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AUTHOR INTERVIEW
By: Chris Azzopardi
-----------------------------------------------------------------------‘Why Mariah Carey Matters’ Speaks to the Power of Pop Star Idolization
Andrew Chan’s book is about Mariah, sure, but really it’s about a love that sometimes we only find in the music Mariah Carey is in sharp focus as a pop music innovator and gay icon in some of the bestwritten commentary on her artistry and what she means to queer fans, thanks to writer Andrew Chan’s remarkably studied new book “Why Mariah Carey Matters.” The book plumbs the depths of Mariah’s voice, songwriting and production savviness since making her debut in 1990. Chan, who wrote about her previously for NPR, writes with a window into his own deeply personal devotion to Carey as a gay ChineseAmerican man. In the 1990s, when Chan was first drawn to her, his connection to her music was “intimate and private,” he writes just a few pages into the book. Here, Chan is summarizing his feelings on “Outside,” a song revered by many of Mariah’s queer lambs, her name for her most loyal fans, for understanding that once an outcast, always an outcast. “The too-muchness of the vocal was an accurate description of everything I 6 Fab Vegas
felt but couldn’t say,” he writes before adding, “Mariah’s vocals seemed to be saying that the ultimate voice could also be the one that resonated on the queerest frequency. The most beloved voice could be the most freakish.” At 40, it’s hard to imagine I don’t already fully understand why Mariah matters to me — like Chan, my foundation for perseverance, enduring those tough gay teen years, was built on her own survival, her own outsiderness. To that end, I wrote how extensive
my connection to her music is in an essay for The New York Times in 2020, coincidentally around the same time Chan began writing “Why Mariah Carey Matters.” Few people in my life fully understand how deep it goes, exactly. On some level, my mother does; after
Author Photo Credit: Grant Delin
all, she saw me struggle the most as a queer kid, and she saw Mariah’s music keep me afloat throughout that period of time. And yet, after reading Chan’s careful analysis — in one part, he recognizes how she entered Black gay club culture in the 1990s by flipping her hits into house mixes — alongside his own personal introspection, I found myself catching my breath several times. Though I didn’t think it possible, I felt like I was graduating to the next level of understanding my own connection to Mariah. I even called my mom to read her some of his best passages — could it be that my defense of her was really an extension of me defending myself as a queer person? I was seeing parts of my own story on these pages, told by someone else who, at one point, also needed, as he puts it, “a glamorous, hetero-feminine idol.” When I wrote my essay on Mariah for The New York Times, I was having this moment where I was craving the comfort of home during the first year of the pandemic. When that need kicks in, I find that feeling in so many of the Mariah songs that have been healing since I was an adolescent, so “Through the Rain,” “Hero” and “Can’t Take That Away.” For you, at what point during the pandemic did you realize that you needed to write this book for yourself? It was after the NPR piece, and there was kind of just an itch. I think there’s a deeper reason, but I think the more superficial reason was I was
