Raiff Celebrates Mariah's 20 Years in Music: 1997

Posted by Raiff on Saturday, 22-May-2010, 12:01PM EDT

Mariah Carey had a monumental year in 1997, personally and professionally. With several months having passed since her last single, fans were eager to see what was next. Much to their surprise, the next annoucement was not regarding a new song or album, but rather the fact that Mariah was separating from her husband of four years, Tommy Mottola. "[The couple] have mutually and amicably agreed to a trial separation," read a statement from Sony Music. "They look forward to continued success in their professional relationship." Mariah did not speak often about her separation in interviews but she did tell MTV News that "[Tommy is] a great person. But that doesn't mean it's not time for me to go in my own direction right now. It's the right thing to do."

With a new provocative image, a more overtly R&B sound and a new relationship status, Mariah was ready to "spread her wings" and embark on a new album appropriately titled Butterfly.

"Honey," the first single from the upcoming album, was released on August 26, 1997. The song was co-written and co-produced by Mariah, Sean "Puffy" Combs, Stevie J and Q-Tip. Billboard described the song as "thickly layered with smooth, seductive harmonies that effectively drive home the quietly insinuating hook" and gave mega props to Mariah for "breaking beyond her safety zone and accomplishing the tricky feat of delivery."

The best known aspect of "Honey" was its music video, which forever changed Mariah's public image. Directed by Paul Hunter and shot during the summer in Puerto Rico, "Honey" featured a scantily clad Mariah being held hostage inside of a huge mansion by three men, including an Italian hood played by actor Frank Sivero. After outsmarting her captors, she escaped by Jet Ski. The video premiered on MTV and BET on July 30, 1997 and there was media speculation that the plot of the video paralleled Mariah breaking free from her marriage, but Mariah maintained that she was just having fun. "It's just a James Bond spoof," she explained. "The actors weren't meant to be Tommy or anybody else."

"There's not a new Mariah. I'm always the same person. I think that, image-wise, this time, people were a bit surprised with the 'Honey' video. But to be honest with you, that's much more of a representation of who I am than most of my other videos," Mariah told VH1 in an interview at the Bronx Zoo's Butterfly Garden.

Despite average success at radio, single sales for "Honey" went through the roof. It debuted at #1 on the single sales chart and sold significantly over platinum status. With its great initial sales, "Honey" skyrocketed to #1 in its first week, making Mariah the first and only artist in history to have three singles debut at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (the others being "Fantasy" and "One Sweet Day"). It also gave her the most #1 hits (twelve) of any female artist - one ahead of both Whitney Houston and Madonna. "Honey" remained in the top 40 for nineteen weeks and ranked at #32 on the Hot 100 1997 year-end charts. Outside the U.S., it went #1 for 3 weeks in Japan, and inside the top 10 in Canada, Australia, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

On September 16, Mariah released her sixth studio album, Butterfly - an album that many look back at as a turning point in her career. Rolling Stone described it as a "transitional album" and positioned Mariah "firmly into the milieu of modern, hip-hop-inflected R&B." TIME's David Thigpen theorized that the new record "continues the evolution that Carey began on Daydream - away from pure pop toward a keener-edged R&B and hip-hop influenced sound."


Mariah celebrated the release of Butterfly with a CD signing for fans at New York's Tower Records. Her promotional schedule for the album included an appearance on the season premiere of Oprah Winfrey, as well as performances on The Rosie O'Donnell Show, The Late Show With David Letterman, and Saturday Night Live. She also promoted the album with appearances in Europe and Japan.

Butterfly debuted at #1 on the Billboard albums chart with 236,000 copies sold in its first week. Although Mariah had had 12 #1 singles and three previous #1 albums, number one had never felt so good for her. "It feels like my first album in a lot of ways, because it's the first time that I'm really enjoying the success," she told VH1.


The next release from Butterfly was the title song, a powerful ballad that talked about having the strength to break free from a bad situation. "I feel strongly about the song as a writer, and also because it's a very hopeful song - a song of strength, about being strong enough to recognize when a situation is not right and having the power within yourself to let that go." Billboard called it the "lovely 'Butterfly'" and described it as "classic Carey, from its gospel-kissed ballad instrumentation and choir chants to the diva's soaring, glass-shattering performance."

