Ok, so you may already know that I spend a lot of time trying to rationalise my love for the Spice Girls, and convincing people that teen dance movies are the vanguard front of the revolution, but you may not know that I have an undying love for Mariah Carey.
Earlier this week MC knocked Elvis out of the #2 spot for most number of #1 singles and is now second only to the Beatles. This is what she had to say:
“I really can never put myself in the category of people who have not only revolutionised music but also changed the world,” she said…”That’s a completely different era and time …I’m just feeling really happy and grateful.”
…
Carey said being in such company was gratifying not only because of her personal success, but what it meant for women and minorities.
Score one for the ladies (and the ladies of colour, and the mixed race ladies, and the ladies who’ve struggled with mental health…)!
Watch the video for her new single “Touch My Body” after the jump. I could go on at length about how it joyfully celebrates sexuality, pokes fun at diva conventions, and confronts the stereotype that ladies don’t know tech talk, but I won’t push it…
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five comments
Shout out to Kenneth!
Posted by Stacey May
April 5, 2008, 1:09 PM
I was going to make a snarky comment about Mariah Carey's questionable views on starving children, but some rudimentary internet research yielded this story, on how that quote was totally bogus: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/carey.asp
For those who don't remember, Mariah Carey was alleged to have said "When I see all those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean, I'd love to be skinny like that, but without the flies and death and stuff". Turns out that the quote was from a satirical article, but was taken to be the genuine article by folks all over the... internet, at least. Which just goes to show how willing (and quick) we are to assume that famous women are shallow, narcissistic morons. Myself included, clearly. Kind of shocking.
Posted by Anna
April 5, 2008, 4:22 PM
Thanks for doing the research Anna - I actually didn't know the quote was fake, but had just conveniently dropped it from my memory...It's an interesting point you make about internalised sexism influencing how we see extremely mainstream female artists (sorry, paraphrase!).
I think my fascination with Mariah has to do with how she's run the gamut of race-d pop music, going from being essentially the female Barry Manilow to being ODB's best friend. It's pretty fascinating to see how mixed race public figures are designated by the public as either of colour or not. Eg Ben Harper = white, Barack Obama = black. Not that many mixed race figures actually go back and forth.
I'm also really amazed by how totally Carey recovered from her very public emotional breakdown. She seems like a really complicated character (as all pop stars are, some just seem more so than others...) and I think the fact that she wears that complicated-ness on her sleeve is what endears her to me.
Though I also recognise that she's not a feminist hero, no matter how much I may try and project that onto her, and that she really just scraped her way onto the Shameless website, and that I probably wouldn't have posted this if it wasn't a Saturday...
Posted by Thea
April 5, 2008, 5:05 PM
Yeah... This makes me prety happy. . . . it would make me happier if most of the video showed a hot guy fawning in party cloths with a putridly pale glasses wearing girl, but we'll never see that one, will we.
Posted by Myra
April 7, 2008, 9:34 PM
Here's a comment on the Spice article that for some strange reason I can't get my computer to post on that message board.
One of the first things I read about the spice girls reunion rather depressed me. They have renounced their ties to femmenism spouting some of the worst cliches about it (angry women, backstabbers, humorless/no-fun). Something has changed. Maybe it was never there in the first place, but now their immage has shifted. Case and point - Scary no longer has her natural hair. If they were so femmenist, it's also worth asking why motherhood and a girl-fight about the relitive hotness of two of them sidetracked their career the first time. Also, it was them, more than any other group, who created a generation of tweens to be marketed to and to be ,often creepily, sexualised. It was them whose fame was used to power the mock beauty pagent of American Idle. As people and activist, I don't trust them. Already in their heyday they were doing chair/dances reminicient of strip shows and brandishsed whips in tight leather in a pain-sex type dance on a music vedio. It was their appeal the Bratz dolls took off from (after all they were made into Barbieish toys themselves, their impact on toys alone has been sweeping) How can any femmenist nickname herself "baby"?
And yet I spent their whole fame impersonating them with a female friend I still have and a slightly younger boy who since drifted out of my life. I'm both in love with them and utterly horrified by them . I guess it's their immage I like. I will alway thing wannabe is femmenist. I will download their early stuff. I love their appeal to commuity, queerness, diversity, femmenism . . . Someone should write a good book about them! I want to! Does anybody know if it's been done already? I'll read it if I don't have to write it! I can talk endlessly about them. Please respond with books! Summer is coming! I long to read about girl power.
Posted by Myra
April 7, 2008, 9:36 PM
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