Sure, Mariah Carey celebrates her birthday every year like the rest of us, but other than that she’s eternal. Many are obsessively fearful about the aging process and Carey is surely no exception, but unlike most people, she refuses to admit that time exists in any traditional sense. Besides, in Being Famous years she’s only, like, 30.
Just this week, Carey’s infamous holiday ballad “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which has been around for decades, finally topped the charts at No. 1. On this occasion the diva deigned to give an interview to the New York Times, during which she remarked that when she first wrote the song she was “in the womb, darling.”
It’s not the first time Carey has been an emotional hero for humans who are growing older, which happens to be all of us. Here are some of the best things she’s said about aging and the impossibility of time.
Carey told Variety in October that although she at times feels infantilized by her fame, it’s not as if she doesn’t indulge her childlike instincts: “I do need someone to be like, ‘Ok, we’ve got to go; you’re running late,’” she told the publication. “Yeah, I am like a petulant child. But my true fans know this. I’m eternally 12.”
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We’re all too old to remember, but last year was actually remarkably like this year in that people were sharing pictures of themselves now versus ten years ago to mark the passage of time. Not Mariah Carey though! She participated in the trend by posting the same picture of herself twice, writing, “I don’t get this 10 year challenge, time is not something I acknowledge.”
In 2015, Carey made an appearance on “Carpool Karaoke” and revealed that unlike age, the amount of No. 1 songs earned over a lifetime is not just a number. About two minutes into the roving interview, host James Corden asks Carey the ultimate softball question: “How many No. 1 [singles] have you had? Eighteen?” Carey replies, “Yes, 18, that’s why my age stays 18. We’ll celebrate my 18th birthday with the face that I’ve had 18 No. 1s.”
In that case: happy 19th birthday, Mariah!
There is also a sense in which Carey’s disallowing of time is not exclusively the providence of a diva but also of diva-as-artist. The collapsibility of time is a notion essential to her art. In youth we are perhaps more raw, tempestuous, experimental, and these can also be the artist’s gifts, Carey famously wrote many of her most famous songs, and that material needs to come from somewhere.
Last year, Pitchfork asked the singer why her songs sometimes have a “childlike quality,” referencing the track “8th Grade” off her 2018 album Caution. Carey responded, at length:
The prospect of remaining intimate with one’s middle-school self sounds absolutely terrifying. As always, I am grateful for Mariah Carey.