Originally, "Butterfly" was supposed to be "a house record," Mariah explained. "I was gonna just do it with David Morales. The mix that's on there, 'Fly Away,' that was my original concept for the song. And I had the lyrics to that part and then I just started working on it a little further and I said, you know this should really be the title of the album and it should be a ballad." Both versions of the song made it to the CD. "Butterfly" didn't fare any better than "Honey"” at radio, it peaked at #16 and for the first time in Mariah's career, Sony Music did not commercially release a second single from Mariah. As a result, the song was not eligible to chart on the Hot 100 under Billboard rules at the time.

Although Mariah was enjoying exploring her R&B and hip-hop roots, some of the standout tracks on Butterfly were the ballads. One of them was "Close My Eyes," a deeply personal song that many fans have identified as one of their favorites, and that Mariah has performed in concert consistently over the years, even as recently as 2009. She began writing the song in 1993, but did not finish it. "It's probably the most personal song that I've ever written," Mariah told VH1. "I was sitting in the bathtub looking at the moon... the song just came to me. It was me sort of reflecting on my life and things that had led me to that point. I was just looking back like 'Wow, I've really come a long way.'"

While its credits show a very extensive list of names (Sean "Puffy" Combs, Q-Tip, Stevie J, The Trackmasters, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Missy Elliott, Dru Hill), Butterfly remains a perfectly cohesive and a wonderfully sequenced album. If you ask yourself why, the answer is easy: the consistency is in its theme and more importantly, in its quality. Among fans, the album is known to have some of Mariah's most personal and detailed lyrics. She writes about love - lost, fulfilled, desired ("My All", "The Roof", "Honey"), she yearns for her lover in "Babydoll" ("Zoning out, thinking about you and me between the sheets"), she exposes stories about her tough childhood and difficulty fitting in ("Close My Eyes", "Outside") and sings about a metaphorical butterfly in the ever appropriate title track. It isn't just the lyrics that make Butterfly so varied and enjoyable. This album introduces Mariah's "whispery" vocals ("Fourth of July") which would play a big part in her future recordings and yet she still delivers her powerful belts and the admired ballads ("Whenever You Call"). In "Breakdown," Mariah effortlessly adapts the staccato singing style of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony as she sings about getting over a breakup; and in the cover to Prince's "The Beautiful Ones," Mariah gives us her soulful interpretation of the song.

Mariah Carey ended 1997 with another #1 album and #1 single to add to her repertoire. More importantly to her, those accomplishments came from a record that she put her all into and believed in more than any of her previous work. "There's a lot of real emotion in Butterfly. I lived with it. I woke up to it," she said.




