Cox number, has a beat that approximates a baby's mobile and a constant stream of coos from the twins themselves. The backdrop puts her newfound motherhood to the forefront, as Mariah delivers the album's most heartfelt devotional and its most astonishing, acrobatic vocal performance.
The true highlight is the Hit-Boy-assisted "Dedicated", built on a loop of Inspectah Deck rapping "carry like Mariah" on "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'". The song opens with dialogue between Mariah and longtime rap executive Steve Stoute about nostalgia. She sings about a long-lost love—"I'll just sit right here and sing that good old school shit to ya"—before referencing Eric B. and the Wu and interpolating Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh. The song is wistful, with a streak of melancholy, but it's also upbeat, and has the glimmer of indulgent memory. "Oh, baby, you know," she sings, her voice falling like a feather. "All that love-making we did, boy, it was so real, I wanna feel that again." Surrounded by the chatter of old friends and older beats, she's rarely sounded as comfortable.
