Once again, Mariah Carey’s “Angels Cry” is one of the most added tracks on AC radio this week:
Make sure you support Mariah’s “Angels Cry” at your local Adult Contemporary & Urban Contemporay station TODAY!
Source: All Access Music Group | Mariah Connection
Monday, February 8, 2010
Nicki Minaj says she was so surprised that she got a call to work with Mariah Carey on the remix of “Up Out My Face” that she kept the collaboration very hush-hush.
“That one, I didn’t believe until I was physically in the studio that I was doing with something with Mariah,” the New York native told MTV News last week. “I didn’t even tell anyone I shot a video with Mariah, because I didn’t even believe. In the back of my mind, I felt like, ‘This video is not gonna come out. There’s no way I’m gonna do a video with Mariah Carey before I even put out my album.’ Then, when it came out, I think it was the #1 video on YouTube in one day, something crazy like that. She’s an icon, I’ve loved her since I was little, like ‘Vision of Love,’ ‘Someday.’ I was one of those little girls in the mirror singing her songs with my mother.”
Much like her fellow Mariah Carey collaborator and good friend Gucci Mane, Minaj said the real Mariah was nothing like she imagined.
“When I met her, she was so funny and silly,” Nicki recalled. “I thought when I was gonna work with Mariah, [she] was gonna be like this diva. But we were cracking jokes the whole day. She’s a sweet, down-to-earth person.”
Nicki and Mimi had their names written on two giant baby doll boxes in the video. In the Nick Cannon-directed clip, the two bust out and have a good time changing outfits and playing with men. The doll angle plays perfectly with Nicki’s “black Barbie” persona.
“I think it was dope,” Minaj said about the video. “A lot of times, more famous artists or more confident artists take from a younger artist but they’ll never include you in that. I feel like she liked the whole doll thing and she wanted to do it with me. But she said that: She said, ‘Everybody’s gonna say “she’s doing Nicki.” But I told her, she’s always had a doll persona, like all that ‘doll baby’ [stuff]. So it goes perfect with Barbie and we had fun. That’s all that matters.”
The remix will appear on Mariah’s Angels Advocate remix LP, due on March 30.
Source: MTV News
Monday, February 8, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Superstar diva’s voice still surprisingly strong.
Mariah Carey made her performance debut in Ottawa last night in front of a smallish crowd of 2,900 at Scotiabank Place. Although she arrived on stage late, seemed to rush through songs and took breaks to conserve her energy, these were not simply attention-getting techniques from the famously difficult diva.
No, the superstar had a little cold, she informed us early in the evening, picked up from one of her dancers. It cut into her sleep, she added, “but here I am. The show must go on.”
In a gold-and-sequined princess dress that showed off her ample cleavage, Carey made a fashionably late entrance dangling in a cocoon-like bundle that descended from the ceiling to the stage.
The full-length gown was torn away, revealing a short, leg-baring skirt as her breathy soprano fluttered into Butterfly, then darted from Shake It Off, Touch My Body and Fly Like a Bird.
Her voice was surprisingly strong, despite the sniffles, but there were backup singers and electronic effects enhancing her natural vocal power. A full band and a contingent of dancers accompanied Carey on stage, and she occasionally let them take over while she rested her voice and changed outfits.
“I’m not going to complain because I love everybody,” Carey said, as if to remind herself not to complain. “No matter what you do, you can’t make me hate you.”
At one point, Carey played up her diva reputation with a tongue-in-cheek bit that involved calling her hair and make-up folks onto the stage for a touch-up.
It was evidently supposed to be playful and self-deprecating, but the sense of fun was dampened by her poker-face delivery, probably due to the fact that she repeats the gag every night.
Sipping something from a champagne glass (she said it was water, Carey seemed to come to life a bit later, and made a point of referring to her new line of champagne.
On the whole, though, Carey gave an uninspired performance — one hopes her champagne isn’t quite so flat.
Source: The Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Check out the “Must List” in the February 5 issue of Entertainment Weekly, where they’ve listed Mariah Carey’s “Up Out My Face” video one of the Top 10 Things We Love This Week! EW cites a “delicious, high-camp clip” from Mariah and Lil Wayne protegé, Nicki Minaj.
Entertainment Weekly is available on newsstands now.
Source: MariahCarey.Com
Friday, February 5, 2010
Less than two months from now, Mariah Carey will turn 40 years old and will have spent half of that time in the public eye, weathering career highs and lows.
Having moved enough units to grant her the title of best selling artist of the ’90s and staging a commercial comeback in the mid-’00s after the double edged catastrophe that was 2001’s “Glitter” and 2002’s “Charmbracelet,” Carey can follow in the footsteps of many a diva past and present and coast on her past accomplishments.
