Mariah Carey's 'Emancipation'

Mariah Carey loves to quote Psalm 30:5: Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

It’s the first thing written in the liner notes of her latest album, The Emancipation of Mimi. The pop queen even included it on the project’s culminating song. She believes this is her morning, a time for joyous freedom.

“With this album, I am embracing my independence and celebrating the person that I have become,” she says. “Over the years, I have evolved into a better person and an even better artist. For the first time in my life, I am proud and unafraid to be who I really am.”

So the real Mariah is free at last?

Pulling Back From the Brink
Given her standing as the best-selling female performer of all time, Carey has had a rough few years. Since 2001, her album sales have slumped. Critics swarmed like vultures as she went through a very public breakdown. Her debut movie, Glitter, and its soundtrack bombed. She did a nonsensical rant and striptease on MTV’s TRL. She posted suicidal messages on her Web site. Then in 2002 Carey was hospitalized for what an official press release termed “extreme exhaustion.” Only a few months later, her record label dropped her (though with a $28 million buyout of her contract).

Carey chalks it all up to being oppressed. “The fighting I had to do, the constant battle with Sony, that whole thing, that put me in a different place—even emotionally,” she says. “I was constantly on guard, as opposed to being really more true to who I am.”

The singer’s 2002 CD, Charmbracelet, didn’t do much to make people forget the string of bad publicity. So it’s obvious she hopes Emancipation will. The true, unshackled Mariah is stepping forward. The record-making slave to the system is finally free to be herself. Or is she?

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Co-produced by such star names as Kanye West, Jermaine Dupri and The Neptunes (along with Carey), Emancipation is a proclamation, a declaration that “The Voice” can still belt it out with the best of 'em and make the chandeliers shake. But the problem isn’t if she can sing. It’s what she’s singing—or better yet, what she and her hip-hop friends are singing.

Guest artists such as Dupri, Nelly and Snoop Dogg call Carey a “fine m----f---a” (it’s partially censored) while describing what getting “buck wild” with her in the bathroom is like. Carey tosses out a few blue lines herself on “One and Only,” “Say Something” and “We Belong Together,” though each is strategically altered to sound less overt. When she’s not deciding whether to bed an old flame (“Stay the Night”), she’s causing a new fling to “want to get with me tonight” by putting “those naughty thoughts into [his] mind (“Your Girl”). Add to the equation her now-standard revealing liner photos. (This time we get Mariah’s curvy super-sexy silhouette.)

After such an onslaught of down and dirty escapades, the scripturally based “Fly Like a Bird” feels downright discordant. Is this the freedom she’s been craving for so long? It must be. Since her 1997 Butterfly album, Carey has seemed desperate to shed her girlie-pop image by collaborating with gansta rappers and upping her R&B/hip-hop appeal.

She traded in her wholesome lyrics for problematic content and skimpy sex kitten outfits. And her videos started steaming up TV sets around the world. Her seductive video for hit single “Honey” included footage of the star getting dressed. (Amazingly, she said at the time, “I don’t think that my videos are focused on my body very much, or any kind of sexuality.”)

“Mariah ... brought a lot of street, hip-hop energy into the pop charts and into this pop/R&B world,” comments Rolling Stone editor Joe Levy. “You had this squeaky clean girl diva who was having Ol’ Dirty Bastard rhyme on her records. And you were just kinda like, ‘Huh? Really? Wow!’ And then, you know, it just became de rigueur.”

Coming to a Standstill
So Emancipation doesn’t really free Mariah at all. It simply adds to her growing catalogue of risqué material. She may claim to be freer by showing as much skin as she wants, dropping an f-bomb and helping to produce her own record. But sadly, this is still the same, constrained Mariah.