They Defrosted Mariah Carey: “It’s That Time of Year”

“It’s time”, “The time has comeor”. It almost sounds like a threat. And for the Grinches of Christmas it is. Mariah Carey has officially been “unfrozen.” What does it mean? Which has arrived that time of year when his “All I want for Christmas is you” prepares to resonate everywhere Last year the American pop star focused on self-irony with a video clip posted on social media in which, trapped inside a block of ice, she literally thawed thanks to her high pitch.

This time he celebrated the start of the Christmas period – 54 days to go – by publishing tonight, on the occasion of Halloween, a video in which he first dances as Morticia Addams, but then at midnight as if by magic he pulls the Christmas-themed red dress worn in 1994 for the iconic cover of “Merry Christmas”, the album of which “All I want for Christmas” was part, destined in a handful of years to become the pop Christmas classic par excellence. .For the thirtieth year in a row, the 55-year-old American singer is preparing to experience a multi-million dollar Christmas.

According to estimates, Mariah Carey would earn a whopping 2.5 million dollars every year with her classic: from 1994 to today, earnings from sales, downloads and streaming would amount to over 70 million dollars. The hit has sold more than 16 million copies worldwide: “I had started thinking about what I liked about Christmas. Lights, gifts, lit fireplaces. I have loved Christmas since I was a child, but I have always been without money and therefore I have never been able to experience the party like my peers Coming from a dysfunctional family I wanted my Christmas to be perfect.

So when I wrote it I put every ounce of my will into trying to reconstruct a perfect moment.” the pop star told us about the song’s genesis, revealing in her autobiography “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” published in 2020, that she composed “most of the song on a little cheap Casio keyboard.” The agreements were then developed into the arrangement by her right-hand man Walter Afanasieff, with whom Mariah Carey must each year share the earnings deriving from ratings, sales, radio and television airings, the inclusion of the song in commercials, films and so on. ‘other. A business that would be worth a whopping 6.1 million dollars per year.

Carey and Afanasieff haven’t spoken to each other for more than twenty years: “We wrote three songs for the Christmas album from which ‘All I want for Christmas is you’ comes, co-signed 50/50, all in the same time frame , in a house in New York during the summer of 1994. But for this song in particular, who knows why, Mariah almost doesn’t seem to want to admit that she wrote it with me”, regrets Afanasieff, real name Vladimir Nikitich Afanasev (he has Russian origins), 65 years old, considered a Stars and Stripes music biz legend just for having produced Celine Dion’s timeless “My heart will go on” winning the 1999 Grammy Award for Recording of the Year.

The New Yorker defined “All I want for Christmas is you” as “one of the few modern additions of value to the musical canon of Christmas carols”, perhaps on a par with “Last Christmas” by Wham!, released ten years earlier. But what differentiates Mariah Carey’s hit from all other Christmas songs? It was summed up well by The Atlantic, which defined the song as “a sort of Hegelian dialectic on Christmas wishes”.

Christmas is a period of material and emotional excesses (of gatherings, one might say). Yet in “All I want for Christmas is you” Mariah Carey sings the opposite. The title already says it. Is called .specificity of desire. Search for the expression on Google and you will find essays by Freud and Lacan, among others, as results. But why rely on psychoanalysis when Mariah Carey is there? “I don’t want a lot for Christmas / there is just one thing I need”, says the pop star in the very first verses of the song.

On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the release of “Merry Christmas” Mariah Carey has announced the release of a series of special edition physical singles of “All I want for Christmas is you”. The singer will also return to the stage for a Christmas tour in North America. Mariah Carey will present its annual Christmas Carol for 20 dates across the United States, starting with opening night at the Yaamava Theater in Highland, California on November 6.