For a large portion of the rock audience, the only thing Mariah Carey and
Jennifer Lopez share is their ability to elicit ridicule. In Carey's case, the
mood to mock was kindled as soon as her homonymous debut flittered up the
charts, in 1990. All the same, over the years she turned out a string of
blockbusters that made her the biggest-selling female artist in history, and
the only artist, female or otherwise, to top the pop charts each year
throughout the 1990s. But by the decade's end, those who never could stand
Carey's five-octave pyrotechnics were joined by former fans who now detected
deterioration in her art and/or moral fiber. One sympathetic young critic,
Nicholas Raymond, put her Rainbow (Columbia) at the top of his 1999
"Worst Of" list in a Cleveland alternative weekly paper, the Free Times,
noting, "I must admit a twinge of pity, having watched her blossom from a
demure, talented young diva into a singing blow-up doll." Rainbow still
sold a hefty three million copies, but Raymond's disdain signaled the beginning
of a free fall that has yet to abate.
On that same 1999 list, Raymond placed another three million seller two spots
below Rainbow: Jennifer Lopez's debut album, On the 6
(Epic). By any standard except maybe Carey's, a triple platinum
debut is a solid hit. But whereas the young Carey once reaped some artistic
praise along with her commercial profit, Lopez only got flack from the critics.
Audiophiles were appalled by her weak voice, and populist writers never rallied
behind her musical nakedness, simplicity, and other such earthy qualities
usually worshipped by rock critics. On top of the æsthetic irritation,
Lopez's vocal shortcomings underscored the undue executive privilege wielded by
this medium-hopping movie star, a whiff of decadence made all the more pungent
by her extravagant public life. Even an august source like the Times of
London opined that "all the headlines have taken their
toll. . . . She began life as a dancer, found her feet as a
soulful, subtle actress . . . and seems to have traded it all in
so that she can play at being a dinky little chanteuse and high-street brand
name. . . . At 32, Lopez is in danger of looking as bizarre as
Mariah Carey in her teenage miniskirt."
Which brings us back to what Carey and Lopez, who have recently released new
studio albums, might share that makes them such natural targets of scornful
writers from the tiny Cleveland Free Times to the mighty London
Times. Although they were born just a couple months and a few dozen miles
apart in greater Metropolitan New York, these two women are in most respects
artistic opposites, with Carey's superhuman skills and Lopez's too-human
shortcomings only the most obvious aspect of their polar differences. Yet
they've played the same role: the bronze beauty who sets out to translate
R&B for the masses. Despite the coming tectonic shift in America's
demographic make-up, the "masses" still means white suburbia. And as everyone
from Vanilla Ice to Michael Jackson can attest, no pop act is more fraught with
peril than the crossover move.
Whether Carey and Lopez know it or not, white suburbia also plays a passive
role in the successes and failures of the singers' diametrically opposed new
albums. In fact, the tremendous difference between this pair's æsthetic
approaches (and their abilities to realize those approaches) reflects a major
difference between American pop audiences in the early '90s and the early '00s.
Taking the futile minority view, I'd suggest pronouncing those double zeros as
the "aughts," because that's exactly what this decade has wrought across the
mass socio-political spectrum. In politics and pop alike, it's been a decade of
reaction and denial (like Carey and Lopez, those are really two sides of the
same coin). And Carey and Lopez have either paid the price for this reaction
and denial or benefitted from it largely according to their ability to
conform.
As the daughter of an Irish-American opera singer and a
half-African-American/half-Venezuelan engineer, Carey has never fit into
America's binary racial categories. And from the beginning she has used her
heterogeneous heritage as a license to take the ongoing racial story of
American pop one step beyond. As every schoolchild should learn, American pop
has always moved white audiences by translating the yearning blues of black
music, a yearning born at least in part from a concomitant history of racial
exclusion. This is hardly a secret, but no one talks much about how that
history has played out over the past couple decades as R&B -- and by
extension hip-hop -- has moved toward becoming the new mass-market pop.
To some extent, that movement has succeeded by whitewashing the music,
investing it with either clunky but hyperventilated zip or a lumbering wash of
exalted emotion. Whitney Houston got there first, but her direct descendant,
Mariah Carey, took it all the way home, not by completing the whitewash but
simply by infantilizing her material. In her big pop bonbons of the early '90s
she substituted will for strife and drama for pain, rendering them safe for a
Disneyfied America in which every individual believes he or she can make it by
just trying hard enough. Her progeny sprung from, of course, Orlando, as white
teen-popsters took her lesson to heart and forged their own distinctive
subgenre.
