Half-Heartedly Defending Mariah Carey

Sometimes I vote for her and sometimes I don't

(Note: I wrote the screed below two years ago; not sure why I didn’t mention the Hole/Sleater Kinney-inspired grunge CD Mariah Carey covertly helped record and release under the band name “Chick” in 1995. They even covered Cheap Trick! Anyway, I’m reviving the post now because I just this week submitted another R&R Hall of Fame ballot, and this time I didn’t vote for her. Though maybe I should have. Explanation forthcoming in another post, soon.)

It occurs to me that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on line these past few weeks debating about something I care almost nothing about: Namely, both defending my inclusion of Mariah Carey on my 2024 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ballot, and defending my statement that my 2024 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ballot votes for Mariah Carey were votes I could easily have lived without, and I only cast them because this year’s slate of nominees was even thinner than usual.

Some background: When I got my Official Ballot in the mail in late February, I was surprised that it said, “Please vote for a maximum of seven (7) nominees!” SEVEN!! As if five wasn’t hard enough! Which I realized meant, guess what, for the first time ever, I might not use all of my votes! Which to be honest, given this year’s mind-boggling roll call of candidates, I was already considering anyway. I mean, why waste votes on nominees I don’t really care about, right? Let’s just say after the ones I vote, everybody else would be tied for….somethingth place.

Okay, not true, technically. I’d rank Lenny Kravitz and Oasis and the Dave Matthews Band below, say, Mary J. Blige and Sade. Though it should go without saying that, when somebody online laughed that they’d initially misread “Sade” as “Slade,” I answered that Slade — who, as far as I know are not only not inducted but have quite possibly never been nominated — would rank among my easiest votes ever.

My two easiest votes this year were for Kool & the Gang and Foreigner — As far as I’m concerned the most consistently interesting/enjoyable artists on the ballot. Those two and Eric B & Rakim were pretty much automatic for me, though admittedly the latter’s time in the spotlight strikes me as pretty short. I gave two more to Cher and Mariah Carey, with reservations. Was allowed seven votes; I only used five. Would have been fine with three. Again, the pickings seemed really slim.

As for Sinead O’Connor, unlike another skeptic or two I’ve seen on facebook, I assume people voting for her actually find her deserving, for whatever reasons. If it took her dying last year to remind them, I’m fine with that. I didn’t vote for her myself because honestly her music’s never done much for me, give or take a couple early album tracks I frankly have trouble remembering the names of. (That one she did with MC Lyte back then was pretty nice; just looked it up, oh yeah, it was called “I Want Your Hands on Me.”) Considered including Sinead because I like her politics, but somehow that didn’t seem enough.

Anyway, a facebook-friend-of-a-facebook-friend named Brad Wheeler (who apparently holds down the music beat for the Toronto Globe and Mail, though I wasn’t aware of that at the time) wondered “What’s Mariah Carey’s connection to rock n roll?,” a question I’ve seen others ask as well. Assuming that he was actually curious, I answered that r&b singing was a subgenre of rock & roll from the beginning, or even before the beginning. Carey (like Whitney Houston) was hugely successful and influential taking r&b singing in a new direction. I’m not a giant fan myself (I mostly lose interest after her first couple albums, before she started seeming to try way too hard to prove how hip-hop she is), but it’s not hard to see how she’d fit.

That apparently wasn’t enough. “She’s pop. R&B influenced pop, but pop. She’s not Ray Charles,” Wheeler replied. “She took R&B in a new direction, sure, but a direction opposite of rock n roll. Lot of her hits were ballads also.” To which I naturally replied that so were lots of Ray Charles’s (who also had pop hits — 76 songs in Billboard’s Hot 100 between 1957 and 1989, ten of which went top 10 by my quick count just now.) “Pop” and “rock’n’roll” have never been mutually exclusive categories. And I can definitely see Carey as part of a multi-octave rock vocal lineage that includes, say, Pat Benatar. But I also definitely agree she’s not Ray Charles. (For one thing, he was also country!)

Still not enough for Brad Wheeler, who countered that “No, you took that wrong. When I say pop, I mean the genre/classification, not that their songs made it onto the pop charts. You can’t say Pat Benatar or Ray Charles had ballads and pop hits and they’re in the rock hall of fame, therefore Carey should also be in. Carey has nothing equivalent to Benatar’s ‘Heartbreaker’ or ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot’ or ‘You Better Run’. Benatar rocked. Charles rocked. Hip hop rocks. Country rocks. Miles Davis rocked. Mariah Carey does not rock.”

To which I more or less pulled out all the (admittedly basic) stops, explaining that “rock” (and “rock’n’roll,” almost never exactly the same thing since at least the late ’60s) can, and have been, defined all sorts of different ways over the the past half century plus. They are fighting words (which is to say people have been known start fights about them), which is part of what makes them fun. (I may have been drawing on Frank Kogan’s theory of “super words” at that point.) To be honest, I’m no stickler for genre when voting on these ballots — I just vote for whoever’s music I like the most, full stop; if enough people have decided an artist is rock’n’roll enough to be nominated, that’s rock’n’roll enough for me (for Hall voting purposes anyway), even if I wouldn’t have classified their music that way on my own because, I dunno, their sound isn’t guitar oriented or they don’t record with the band they tour with or their rhythmic sense is inert or whatever.

