FEATURE:
Groovelines
Mariah Carey - Emotions
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I am going to talk about…
the album in addition to the single. Both are called Emotions. They are, of course, from Mariah Carey. I think both are classics that remain underrated. On 13th August, the single turns thirty. It seems amazing to think that it was released that long ago! I remember it coming out and being hooked by it. Carey’s second studio album was released in September 1991. The title track opens proceedings with real energy and memorability. Maybe Carey started to really hit her stride (in terms of her vocals and songwriting) on her fifth studio album, Daydream (1995). I really like Emotions and feel that it is a fantastic album that warrants reinvestigation. Before coming to an article regarding the album, here is some information about one of Carey’s biggest singles:
“Emotions" is a song by American singer Mariah Carey from her second studio album Emotions (1991). It was written and produced by Carey, Robert Clivillés, and David Cole of C+C Music Factory and released as the album's lead single on August 13, 1991. The song's lyrics has its protagonist going through a variety of emotions from high to low, up to the point where she declares, "You got me feeling emotions." Musically, it is a Gospel and R&B heavily influenced by 1970s disco music and showcases Carey's upper range and extensive use of the whistle register.
"Emotions" received positive reviews from critics.
About.com's Bill Lamb called the high notes as the pros of the album itself and that it stands with Mariah's best.
AllMusic editor Ashley S. Battel highlighted this song and he wrote that this song is upbeat and it serves to send the listener on a musical journey filled with varying emotions.
Billboard editor Larry Flick said, "Although the heat generated by her multiplatinum debut album has barely cooled, Carey previews her sophomore set with a dance /pop ditty that will remind some of the Emotions' "Best Of My Love". Expect instant multiformat attention.
Cashbox described it as "a happy, perky soul/pop number bearing a resemblance to the music the group The Emotions embraced during the 1970s".
Chicago Tribune editor Jan DeKnock wrote "just listen to those incredibly high notes on the title cut and current single 'Emotions.'"
Los Angeles Times wrote that this song's producers somewhat perk up this song but he noted that the song can't match the quality of any C+C material.
Music & Media said it "is a good display of Carey's impressive vocal gymnastics. A fashionable co-production by Cole and Clivilles (C&C Music Factory) is paired to a gospel-tinged pop groove."
Music Week called it a "dynamic gospel/R&B-inflected house track" in their review.
Rolling Stone writer Rob Tannenbaum also said, "they (producers) back Carey with pumping house keyboards and shamelessly recycle the chords of Cheryl Lynn's 'Got to Be Real' and the Emotions' 'Best of My Love' to construct the bubbly new-disco 'Emotions.'"
Sun Sentinel magazine editor Deborah Wiler wrote that "the unimaginative first single, Emotions, sounds suspiciously like the `77 hit Best of My Love (by the Emotions)."
"Emotions" was nominated for the 1992 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, losing to "Something to Talk About" by Bonnie Raitt. It won a BMI R&B Award, continuing Carey's unbroken streak of wins for this award. Carey was also nominated for Producer of the Year (non-classical), becoming the second woman to achieve this honor”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Mariah Carey won the Best New Artist award at the GRAMMYs in 1991
The chorus has an incredible hook. Carey’s whistle register, whilst it can put some of, works really well and highlights her amazing range. Many people have placed Emotions in the top-ten singles from the superstar. Nearly three decades after its release, Emotions is still being spun and celebrated. Mariah Carey has influenced legions of new singers. One can tell that songs like Emotions are important and have fed into other tracks. If you need to be uplifted and have some energy put into he veins, then I would recommend you listen to Emotions. My second-favourite song of Carey’s (behind Fantasy from Daydream), there is something about Emotions that draws me in. Before finishing with an article that asks us to reassess the album, Emotions, here are some facts about the album’s lead single:
“In this song, Mariah Carey is over the moon for a guy who makes her feel alive and in love. The emotions he makes her feel are deeper than she's ever dreamed of.
Carey wrote the lyric, but the track came courtesy of David Cole and Robert Clivillés, who were the C+C of C+C Music Factory. They were red-hot producers at the time with a hit of their own in 1991 with "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)."
