Awesome / Mariah Carey

• Every single time she hit that whistle tone. It's unbelievable what Mariah could accomplish in her prime.
• After a breakdown where she stripped live on TRL, and then checked herself into a mental rehab while suicide rumors floated about, Mariah came back with her biggest hit yet and had a phenomenally successful year. Even if her music isn't to your taste, one has to admire her mental resilience and how she never gave up and eventually recovered fully.
• #1's is by far the highest-selling album in Japan by a non-Asian musician, at over 3.7 million copies, which is massive by Japanese standards. Just for comparison, the second highest-selling album by a foreign artist is Seishun no Kagayaki: Best of Carpenters, at only 3 million.
• "Fantasy," her duet with Ol' Dirty Bastard, is a landmark recording, with a fresh combination of pop and hip-hop. Alongside Mary J. Blige, the pioneer of hip-hop soul, this song helped set in stone what R&B sounded like for many years afterward. For the record, Mariah co-wrote the song and made the decision to get Ol' Dirty, so she deserves a lot of the credit, and knowing what a Herculean effort it was to get ODB's performance, such as it was, out of him, makes the achievement even more awesome.
• With the success of 2008's "Touch My Body," Mariah got a whopping 18 #1 hits to her name, more #1s than any other female artist in history. But wait, there's more: in December 2019, Mariah's 1994 Christmas song, "All I Want for Christmas Is You" hit #1, over 25 years after its initial release, giving her 19 #1 hits. What an icon.^note It should be noted that "All I Want for Christmas Is You" is the first #1 Christmas song since 1958's "The Chipmunk Song" - that was sixty-one years prior.
  • By this point, she's beaten out the male artist with the most #1s, Elvis Presley.
  • "All I Want for Christmas Is You" is Awesome Music, full stop. She's the co-writer, singer and performer of that song and very few can compare when it comes to covering it. Many consider it the best Christmas song ever.
  • With "All I Want for Christmas Is You" peaking at #1 at the tail end of 2019 and the first week of 2020, Mariah Carey is the first artist ever to have a #1 hit in four consecutive decades.
  • On December 3, 2021, Mariah made history when "All I Want for Christmas Is You" went diamond, selling ten million copies. It's the only Christmas single to ever accomplish this feat.
• In late 2020, as Mariah was promoting her memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, a funny thing came to light - Mariah revealed that way back in 1995, she had recorded an entire Grunge album, entitled Someone's Ugly Daughter, under the name Chick, with her backup band around the Daydream period (adding that it was "just for laughs, but it got me through some dark days"). The record company balked at Mariah doing an Out-of-Genre Experience like this, so Mariah got her then-roommate, Clarissa Dane, to be the lead vocalist/frontwoman, with herself as a backup singer. It's mind-boggling to think that in twenty-five years, literally no one figured out that one of the most visible musicians in the world had done an Alternative Rock side project. Here's the video for Chick's song "Malibu" (which was once featured on Beavis And Butthead, by the way).