featured-image

At the turn of the millennium, Mariah Carey’s career was in transition. Inching away from the sweeping ballads and torch songs that had defined her early sound, Carey comfortably bridged the gap between pop and hip-hop when the “Fantasy” remix featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard hit number one in 1995. Two years later, her album and its lead single, “Honey,” moved her even further into hip hop.

During the recording of , Carey separated from her husband Tommy Mottola, the music executive who had maintained intense control over her career and image ever since signing her to Columbia Records a decade earlier. Eager to push her music in new directions, but working against Tommy’s distaste for hip-hop, Carey had sold more than enough records by that point to chart her own way forward. So, with one more album left in her contract with Columbia, Carey set out for Capri during the summer of 1999 to record what became .



, Carey’s seventh studio album, sold eight million copies worldwide and earned her two more number one hits: the Jay-Z-assisted “Heartbreaker” and “Thank God I Found You.” There are plenty of ballads to be found across the album, the deeply personal “Petals” and Diane Warren-penned “Can’t Take That Away (Mariah’s Theme)” key among them. But its most colorful moments are when Carey lets loose on tracks like “Heartbreaker” and “How Much,” which samples Tupac.

Compared to the sultry , represented a kind of gleeful experimentation that C.

Back to Beauty Page