A grave mistake is doubting Mariah Carey, over the last three years of analyzing live performances and dismissing one of the most indelible voices and successful songwriters of our time as a nostalgia act beyond her prime. We celebrate music-industry men long after their singing voices decay into dust; Mariah’s instrument isn’t quite what it was, thanks to some natural wear, but it is still a powerful weapon. There are different rules for women. It’s not fair. Part of the reason people acted shady is that Mariah was introduced to us as a total-package artist. She came into the biz writing her own stuff — and singing the holy living shit out of it — and stayed put through decades of radical sea changes. The bar for Mariah is excellence. The New Year’s incident was below par, even though the circumstances weren’t necessarily her fault. Treating Mariah like an artist in the twilight of her relevance was premature, though, another case of the internet playing judge, jury, and executioner before it had reviewed all of the evidence.
Would we have gotten Caution, almost-all-killer-almost-no-filler Mariah Carey album, if she didn’t feel like she had something to prove? And what we have is the tightest, shortest Mariah album in ages, a collection that leverages the singer’s skills, quirks, and history with the sonic architecture of modern mainstream R&B. Caution splits the difference between current trends (alternately ambient and bleepy keyboards that 20 years ago would have sounded more at home on IDM albums, soothing snares whose staccato rolling mimic the sound of ratchets) and her career-long devotion to a lush, high-quality product. As has been the case since virtually her 1990 debut, if modern R&B is a Yamaha piano, what Carey gives you is Bösendorfer. There are pillows of backing vocals, melodies with contours like those of ornate vases, songs with real momentum and solid payoff by way of elaborate emotional crescendos.
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Part 1 of 3
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