This song bears resemblance to the 1977 #1 disco hit "Best Of My Love," by... The Emotions. Producers would often conjure up tracks in the style of hits from the past, and would label them accordingly. So, it's entirely possible that when Carey got the track (which would have come in a box), it said "Emotions" on it, perhaps triggering her lyric.
Carl Sturken, who as a member of Rythm Syndicate toured with C+C Music Factory around this time, is convinced this is the case. "I am absolutely one thousand percent certain that when they wrote that groove, they labeled it 'Emotions' because it's The Emotions' groove," he told Songfacts. "Then when Mariah Carey comes in to write over it, she sees 'Emotions' written as the name of the groove, so she writes a song called 'You've Got Me Feeling Emotions.'"
The "Best Of My Love" songwriters are not credited on "Emotions," but one of them - Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire - took legal action and received a settlement.
Speaking to Fred Bronson, author of The Billboard Book Of #1 Hits, David Cole weighed in on the connection to "Best Of My Love": "What was funny was both Robert and Mariah came up with the 'Emotions' groove separately. She had an idea for it and so did Robert. They both mentioned doing something similar to the (group) Emotions. I mean, the Emotions were an inspiration for the song 'Emotions,' there's no way to deny that or get around it. It definitely has the feeling from the Emotions, but we're not dumb enough to go and steal the damn record."
According to Cole, Tommy Mottola, the head of Sony Music and Mariah's soon-to-be husband, suggested the collaboration. Mariah was a big fan of the producer and the pair hit it off right away. "Working with Mariah was, first of all, fun," Cole recalled. "Robert and I bounced off ideas. We came up with a whole bunch of grooves. If this worked, cool, this doesn't work, next. And that's how we did the whole project. We would all come together and decide on what worked and what didn't.
Even though she was already a perfectionist in the studio, Mariah credits Cole with pushing her to even further heights. "He was one of the only people I used to have in the studio when I would sing because I respected him as a singer," she recalled in a 2018 Pitchfork interview. "He would push me in different areas where he could actually sing it to me and I would be like, 'Oh, this is cool. I like that.' If you listen to the song 'Emotions,' that was him going, 'You can do that. Try this.' Half the time, I would lose my voice afterwards because he would just push me."
In a 2015 retrospective interview for her greatest hits album #1 To Infinity, Mariah said she enjoyed making the music video because the director, Jeff Preiss, was more artistic than her previous directors. The playful clip shows her cruising in the back of a convertible and hanging out with a group of friends in New York City”.
To wrap up, SLANT wrote about Emotions five years ago. They marked twenty-five years of an album that is underrated. Few speak about Emotions as highly as albums like Daydream and Butterfly. They make some interesting observations:
“At the time of its release, Mariah Carey’s sophomore effort, Emotions, was considered a commercial disappointment, failing to reach the top of the charts and selling just half of what the singer’s blockbuster self-titled debut did. In his review of the album, Rolling Stone’s Rob Tannenbaum deemed Mariah’s singing “far more impressive than expressive,” a criticism ostensibly borne out by the album’s titular lead single, on which she proclaims that she’s been “feeling emotions.” Not to put too blunt a point on it, she then tells us, rather than shows us: “I feel good, I feel nice!”
Critics like Tannenbaum routinely griped about Mariah’s reliance on vocal acrobatics, which, they claimed, kept audiences at a remove from her actual songs. Like that of Whitney Houston, to whom she was often compared (and much to both women’s irritation), Mariah’s voice was indeed almost supernatural, a thing to marvel at from a distance. But the assertion that her music lacked expression, even at this early date in her career, is one that the songs themselves simply don’t bear out. The deliriously joyous “Emotions,” however broad its lyrics may seem, all but mandates a performance of the magnitude that Mariah delivers: Her object of desire has her feeling “intoxicated, flying high,” and though hers might be a literal vocal interpretation, it’s certainly an expressive one.
