This two-part episode of Questlove Supreme is a three-hour conversation with the one and only Mariah Carey, global best-selling female vocalist who “basically owns Christmas” and just released her New York Times best-selling memoir The Meaning of Mariah. In part one, Mariah gets into her unstable childhood, living on bagels and sleeping on the floor of the studio when she was cutting her demo, her opera-singer mother warning her about her famous “Mariah whistle” (as Questlove calls it) but James Brown encouraging her to develop it, and her years stuck in “the Sony prison.” In part two, she reveals her struggles with her biracial identity, the emotional abuse from her first husband, co-parenting with Nick Cannon, and leans into her high-maintenance reputation. Plus, they play a clip of a song from her lost 1995 alt-rock grunge album, Chick!
Of course with Questlove in the conversation, the mechanics of the music are broken down too, with insider talk about legendary studio musicians and producers, studios on top of mountains in Capri, as well as stories from The Tonight Show. He remembers when Aretha Franklin was a guest; she’s sensitive about the air conditioning, they learned, and they had to cut the HVAC to seven floors of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in order for her to sing on the show. Mariah says it’s a real thing, though – cold air can tighten the vocal cords and affect your performance – but even if it wasn’t a real thing, just do it! “She’s the queen!” Mariah laughs. She had a similar experience when she and Aretha were supposed to perform together, and they weren’t turning the air off as requested. “She said, ‘Mariah, they are playing games, and I’m not having it. So we won’t be rehearsing tonight.’ And I’m like, ‘Who is playing games with Aretha Franklin?!’”
Mariah reveals a lot about her struggle with her racial identity, expressing that while she “wasn’t dark enough to scare” her neighbors, she was just “other” enough to feel different everywhere she went. “And the things they’d say in front of me,” she marvels, because they felt she was “white enough” not to be offended. Once as a child, she was playing with a white girl named Becky when her father showed up to see her; Becky ran away crying because she had never seen a Black person before. Team Supreme feels that she was marketed as white, too, but Mariah pushes back on that, saying that her first album cover was just a picture of her face with her natural hair: “How could I have presented Blacker than that?” Quest describes a “gripping” scene in her book where a trip to get french fries turns into “a Will Smith, Enemy of the State-situation,” and they talk about her life as an internationally recognized superstar. And best of all, her grunge project from 1995 is pretty awesome! Listen to this two-part conversation to learn more about the real Mariah Carey, the music industry, and so much more on Questlove Supreme.
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