Sales of her most recent effort, last year’s “Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel,” have been respectable given the lackluster state of affairs in the record selling biz in the last few years. Yet it’s still fallen short of expectations given her past track record. The first single from the set, “Obsessed,” was a success, but subsequent offerings, including her cover of Foreigner’s schmaltz-pop ballad “I Want to Know What Love Is,” fell off the radar seemingly as soon as it first blipped.
Given this, along with her forthcoming two decade anniversary as a pop culture entity and the scheduled release of a “Memoirs” remix set in the next two months, it’s easy to see Carey following in the footsteps of fellow ’90s pop powerhouse Celine Dion and Elton John, moving her operations to Las Vegas for a year-plus stand.
Surprisingly, though, Carey’s greatest triumph in the last few years was on the big screen in a supporting role in 2009’s critically acclaimed “Precious.” While it’s not enough for us here at Tunes and Tix to cease mocking what we see as her multi-octave shrill or stop testing our gag reflex by seeing how many minutes of “Glitter” we can endure before scrambling for the remote, it’s a promising direction. That’s something many a veteran diva would give an octave for at this particular stage.
At press time, limited tickets were available for Carey’s Feb. 13 and 14 shows at Chicago Theatre.
Mariah Carey, 7:30 p.m. Feb. 13, 7 p.m. Feb. 14, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State St., Chicago. $69.75-$150.75. FYI: (312) 462-6300, thechicagotheatre.com
On sale now
Source: The Northwest Indiana Times
Friday, February 5, 2010
No need to worry, fans: Mariah Carey’s creativity is in full bloom.
Mariah Carey was overlooked in this week’s Oscar nominations, took a pass on the Grammys and won’t be singing at the Super Bowl this weekend. And what about that incident in Florida in January?
The pop superstar gave a rambling acceptance speech at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, leading to widespread speculation that she was drunk. Smiling sweetly, she stumbled over her words and cut off sentences with a throaty laugh as she accepted the Breakthrough Actress Performance award for her role in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.
What’s going on with Mimi? fans wondered. Are we seeing the exalted diva fade, ungracefully, from the limelight?
Far from it. As she begins the year of her 40th birthday, the five-octave singer is a creative dynamo who appears to be making the most of her charmed existence.
Among Carey’s many reasons to celebrate are a happy marriage, a hit album, a new fragrance and the satisfaction of a job well done for her role in Precious. She plays a social worker, a gig that required her to skip the makeup and fancy clothes. Although Carey wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for her excellent performance, the film is up for six awards, including best picture.
Carey has also embarked on a major tour, her first in three years. The Angels Advocate tour follows the release of her 12th studio album, the aptly titled Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, which went to No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B charts and inspired People magazine editors to declare her one of the top 10 most intriguing people of 2009.
Carey has been married for about a year and a half to Nick Cannon, the multi-media rapper/comedian/entertainment mogul who’s a decade younger than Carey.
Really, the only reason fans might be worried about her tipsy on-camera behaviour is because she’s been there before, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.
In 2001, Carey had a breakdown, reportedly brought on by overwork and lack of sleep. Her behaviour became erratic, and not long after her infamous striptease during an MTV interview, she was admitted to a New York hospital for supervised care.
“The funny thing is, when I realize how young I was when I first started in this business, and how it was all crazy and nothing seemed real; I sort of haven’t taken a break since then,” she said in an interview before the emotional collapse. “So it all seems like one continuous day.”
Carey signed her first recording contract at 17. At 23, she married Tommy Mottola, the much-older music-industry exec who discovered her at a party. Although he helped guide her career to superstardom with her first album, the marriage lasted less than five years.
With her first album, Carey helped define the genre of contemporary R&B, taking it into the mainstream with slickly produced love songs like Vision of Love and Love Takes Time, both from her chart-topping, Grammy-winning 1990 self-titled debut. The disc sold millions around the world.
After the split with Mottola, Carey began to introduce elements of hip hop into her music. Between 1997 and 2002, a string of albums with girlie names - Butterfly, Rainbow, Glitter and Charmbracelet - found Carey collaborating with rappers and hip-hop producers. Sales began to slide, though, along with the rest of the music industry, and Carey lost her record deal. She kept writing.
In 2005, Carey released The Emancipation of Mimi, her songwriting energized by the influence of ’70s and ’80s soul and disco. A bevy of Grammy Awards marked her comeback as a pop superstar, and the monster hit, We Belong Together, was declared the song of the decade by Billboard magazine.
