This post originally appeared on Shondaland.

“Mariah Carey’s voice is a portal to the sublime,” says Andrew Chan, author of Why Mariah Carey Matters, a new book from University of Texas Press that examines the pop star’s life, career, and legacy in detail. “I know that sounds overwrought, but it’s melodramatic just like her music! There’s a reason that there’s a mythology around the voice and that certain vocalists become myths themselves because they are showing us what it can evoke and achieve when it’s used beyond its own limits.” Why Mariah Carey Matters seeks to unpack that myth.

Growing up, Chan split his time between the southern U.S. and Malaysia, where he was raised on Chinese pop divas. His appreciation for China’s pop stars led him to American pop divas, such as Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, and the apex, Mariah Carey. “At the time, I didn’t have the language to describe what her voice was doing for me, but it was a very visceral reaction for a child [to have],” Chan tells Shondaland during a recent interview.

Though at the time Carey was marketed as a white-coded, ethnically ambiguous pop star, it was her lyrics about searching for belonging and identity that Chan connected with. As a gay Asian boy growing up in the American South, who also felt out of place in Malaysia as an American, Chan felt he could relate to Carey.

“What she was able to articulate — not just lyrically but sonically — about the experience of being an outsider and living in between identities spoke to me even before I really knew that that was what was at stake in her music,” he says. That’s clear from the jump even in the titles of some of Carey’s later albums —The Emancipation of Mimi, E=MC², Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, and Me. I Am Mariah … The Elusive Chanteuse — as well as her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. But it’s also apparent as early as 1997’s Butterfly, which Chan believes is Carey’s best album and contains the song “Close My Eyes,” with the lyrics “I was a wayward child with the weight of the world that I held deep inside.”

At some point in Carey’s career, probably around the time she broke away from the adult contemporary genre and pioneered the art of the remix, Carey’s identity as a mixed-race woman — her father is Black, and her mother is white — came to the fore. Previously, what we thought of as a crossover artist was a regionally or culturally specific kind of musician, as Chan describes it, moving into mainstream pop. But Carey debuted in the early ’90s with No. 1 pop ballads “Vision of Love,” “Emotions,” and “Hero” before moving into remixes with 1993’s “Dreamlover” and, perhaps most famously, “Fantasy” in 1995, whose “Bad Boy Remix” version was named Pitchfork’s top song of the ’90s (“which would have been inconceivable in the ’90s for a publication like Pitchfork,” Chan adds). Since then, Carey’s music has been heavily and obviously influenced by the genres that she grew up with and loves. “She’s a genre chameleon,” Chan says.

But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for the highly decorated diva. If you came of age in the early aughts, you would have been privy to Carey’s struggles in 2001 after the ill-timed and poorly received dual release of the movie Glitter, in which she starred, and the accompanying album of the same name. What makes her different from a lot of other famous women who experienced similar turmoil in that decade and have since been revisited by the culture is that Carey engineered her own comeback, with 2005’s The Emancipation of Mimi spawning the No. 1 single “We Belong Together.” Coupled with this is the playing up of her high-femme, camp image as the timeless Queen of Christmas, which Chan likens to a “shield” against scrutiny and other past traumas. Carey’s Christmas single “All I Want for Christmas Is You” hits the top 10 every holiday season, thus garnering her the accolade as the first and only artist with a Billboard No. 1 single in four consecutive decades.

Despite this, Carey is still underrated and underappreciated by the public, a space that she’s occupied since the beginning of her career. “You didn’t want to admit that you loved Mariah,” Chan offers. “But Mariah was simultaneously one of the most beloved and top-selling artists of her time as well as one of the most dismissed artists, partly because she was so popular, as if her success was purely generated by the prioritization of her record label.” 

People still don’t realize that Carey has co-written, co-produced, and arranged the vocals on 99 percent of her music. Chan says, “She has 19 No. 1 Billboard hits, which is the most achieved by any solo artist, and she co-wrote 18 of them. One of them was a cover. And these are just the number ones! She is an incredible musical mind, but as she herself will say, she doesn’t have the image attached to her of being behind a piano or holding a guitar. She isn’t like a Joni Mitchell or a Taylor Swift with the guitar, she isn’t behind the piano like Roberta Flack or Alicia Keys, so it’s hard for people to process that she’s a singer-songwriter. She is as much a singer-songwriter as anyone I just mentioned, and what’s remarkable about that is that she writes songs that are tailored to the uniqueness of her voice.”

What’s more, Chan says, is the ignorance of “the depth of her musicianship, and by that I mean the sound she created with the voice that is like no other; the style that is inimitable. You hear a Mariah song and immediately know it’s a Mariah song.”

So, what are Chan’s favorite songs then? “Breakdown” from 1997’s Butterfly, and “Candy Bling” from 2009’s Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel. He also name-checks “Always Be My Baby” (one of this writer’s favorite Mariah Carey songs) as no less “perfect of a pop song than ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles.” Cue the outrage from those aforementioned music snobs.

For Chan, though, it all comes back to the famous five-octave vocal range, all the way up to the whistle register. “In her voice, I found escape, but I’m also brought back to the place that I was escaping from. In her music, people find a certain transcendence the same way one might find in religion.” And that’s why Mariah Carey matters.