![]() The deeper reason was I knew that tapping into her as a subject was going to allow me to explore a lot of other themes. I think there's a deeper reason, but I think the more superficial reason was I was a little bored and I needed a project. It was after the NPR piece, and there was kind of just an itch. When that need kicks in, I find that feeling in so many of the Mariah songs that have been healing since I was an adolescent, so “Through the Rain,” “Hero” and “Can’t Take That Away.” For you, at what point during the pandemic did you realize that you needed to write this book for yourself? When I wrote my essay on Mariah for The New York Times, I was having this moment where I was craving the comfort of home during the first year of the pandemic. I even called my mom to read her some of his best passages - could it be that my defense of her was really an extension of me defending myself as a queer person? I was seeing parts of my own story on these pages, told by someone else who, at one point, also needed, as he puts it, “a glamorous, hetero-feminine idol.” Though I didn’t think it possible, I felt like I was graduating to the next level of understanding my own connection to Mariah. On some level, my mother does after all, she saw me struggle the most as a queer kid, and she saw Mariah’s music keep me afloat throughout that period of time.Īnd yet, after reading Chan’s careful analysis - in one part, he recognizes how she entered Black gay club culture in the 1990s by flipping her hits into house mixes - alongside his own personal introspection, I found myself catching my breath several times. To that end, I wrote how extensive my connection to her music is in an essay for The New York Times in 2020, coincidentally around the same time Chan began writing “Why Mariah Carey Matters.” Few people in my life fully understand how deep it goes, exactly. The most beloved voice could be the most freakish.”Īt 40, it’s hard to imagine I don’t already fully understand why Mariah matters to me - like Chan, my foundation for perseverance, enduring those tough gay teen years, was built on her own survival, her own outsiderness. “The too-muchness of the vocal was an accurate description of everything I felt but couldn’t say,” he writes before adding, “Mariah’s vocals seemed to be saying that the ultimate voice could also be the one that resonated on the queerest frequency. Here, Chan is summarizing his feelings on “Outside,” a song revered by many of Mariah’s queer lambs, her name for her most loyal fans, for understanding that once an outcast, always an outcast. In the 1990s, when Chan was first drawn to her, his connection to her music was “intimate and private,” he writes just a few pages into the book. And I just think aging… can be such a beautiful thing.Mariah Carey is in sharp focus as a pop music innovator and gay icon in some of the best-written commentary on her artistry and what she means to queer fans, thanks to writer Andrew Chan’s remarkably studied new book “ Why Mariah Carey Matters.” The book plumbs the depths of Mariah’s voice, songwriting and production savviness since making her debut in 1990.Ĭhan, who wrote about her previously for NPR, writes with a window into his own deeply personal devotion to Carey as a gay Chinese-American man. "And maybe I'll start again one day, I don't know, to each their own, whatever makes you feel beautiful, I do support - but I know for me, I was just like, 'Oh, I wanna see my well-earned cry lines and smile lines.' I hope my smile lines get deeper and deeper and I laugh more and more. I just felt like hiding, you know," she continued. I stopped in 2018 because I just felt so … too much. ![]() "Full transparency, as a beauty person, as I do my lips, had a ton of lip filler over the years and Botox. ![]() In the clip, the 30-year-old first reflected, "Being exposed to so many voices at a young age, and especially when people have, like, things to say about your appearance and stuff at a young age, it's like really hard to know what's worth hearing and not." She added, " used makeup as a disguise or something to hide behind… and that can be so beautiful at times, and I still do have love for it." ![]() In a new makeup tutorial video with Vogue, the "7 Rings" songstress tried to hold back tears while explaining why she stopped getting filler and Botox. Ariana Grande couldn't get but get emotional when discussing her view on beauty. ![]()
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