Dear Gossips,

It’s the week of the celebrity profile/interview. We’ve had a few standouts so far and now it’s Mariah Carey’s. Mimi talked to Pitchfork about her new album, Caution. Have you been listening? I like it a lot. To me, the album as a whole is stronger than any one track. A few years ago, Taylor Swift, when she was out here hustling for Grammys for 1989, kept talking about wanting the album to be “sonically cohesive”. Mimi’s not using technical terms to describe Caution but Caution is “sonically cohesive”. All the songs come together as a unit without sounding the same. This is great work from Mimi and it’s one of the reasons why she’s been so extra Mimi lately – because she’s proud, because she wants to show her work. In this interview, she gets a chance to. 

She tells Pitchfork about growing up poor, about struggling with her biracial identity. Mimi goes back to the beginning of her career, when she was still singing backup for Brenda K Starr (something she loves to repeat) and insisting on performing her own music, refusing to give up her songs to anyone else. But she also remembers not having any agency in other aspects of her career early on – which of course we know because Tommy Mottola tried to keep her in a box. As she puts it: 

“The beginning of my career was bleak, because I was surrounded by everybody who was so much older than me, and I wasn’t really allowed to have fun. The big boys were always in control.”

Bleak! 

Mimi fought to release herself, so that the Butterfly could be free. And when the Butterfly did finally break from her cage, it became Butterfly the album, the sound she was held back from sharing, the sound she eventually blessed us with. From there, Mimi started flexing and she’s doing that here in this interview too. For as silly as she can be – not complaining – Mimi knows her sh-t. You can’t have accomplished what she’s accomplished without knowing some sh-t. Mimi knows a LOT of sh-t. She knows what goes into the work, she can break down all the separate components of the work, only she just doesn’t get enough credit for it. 

But Mimi also knows how to entertain. So of course, it’s not all serious. There are the Mimi moments in this interview that we live for. She claims, for example, that when she said, “I don’t know her”, about Jennifer Lopez that she was trying to “say something nice”. And while considering a question about “Glitter”, which has now become a smash hit album almost two decades after its release, she somehow manages to turn the conversation around to remind us of the fact that as mocked as Glitter was, at the time, the lead single off the album, “Loverboy”, was the biggest hit of that year. 

My favourite though is something I don’t think I’ve highlighted enough where Mimi is concerned – Mimi often answers questions by quoting her own lyrics. IT’S THE BEST. She does it several times in this interview and I never want it to stop. Click here to read the full article. 

In other Mimi news, remember a couple of week ago during the first major snowstorm of the year in New York, Mimi was riding around unbothered in her SUV singing along to her own Christmas song and she was all like, normally we don’t do this until we get to Aspen? As I said at the time – as IFFFFFFFFFFFFFF. 

Here’s what Mimi posted yesterday. Dembabies are now part of it, part of the season their mother has taken ownership of: 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A post shared by Mariah Carey (@mariahcarey) on

And of course they should be participating. Every time you listen to that song – and you’ll be hearing it a LOT if you haven’t already – they get paid. One day. Monroe and Moroccan will own “All I Want For Christmas is You”. And it will be played forever and ever and ever. That song will take care of them several times over and their own kids and their kids’ kids and their kids’ kids’ kids. MIMI IS IMMORTAL. 

But… do you think they’re allowed to listen to other people’s music? Do you think dembabies know any other songs by any other artists? How would one even go about finding the answer to this question? Like, what are you going to do – ask her? Really? OK. Picture yourself sitting across from Mimi. She’s in a chaise longue and she’s wearing a pair of tight leather pants (how else would they fit?) with a corset. Her “titty balls”, as Michael K at Dlisted calls them are sitting up nice and tall. She’s drinking Dom. She asks if you’d like some bubbles. When you say yes, an assistant pours you a glass of prosecco from a bottle that was chilling in the cheap seats. You are grateful. You want to stay. You cannot bear to leave this life. Then she tells you she’s ready to talk. In fact, she purrs it at you. 

Are you seriously going to ask her about any other artists and their music?!

I f-cking wouldn’t. But hey, you may have other priorities in your life. They’re wrong, but they’re yours and I will try to respect that. 

Yours in gossip,

Lainey