| Saturday 20 December 2003 |
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Don't call it a comeback
With Mariah Carey's recent album "Charmbracelet" ditching the ghetto-fabulous/hoochie-mama look that led to the personal and professional breakdown of "Glitter", one would have expected a subdued performance on Monday night. What the Arlington Theatre audience of Carey devotees got was pure Vegas, baby. Looking a bit like coochie-coochie girl Charo - in glittering silver bra and miniskirt, showing off a toned six-pack of abs - Carey entered the Arlington from the lobby, coming down the aisle like a prize fighter.
In a way, Carey is a fighter. On this night, she was battling a cold, "doing the best with what I got" as she told us. Professionally, she is defending herself against critics who are saying she's lost the one thing that's made her famous - her five-octave range voice. Cold or not, it was disappointing that instead of making a stand and demonstrating that voice in a setting not unlike her "Unplugged" appearance, the Mariah Carey Show was a glossy and often tacky parade of costume changes, projected video interludes and an atrociously dressed gaggle of backup dancers on loan from an MC Hammer video.
The audience, of course, ate it up, but it often seemed that we were all paying good money (more than $100 for the front 20 rows, really socking it to the average working people who make up her core audience) for a whole lot of padding. Carey's songs usually fall into two categories: light, fluffy hip-hop with the occasional rap star cameo, or power ballads where she really belts it out (or would do, if she weren't so low - intentionally? - in the mix). Here is Carey's bread and butter, with lyrics about holding onto dreams and "finding the will to carry on".
These are phrases that creep into her songs whether or not she writes them herself. If early R&B took the spiritual longing of gospel and turned it into tales of earthly lust, modern worship music has taken the catchphrases of self-help gurus and turned them into quasi-Christian platitudes, a point where Carey's odes to the power of self and of the Lord converge. This meeting of the pop-sacred and the new age-profane resulted in one of the worst moments of the night, the unbelievable self-aggrandizement of "My Saving Grace".
Meant as her post-trauma, soul-searching song, the moment could have be played as an intimate exchange between the diva and her fans. Instead, the large video monitor played a photo montage of Mariah's career from childhood to fame, up to breakdown and through to recovery, like an episode of "Behind the Music". Photos were one thing, but we also saw clippings from the press about the her nervous breakdown, a few glowing record reviews of "Charmbracelet" and what looked like a People magazine article on her "comeback". All that was missing were shots of her most recent tax returns. This was confession turned ego trip turned commodity.
At one point Carey was up for another costume change and gave the stage over to her four backup singers, but not before introducing them. Carey was at her most laid-back here, carefree and improvising on her fellow performers' names over a soulful vamp. This and the subsequent number "Friend of Mine" by the quartet (leader Trey Lorenz vocally sparring with the three ladies) were two of the most honest and enjoyable performances of the night.
Carey returned in a neon blue and pink rollergirl outfit to sing "Fantasy", her perky palimpsest of Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love", and then closed with her two most popular self-help ballads, "Make It Happen" and "Hero". If "Charmbracelet" is seen as some sort of comeback (at least by her own accounts), then it is mysterious that she only focused on two of the album's tracks, and did so earlier in the show to get them out of the way: the slow, bland "Through the Rain" and the above-mentioned "My Saving Grace".
Of course, if you are only going to sing 11 songs, then give the people what they want - all the hits. But for an artist who is still trying to maintain a viable career, it's dispiriting to see her falling back on her earlier material. Residency on the Las Vegas strip may be coming sooner in Mariah Carey's career than her fans might think. (Santa Barbara News-Press)
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