There’s plenty of music that people (rock radio included) even think of as rock these days that doesn’t remotely rock me. I can say with confidence that Carey has no less to do with rock as I understand it than most of the crap that gets marketed as “rock” (and don’t even get me started on “indie rock,” if people even call it that anymore) now. But big whoop. What Wheeler asked for was “Mariah Carey’s connection to rock n roll,” which I’m pretty I gave him in the clearest terms I could think of. Beyond that explanation, honestly, he’s on his own.

Yet at an opposite pole, turns out there are also people for whom Mariah Carey deserving Hall of Fame accolades is unquestionable! In a comment a few weeks ago below a year-old post on this very blog, after noticing I’d said I would’ve been fine limiting my ballot this year to three votes, one Jess Hahn asked me, “What is your reasoning for being fine with leaving Mariah off? She’s easily been the most influential musician of the past 30 years between her vocal stylings, her merging of pop and hip-hop, and her making original holiday music commercially lucrative.”

To which I naturally, patiently, and at this point no doubt redundantly replied that my Hall of Fame votes are based on one factor and one factor only — that is, how much I enjoy listening to the artists in question. I don’t really care how “influential” nominees are, for one thing. And while I acknowledge that Carey has influenced an awful lot of singers, I wouldn’t say the deluge of melisma she (and Whitney Houston) set in motion was an especially positive development. (Anyway, that long trend has long passed, right? Maybe someday I’ll eventually start missing it, who knows.) That said, I should reiterate here that the only Mariah Carey albums I’ve actively enjoyed over the years were her first two (well, those and the Unplugged EP), when she was regularly shattering glass with her over-the-top Minnie Riperton high notes and keeping me diverted under nitrous oxide-induced semi-sedation while a dentist gave me much-needed root canals.

After that, to me, she seemed pretty much just okay. Never outwardly disliked her, but never much cared one way or another about her either. She just struck me as professional, and if there was a personality there I was supposed to grasp it must’ve slipped right past me. I’m not sure how innovative her pop/hip-hop/r&b fusions ever were (they at least never struck me as particularly innovative, given that those genres had been merging since long before Carey recorded — since, I dunno, “Square Biz” by Teena Marie at least).

As for the success of her Christmas song, which I can take or leave, that’s certainly a commercial accomplishment, I guess up there with “Last Christmas” by Wham! as the biggest original Christmas carol of, I dunno, the past half century or so. Given the choice, I’d take “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses over either of those, no contest. (And I’d take “Genius of Love” by Tom Tom Club no contest over the song Carey sampled it in.)

But despite all that, I voted for Mariah Carey anyway! Primarily based on those early albums, just like my Cher vote was based on three immortal (if at times racially insensitive) ’70s hits (what Robert Christgau once called “the great Swarthy Triology”: “Dark Lady,” “Half Breed” and “Gypsies Tramps and Thieves”) and a couple with Sonny. (As far as I know, Sonny & Cher aren’t in as a duo already; that I don’t know for sure shows just how little I pay attention to the Hall of Fame, and how seriously I take it, on the 364 days a year I don’t fill out a ballot….Or 365 on leap years, given that I was replying to Jess Hahn on February 29! I am fairly certain the Waitresses and Minnie Riperton — not to mention Teena Marie! — have never even been nominated.)

“But Chuck,” Hahn answered, “the Hall of Fame literally says the criteria for getting in is about influence and longevity. So, you are acknowledging you aren’t going by the criteria given to you.” Which took me back a little. I mean, I dunno, if they say so I guess. I had never once been told, or heard anybody suggest until then, that I’m supposed to limit myself to those criteria. If you can find something official that says I’m supposed to, I’d love to see it. But sorry, either way, “longevity” is just ridiculous. “Here is one thing,” Hahn answered. “Performers – It mentions influence and impact as reasons. Here is another: It mentions ‘length and depth of career’ (and again influence on other artists).Those are from the official site.”

So I quoted one of those links back: “Factors such as an artist’s musical influence on other artists, length and depth of career and the body of work, innovation, and superiority in style and technique are taken into consideration.” In other words, those are a few possible attributes that can play into the decision. It doesn’t suggest any of those factors outweigh the others; clearly that’s left up to the discretion of the voters. These are almost all subjective and unquantifiable, obviously. (“Length of career” might not be, though I’m sure we could debate what constitutes a “career.” At any rate, the Sex Pistols and Nirvana — to name just two examples off the top of my head — really didn’t last that long. So if I’m defying the rules and regulations, I’m clearly not alone.) Anyway, that “such as” suggests other factors can be considered as well. Pretty sure I’m in the clear.

A few more artists with fairly short careers who I think might well be in (somebody else can check; they’re pretty much all deserving, I would think): Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Eddie Cochran, Shangri-Las. I’m sure there are others I’m not thinking of at the moment. (I’m guessing there’s a good chance Robert Johnson might be in as well?) Of course if it was me up to me there would be plenty of one-hit wonders as well. But I’ll leave that for another day.

Eliminated for Reasons of Space, 17 March 2024