MARIAH QUOTES

"If you believe the tabloids, you'd think I was out with a different guy every night. I am not a promiscuous person. I might go out to dinner with someone. But, I would not be in someone's bed one night and someone else's the next night. If you believe the media, you'd think I'm just jumping in and out of bed with gangsta rappers and models. It is so ridiculous how they are calling people 'gangsta' rappers." Jet "I'm not this one-dimensional girl who sits in a field wearing a flannel shirt or stands onstage singing only ballads. And I feel I'm in a better position to express myself at this point." Cosmopolitan "For a long time, I was so blocked that I went through meetings and interviews very uptight and guarded because I thought people were out to get me. In a lot of ways, a lot of people were." Modern Woman "That's why I don't use tracks people might submit to me because I like to come up with my own musical ideas, even down to the loops. Like the idea to use the Tom Tom Club for 'Fantasy' was mine and I came up with the idea to use the Mobb Deep loop for 'The Roof' which I did with the Trackmasters, which, by the way, is my favorite song on the album." Blues & Soul "It's like when people used to say, 'If she weren't married to him, she wouldn't have this, she wouldn't have that.' I don't care if you're married to the President of the United States or Houdini! Nobody can make the public buy records.... I've worked my ass off for years, and contributed as much to the company as the company contributed to me." Entertainment Weekly "What really matters at the end of the day is not how many records I've sold, who says I was manipulative, who says I was manipulated, who says I was caged, who says I planned the whole thing. I know who I am." Entertainment Weekly "Now I'm just more comfortable in my own skin, where I can just be like, "This is who I am. You like it? Good! You don't? Goodbye!" MTV News "I've definitely gone through a lot of personal changes, and a lot of professional changes, during the process of recording this album. Much moreso than on any other record that I've done." MTV News "For the first time, something that I really feel this close to is coming out, and I'm getting a chance to show that side of me to the fans." VH1 To One "There have been times in the past when I've wanted to go further in more of a hip-hop direction and people were a little bit apprehensive about me doing tracks that had a harder edge, or working with people that might not be the typical pop-producer. But I think it's been a gradual thing." VH1 To One "A lot of people don't realize what a luxury it is to be able to just say, "I'm one thing." That's a very very empowering thing. And when you don't have that, it's something that you can never really obtain." VH1 To One "I let out a lot of emotion during the making of the album and that's why I feel so close to it. It's been like therapy." Boston Globe "Butterfly was about leaving one section of my life and moving on to another. The title track was a wish list of things I hoped somebody would say to me, but I wrote it as though I were talking to someone else. The lines 'Spread your wings and prepare to fly/ For you have become a Butterfly/ Fly abandonedly into the sun' is like someone saying, 'Do your thing.' There's another line: 'Wild horses run unbridled/ Or their spirit dies.' You can't restrain a free spirit - either you're going to break them or they're going to leave and never come back." VH1, 2003 "It was '97 and I was leaving my marriage [to Tommy Mottola] which encompassed my life. I was writing the song 'Butterfly' wishing that that's what he would say to me. There's a part that goes, 'I have learned that beauty/has to flourish in the light/wild horses run unbridled/or their spirit dies/you have given me the courage/to be all that I can/and I truly feel ...[sings] and I truly feel your heart will lead you back to me when you're ready to land.' At that point I really believed that I was going to go back to the marriage - I didn't think I was going to leave forever. But then the things that happened to me during that time caused me to not go back. Had it been, 'Go be yourself, you've been with me since you were a kid, let's separate for a while,' I probably would've." Interview Magazine, 2007

COLLEAGUES' QUOTES

Jamie Theakston: "I first met her in 1997 when she was promoting her album Butterfly and we hit it off immediately. With everything that had been written about her I had no idea what to expect, but she was smart, warm and very funny. She's a lot of fun to be around and unlike a lot of celebrities, can really laugh at herself. When she performed on Top Of The Pops we started a rumour she'd demanded puppies in her dressing room and it became instant Mariah folklore. But she loved it because it was all harmless fun, and that's what she's all about." (Glamour UK, 2006) Missy Elliot: "MC is a funny girl and always makes me laugh no matter what. I love her!" "Mariah, she listens to Rap. She's just straight up cool." "I remember, when my manager asked me to work with Mariah. I thought I would faint immediately. I mean, the legendary Mariah Carey wanted me to rap on her CD? I was shocked, excited, honored and happy."

TV APPEARANCES

"Honey" Music Video: Original | Bad Boy Remix


"Butterfly" Music Video


"The Roof" Music Video


"My All" Music Video: Original | Club Mix | Hip-Hop Remix


"Breakdown" Music Video


"Honey" Interview w/ Jamie Theakston, O Zone, 1997


"Butterfly" Interview w/ Jamie Theakston, The Hit Factory, 1997


David Letterman Show, 1997: "Butterfly" | Interview


Saturday Night Live, 1997: "Butterfly" | "My All"


Rosie O'Donnel Show, 1997: "My All" | Interview


Oprah Winfrey Show, 1997: "Butterfly" | Interview


Mariah Carey Raw - MTV 1997: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3


"Butterfly" Release - E! News, 1997


"Honey" at Top Of The Pops UK, 1997


Interview - The Bigger Breakfast UK, 1997


"Honey" - The Hey Hey Music Show Japan, 1997