mariah's emancipation + o.j.'s expiration
‘yeah, daddy, i got a lil bit of Black in me, too. i didn’t tell you?’
square one.
The album was released on this day, April 12 2005.
It was Mariah Carey's 10th studio album
The album was nominated for a eight Grammys, including Album of the Year (she lost to U2's How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, but won Best Contemporary R&B Album, and two other awards)
In the US, The Emancipation of Mimi was the best-selling album of 2005.
For VIBE magazine, I interviewed Carey around the time of her #1s album, a compilation of her 18 No. 1 hits. I’m including readable scans from that issue. We were in Sonoma, California, sipping merlot, and nibbling on Monterey Jack cheese.
Plus: Rolling Stone excerpted the Mariah chapter of my Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop, right here. In the below paragraph I was talking about being at a Mariah Carey party at New York City’s Royalton hotel
This event is likely the one Sandra Bernhard referenced in a Mariah Carey joke from that era: “Now she’s trying to backtrack on our asses,” goes the bit. “Gettin’ real niggerish up there at the Royalton Hotel suite with Puff Daddy and all the greasy, chain-wearing Black men. ‘Oooh, yeah, Daddy I got a little bit of Black in me, too. I didn’t tell you that?’ Do not try to compete with the fierce ghetto divas. Because they will go down, in, around, and off on your ass!” Bernhard is also known for saying that Carey is “only Black when it helps her sell music.” Which denies Carey her authenticity and humanity, and is also a super-rich comment, considering that the statement could be a motto for many white recording artists over the course of history.
Here’s the Mariah Carey episode of my Black Girl Songbook podcast.
Paid subscribers get a full
of reccos once a week. But I couldn’t resist sharing these few
With regard to O.J. Simpson, the Oscar-winning 2016 Made In America is an important way to toward context (it’s streaming on Hulu). I haven’t had a chance to read them all yet but here’s the New York Times obituary. The Guardian obituary. New York magazine. USC (where Simpson was a Heisman winner) has not yet spoken. The state of O.J.’s estate. Where the kids are. A view from the Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood, with was the epicenter of the crime. How Nicole Brown Simpson’s family was dealing with things in 1995. Apparently the Nicole Brown Simpson Foundation is no more. On April 11, victim Ronald Goldman’s father, Fred Goldman said: “It’s just further reminder of Ron being gone all these years…It’s no great loss to the world. It’s a further reminder of Ron’s being gone." The Ron Goldman Foundation is here.
I must admit: this interview, with the Reacher guy
went unexpected places:
“Christians today have become the most vitriolic tribe. It is so antithetical to what Jesus was calling us to be and to do,” he explains. It also upsets him that some Christians have so closely aligned with former President Donald Trump. “Trump is a rapist and a con man, and yet the entire Christian church seems to be treat him like he’s their poster child and it’s unreal. I don’t understand it.”
Allen Ritchson also discusses the sexual assault he was a victim of during his modeling days.
Is it weird that TikTok’s new Instagram competitor is called, “Notes”?
“An Honest Assessment of Rural White Resentment Is Long Overdue.” The New Republic has thoughts: “But we refuse to justify attitudes that some scholars try to underplay.”
In music,
Danyel