Source: The Montreal Gazette
Friday, February 5, 2010
Below you will find scans of Nick Cannon’s interview with Entertainment Weekly, as previously mentioned Mariah Carey is discussed:
Source: Entertainment Weekly | Scans: NickCannon.Com
Friday, February 5, 2010
Some might still call it rhythm ‘n’ blues, but it’s really the genre’s hip-hop-influenced, weaned-on-pop grandchild that Mariah Carey offered to 7,000 fawning fans Thursday night at a suitably shrunken Bell Centre. As the multimillion-selling, statistic-breaking singer proved one more time, R & B might have become more of a brand name than a meaningful style.At its best, Carey’s music is infectious and cannily persuasive enough to do the form justice. Even after 13 years, you’d have to be a hopeless purist not to be seduced by Always Be My Baby, which was mostly delivered as Carey reclined invitingly in a love seat. And if the hook in Obsessed or the sweet, anthemic We Belong Together don’t do anything at all for you, maybe you’re just not being fair. Not to forget Touch My Body, an irresistibly catchy song, effective even without the video antics of 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer.
But at its worst, well, God help us. Mawkish muck like the dreadful Hero, which closed the concert, or the over-emoting in the inspirational but uninspired ballad Fly Like a Bird place Carey more in Céline Dion territory than in Aretha country.
Yet maybe that chasm is not as great as we assume. Sure, Carey is a diva. But so is Aretha, who, for all her brilliance, really spawned all the vocal excess of this generation of R & B singers. Carey even had the sense of humour to playfully send up her image Thursday night, after Always Be My Baby, by having two flunkies come out to dab her face and touch up her hair. “Wouldn’t you do the same if you were me?” she asked, to cheers. The star and the little people is, as always, the operative dynamic in a Carey concert.
Incidentally, it’s hard to figure out why the on-stage freshening up would have been needed, even in jest. Carey is not what one would call an energetic performer: finger waves and slinky hand gestures are about it. Her dancers – numbering between three and 10, depending on song requirements – shouldered most of the physicality and visuals.
Should we chalk it up to fatigue? Starting a full hour after she was scheduled to go on, Carey waited a few numbers before apologizing and explaining that she had been up late shooting a video to raise funds for Haiti and got little sleep. The audience members – pretty soldily in the thirtysomething range – quickly forgave the fact that they would lose an hour’s sleep themselves and showered her with love.
If you knock off about 15 minutes total Carey spent off stage for a costume change, she performed for about 70 minutes. With top ticket prices reaching $130 plus extras, it wouldn’t be unfair to raise the question of value for money. But Carey’s fans answered it with adoration. And we didn’t come to argue.
Source: The Montreal Gazette
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Nick Cannon firmly believes in the power of positive thinking. Ask the 29-year-old how his various achievements came about—successful stand-up comic at 15 years old, staff writer for Nickelodeon’s All That and Kenan & Kel at 17, CEO of his own production company Ncredible, chairman of the TeenNick cable network, host of NBC’s hit America’s Got Talent and a daily radio show, and loving husband to Mariah Carey—and he’ll tell you that he willed them to happen by telling the universe what he wanted. “I truly believe in speaking things into existence,” says Cannon. “Not to get all Tony Robbins, but you speak it, and it can definitely happen to you.” Cannon sat down with EW for an exclusive interview on his growing career and his high-profile marriage to superstar Mariah Carey.On his film career: “They started throwing every movie [at me] and I chose bad. I didn’t understand that you had to be strategic. I was like, ‘A couple million dollars?! I get to shoot a gun?! Let’s go!’”
On his marriage to Mariah: “There were people who were for it and there were more people who were against. You have to ask the question: Is your heart more important than your career? Absolutely. I was like, If I don’t do anything else ever again in the entertainment industry, I’m in love with this woman.”
On his five-year plan: “First and foremost, to have a happy family and have some little Cannons running around. And then career-wise, I feel like I’m in that stage where people are taking me serious as a man right now. I wanna be a billionaire in five years. It can happen! I’m speaking it into existence!”
On raising children in Hollywood: “Me and my wife talk about it all the time. As much as there are private jets and champagne everywhere, I want them to understand that’s not what life is about. I’ve met quite a few grounded people who were born into situations like this. We look at those type of examples. I always admired the Kardashian family. They are normal. They’re a family that really loves each other. Or the Osbournes.”
On Mariah’s pet peeves: “She hates when I’m messy when it has to do with her nice stuff. Like, I can’t throw my jacket on the Marilyn Monroe piano—but I do. She hates that I wear suits. She likes me in, like, Timberlands with the fitted cap and T-shirts.”
For more from Nick Cannon, including how he and Mariah spend a typical night at home, pick up the new issue of Entertainment Weekly on stands Friday.
Source: Entertainment Weekly
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
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