Jennifer Lopez
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In the world outside the teen-pop enclave, however, race kept pushing back. In
the '90s, this was felt in the crack epidemic, the explosion of gangsta rap,
the O.J. trial, you name it. In time, Mariah got caught between true teen pop
and the increasingly graphic world of R&B/hip-hop. The result was albums
like Rainbow, a disc whose most egregious musical miscalculation is its
attempt to lean a little harder in the R&B direction than her earlier
work.
But Rainbow's real shortcoming was the same one that plagues the new
Charmbracelet (Monarc/Island) -- the celebrated thrush has lost her
ability to command a tune, and the emphasis on adult material only exacerbates
her shortcomings. Rainbow partly masked that point by kicking off with
"Heartbreaker," a playful Jay-Z duet that became Carey's last #1 single.
Charmbracelet leads with the self-explanatory glop of "Through the
Rain," a ballad that performed so badly in advance tests, it wasn't even
released to broadcasters. The song was no more maudlin than any of her early
smashes were, but the more "mature" setting makes it clear how shot her voice
now sounds.
This obvious point is rarely noted in reviews, but it explains a lot. Carey has
always had an oddly breathy midrange, but in the past her biggest hits pushed
past that tone with an intensity that sounded effortless. More and more often,
however, she has used a strained whisper when attempting to sing at a normal
volume and range, a tone that regularly cracks open mid syllable and never
settles into the melody's groove. If her histrionics of days past were trite,
her new attempts at personable warmth, as on the soft-focus come-on "Yours" and
the sad sing-song ballad "My Saving Grace," are almost physically off-putting.
It's a shortfall that Carey and her various co-producers seem to recognize with
their fussy overdubbing of background choruses and wailing counterpoint. The
tunes on Charmbracelet may be as good as any Carey has recorded --
certainly they're as sophisticated -- but this superhyped album is already
dropping in the Billboard charts.
Meanwhile, Jennifer Lopez is holding steady in the lower reaches of the Top 10
with This Is Me . . . Then (Epic), an unassuming album
that's daring only insofar as it aims for nothing higher than what it's already
achieved. Unlike Charmbracelet, Lopez's fourth album was released with
no press fanfare and a modest if surefire single, "Jenny from the Block," a
number that's meant to reassure, not reconvince. Like Carey, Lopez plays off
her very public personal life by dedicating the whole project to actor Ben
Affleck, who will soon become Mr. Lopez #3. Awash in old soul grooves and
simple, self-written tunes, the disc is meant to bear testimony to Affleck's
influence in refocusing Lopez's attention on down-to-earth, honest pleasures, a
sentiment that's no more convincing than the vocal filters that help keep Jenny
from the Block's vocals on track.
Even so, the album is a small coup in that it diverts attention from the
biggest story -- Lopez's complete abandonment of Latin rhythms. She's a
full-fledged New Yorican with a heritage every bit as heterogeneous as Carey's,
and she took her first pop shot during one of the Latin-music bubbles that
regularly rise to the surface of our shifting cultural landscape. Yet unlike
Ricky Martin or Marc Anthony, she was quick to abandon Latin music's middling
pop flavors for traditional R&B, so that she'd find safe harbor when that
bubble inevitably burst. The result was her second album, J. Lo (Epic),
a gutsy makeover that has proven her most enduring disc thanks in part to the
way it backed the straight R&B with vivacious salsa to keep its second half
afloat.
This Is Me . . . Then is something of a setback by
comparison, with many of its most tuneful cuts just "interpolations" of old
soul standards. "The One" reworks the Stylistics' 1972 hit "You Are Everything"
with no more subtlety than is usually expressed by J. Lo's old flame, Puff
Daddy. Still, it's a little subtler than your average brazen mash-up, and
almost as groovy, just like the rest of this pleasant interlude, an intermezzo
before the next makeover that's surely to come. In a time of such massive
cultural retrenchment, at least we can bob along our heads in our respective
black and white bunkers.
Issue Date: January 17 - 23, 2003
