Covering Covers # 3

Energy equals Mariah Carey²!!!!!

Mariah Carey is a singles artist, an artist for whom the ALBUM as a cohesive conceptual object doesn't apply, but instead the ALBUM is merely a physical object (CD) which exists solely to collect a group of random songs in one convenient and marketable package.

Speaking of physical objects, Island Records relies solely on Mariah Carey to market and sell these collections of random songs. Every last piece of lumpen related to Mariah Carey, whether they be CDs, 12" vinyl EPs, or DVDs, has a picture of the singer herself on the cover. Half the time they are glamour headshots, and half the time they are full body shots, usually showing Mariah dancing, which in her case is nothing more than some slight shuffling and subdued hip-swaying. I have never heard an entire Mariah Carey album, so somebody else will have to verify or refute my theory that the albums with headshots contain mostly ballads and pop songs, while the albums with full body-shot covers are weighted towards dance music and Hip Hop.

And so we have Mariah's newest album, E=MC². Judging by this album cover, I strongly suspect it's got plenty of uptempo dance and Hip Hop on it, and judging by her recent appearance on SNL, my suspicions are correct. One song was pure dance pop, and the other featured rapper T-Pain. HOLLA!

So, what else can be said about this album cover?

It's a high-contrast black'n'white photograph in which the white feather boa obscuring Mariah's naked body pops the most. The boa, and Mariah's nudity, suggests old school burlesque and stripping of the variety Dita Von Teese has brought back into vogue these past few years.

It's a continuation of the sexualization (however mild) that Island Records marketing department and Mariah herself have been fashioning during the past decade, since her divorce from record mogul Tommy Mottola. It began with 1997's Butterfly album, a none-too-subtle allusion to her newfound liberation, through 2005's Emancipation Of Mimi album, and as you can see, the evolution has been slow...It began with butterfly imagery, for crissakes - that's the kind of megaplatinum crossover pop queen she was in the first decade of her career...

"Touch My Body" is the first single off the new album, but of course, we don't see much of Mariah in this photo - a modest bit of her left leg, her right arm reaching behind her head to touch her own neck, as if in some sort of mild ecstasy (Khia's "my neck, my back" flutters through my mind), and Mariah's face, half-hidden in shadow and framed by her long, flowing hair. Sex sells, but so does tease, and Mariah might be inviting us (somebody) to touch her body in her song, but this album cover seems to be saying something else.

"Look, but don't touch my body."

Anyways, mostly I'm intrigued by the title of this album, fodder for this particular blather because hey, there it is, printed prominently right next to Mariah's hip.

E=MC²

Quite frankly, I'm not gonna pretend to understand Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, and all I can say is Einstein's famous equation, E=MC², supposes that energy and mass are equivalent and transmutable - that all energy has mass, and all mass has energy. The speed of light in a vacuum figures into it (C²), but don't ask me how.

Obviously, in regards to this Mariah Carey Album, the title suggests that Energy is Mariah Carey, and Mariah Carey is Energy, or if we follow the equation literally

Energy equals Mariah Carey²!

It's all meaningless nonsense of course.

It's nothing more than somebody in Island Records marketing department realizing while tripping on Vitamin Water one lazy Tuesday afternoon that Mariah Carey's initials are a part of that famous science equation that Einstein came up with...

Viola!

"Karen, you're a genius!" exclaims Doug in sales.

Like I said, it's meaningless nonsense, although it serves as a good example of this "post-album culture" in which I believe we now find ourselves. A culture in which 99 cent downloads from iTunes has rendered the album as a cohesive, conceptual object nearly obsolete.

I have no fetish for mp3's.

They're a tease, just like Mariah.

MARIAH!

Hotcha! Hank