Whenever the holiday season approaches, you can rely on one thing – but by the time New Year’s rolls around, you will have heard Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is You” more times than you can count. In many ways, Carey has become the Queen of Christmas, but in recent years people seem to forget that before she started embracing the Christmas thing, Carey was one of the most successful recording stars of all time. While her recent singles haven’t been that successful, she’s been racking up number-one hits since 1990, when her first single, “Victim of Love,” rocketed to number one on the Billboard charts.
One thing worth noting is that Carey was always able to reinvent herself. In the early nineties, she was more of a pop princess. But, later in the nineties, she reinvented herself as a sex symbol/diva with some of her biggest hits, including the immortal “Fantasy” and her collaboration with Jay-Z, “Heartbreaker.” However, an ill-fated detour into acting almost derailed her career, with the film Glitter ranking as one of the biggest box office bombs of all time, although she received much better reviews for Lee Daniels’s Precious.
In this episode of WTF Happened to this Celebrity, which is written by Mathew Plale, narrated and produced by Taylor James Johnson, and edited by Kier Gomes, we examine Mariah Carey’s career highs and lows and discuss what makes her such an enduring icon.
Are you sick of hearing “All I Want for Christmas is You” yet? Let us know in the comments.