Dear Gossips,
This weekend is Thanksgiving in Canada. I’ve been holding this post for today so that we can properly give thanks to our Elusive Chanteuse Butterfly, the one and only Mimi. Mimi’s one of the six women honoured in Variety’s 2019 Power of Women issue for her work with The Fresh Air Fund’s Camp Mariah. Ramin Setoodeh did the interview – and it’s a f-cking SCREAM. This opening paragraph is worth the price of admission:
Mariah Carey isn’t someone who rushes anything. So when it comes to a photo shoot, an afternoon naturally stretches into an evening, which turns into a late-night event. At 10 p.m. — after a marathon of costume changes and notes on lighting (one of Carey’s many areas of expertise) — she’s finally ready to sit down for a print interview.
For a PRINT INTERVIEW.
The second paragraph is just as good but I don’t want to spoil it for you if you haven’t read it yet. In fact, the whole interview is sustaining, revitalising, exactly what we all need for this weekend of giving thanks. For this interview, during which she talks about her upcoming memoir (I’m curious about this memoir because it’s not like, you know, Mimi’s known to withhold sh-t – she has eight or nine “facts” about herself that she repeats over and over again….what could possibly be NEW?!), how much she loves Christmas (so much that she started preparing on the last day of summer, LOL), and being treated unfairly in the business, because she’s a woman and because she has an attitude.
And this is where we have to fire up the indignation, even though it’s Thanksgiving, because this is some f-cksh-t. Let me be the first to apologise for this f-cksh-t as I’ve not written about it before and it should be on the long list of grudges I keep and roll out regularly in this space. Curiously, where my grudges are concerned, Justin Timberlake is involved in half of them.
Mariah Carey, who holds the record for most #1 singles for a solo artist – that would be 18 singles, 17 of which she wrote herself – is not in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. To be clear, when I say she writes, that’s music AND lyrics. You know this. We all know this. We all know the songs. The songs are MONSTER hits. One of those songs, for sure, will be around FOREVER. “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is history, present, and future. Seriously. If humanity finds a way to exist for another thousand years, they’ll still be playing “All I Want For Christmas Is You” through radiated sand, or whatever will remain of the planet by then.
And they still haven’t let her in the Songwriters Hall of Fame?!? There are very few women in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, for starters. So that’s one of the barriers. The other barrier is, because of her personality, people don’t take her skills seriously. And some people think that it’s also because Mimi writes and performs her own music and doesn’t, for example, write songs and give them to others – which is bullsh-t because songwriting is songwriting, why should generosity be a qualifier for whether or not you can write a goddamn song?
But while Mimi’s still waiting to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, remember, they gave Justin Timberlake the Contemporary Icon Award this year at the 50th anniversary dinner since he’s still too young to make it into the Hall. So they found a way to roll out the carpet and let Pipsqueak in but the Goddess of Glitter and Rainbows, the girl who gave us “Fantasy” and “One Sweet Day” and “Hero” and “Dreamlover” and “Always Be My Baby” and “Heartbreaker” and on and on and on is still standing outside? How dare you!?!
Savour that Thanksgiving rage for a moment, as Mimi would say. She does love her moments, even though she herself has never been a moment. Mimi is time itself. Mimi is eternal. I am thankful for the eternal wonder of Mariah Carey.
Click here to read the full profile.
Happy Thanksgiving! And have a great weekend!
Yours in gossip,
Lainey