PHOTO CREDIT: John Loengard
Mariah and her label, however, obviously got the very public memo, as the arguably gratuitous sustained whistle note at the end of “Can’t Let Go,” the album’s second single, was removed from the radio edit of the song, and her upper range was employed sparingly, and often only as background textures, throughout much of the remainder of the decade. Luckily, Emotions still exists as it was conceived, complete with Mariah’s unapologetic deployment of her powerful instrument, and free of the reproach of the same people who would, in just a few years’ time, lament its inevitable deterioration.
Beginning with a rumbling piano tremolo followed by what might be the lowest note Mariah has committed to tape, the bombastic “You’re So Cold” is a lesson in fabulous excess, a showcase for four of Mariah’s infamous five octaves. The first 60 seconds of the song make for a deceptive introduction, with the singer’s portentous, protracted opening invocation (“Lord only knows…why I love you so…”) giving way to a bouncy, horn-filled kiss-off to a cruel devil in disguise. Of course, whistled at a pitch where articulation is rendered secondary, the word “disguise” becomes as unintelligible as Mariah’s euphoric squeals throughout the title track.
There are, believe it or not, moments of subtlety and nuance on Emotions, the fact of which is perhaps key to understanding the frustrations some have regarding Mariah’s myriad vocal tics. “Can’t Let Go” is, in hindsight, one of her most understated hits, her downcast verses floating ephemerally atop the song’s pointillistic percussion, while the album’s penultimate track, “Till the End of Time,” finds Mariah taking her sweet time building from a barely audible whisper to a thundering belt over the span of five minutes.
Mariah’s albums hadn’t yet become venues for her karaoke-style covers of ‘80s power ballads, but Emotions was an early indicator of her penchant for musical quotation. Mimi’s fascination with appropriating hits from her youth manifested itself on “Can’t Let Go,” which swipes its opening keyboard riff from Keith Sweat’s “Make It Last Forever” (she would go on to more directly sample the 1987 R&B hit on a remix for 1999’s “Thank God I Found You”). More than on any other Mariah Carey album, though, disco is a clear influence here, thanks in part to her collaborations with Robert Clivillés and David Cole of C+C Music Factory. House music, the duo’s genre of choice, was still gloriously and inextricably bound to hip-hop in the early ‘90s, as both were built almost entirely on pastiche: “Emotions” is a shameless homage to “Best of My Love” (by none other than the Emotions), while “Make It Happen” makes a less overt nod to Alicia Myers’s 1981 single “I Want to Thank You.”
If Mariah’s struggle to locate her musical identity at this point in her career often resulted in her cribbing from the past, she was already exerting a sense of agency in her lyrics. Songs like the autographical “Make It Happen” and “The Wind,” the latter of which is the story of the death of a friend set to Russ Freeman’s instrumental jazz composition of the same name, hint at the inspirational anthems and confessional manifestos, respectively, that would come to be fixtures on Mariah’s future albums. “No proper shoes upon my feet/Sometimes I couldn’t even eat,” she sing-raps on “Make It Happen,” recounting her struggle from Long Island backup singer to multiplatinum superstar by the age of 20. Though her “struggle” ended before most people’s usually begin (“It just didn’t take that long for the girl with one shoe to acquire many,” Rich Juzwiak quipped in our 2005 retrospective of Mariah’s work), her performance is galvanizing and soulful”.
Mariah wouldn’t completely liberate herself from the fetters of everything she believed was holding her back until 1997’s Butterfly, and has since strained to maintain an equilibrium in terms of both her music and image, often slipping into caricature. But on Emotions, at least musically, she managed to strike a balance of soul and pop that’s not just technically impressive, but filled with undeniable, honest-to-god feeling”.
A stunning song that is infectious and sounds fresh today, Emotions is one of the very best from the iconic Mariah Carey. If anything, Emotions has received more love and investigation this long after its release than it did when it was released in 1991. Perhaps Carey was seen as a new commodity and few knew what to make of her music. Despite the Emotions album having a few weaker moments, one cannot deny the strength and importance of its title track. It is a jam that has this incredible force and positivity. If you have not heard the song or have not spin it for a while, put it on now and spend some time with it. In my opinion, it is…
A real gem.