Word: charmbracelet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...problem when a singer's personal life is more interesting than her music. The lives of America's two grandest pop divas have become as scandalously compelling as an Aaron Spelling script. But their songs, as demonstrated above, have not. Carey's Charmbracelet and Houston's Just Whitney ... offer decidedly different approaches to the pop comeback; one is penitent, the other defiant. Both are letdowns...
...bizarre ramblings on her website and even flirted with Eminem. After she was hospitalized for exhaustion and Glitter flopped in a Waterworld-meets--Chris Gaines kind of way, Carey's record label paid her $28 million not to record with it again. This is pretty humiliating stuff, and Charmbracelet is not above begging for sympathy. Carey opens with Through the Rain, a somber ballad that reduces her formidable voice to a tentative little quaver. "I can make it through the rain, I can stand up once again," she sings. Never mind that Barry Manilow used these approximate lyrics...
...Much of Charmbracelet follows this pattern: Carey makes vague allusions to her recent problems while musically cannibalizing her back catalog. There are a few moments when she reveals enough to make the formula interesting, as on the playful Clown, a mid-tempo revenge song that responds to Eminem's sexual innuendo with the lines, "You should've never intimated we were lovers/When you know very well we never even touched each other." But mostly Charmbracelet feels like a hedge. There are the guest rappers (Jay-Z, Cam'ron) of Carey's late '90s hits, the chipper ballads of her multiplatinum...
...best songs on Charmbracelet and Just Whitney...are covers. Carey does a terrific remake of Def Leppard's Bringin' on the Heartbreak, and Houston turns the cheeseball standard You Light Up My Life into something vaguely moving. Both have succeeded with covers before--Houston famously with Dolly Parton's I Will Always Love You, Carey with Journey's Open Arms and her near-cover of Tom Tom Club's Genius of Love. Perhaps when your own life is unbelievable, it's easier to sing as someone else...
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