You've been bruised and confused. There's nowhere to run, and you're in pain, without anyone. You've got a lot to learn; do you know where you can turn? Mariah Carey--fragile workaholic, recovering star of Glitter, multimillion-dollar record-company layoff and author of wounded banalities like those above--would like you to turn to her.
But perhaps neediness isn't your thing. Maybe you're the sparring type, and you live your life the way you feel; no matter what, you keep it real. Then Whitney Houston--reedy substance abuser, self-proclaimed child of God, spouse of one of the world's most consistent recreational-drug suspects, and singer of tough platitudes--awaits your ear.
It's a problem when a singer's personal life is more interesting than her music. The lives of America's two grandest pop divas have become as scandalously compelling as an Aaron Spelling script. But their songs, as demonstrated above, have not. Carey's Charmbracelet and Houston's Just Whitney ... offer decidedly different approaches to the pop comeback; one is penitent, the other defiant. Both are letdowns.
Carey's fall from the charts was the more tragically spectacular. While promoting Glitter, her vanity movie and album, she did a woozy striptease on MTV, posted a series of bizarre ramblings on her website and even flirted with Eminem. After she was hospitalized for exhaustion and Glitter flopped in a Waterworld-meets--Chris Gaines kind of way, Carey's record label paid her $28 million not to record with it again. This is pretty humiliating stuff, and Charmbracelet is not above begging for sympathy. Carey opens with Through the Rain, a somber ballad that reduces her formidable voice to a tentative little quaver. "I can make it through the rain, I can stand up once again," she sings. Never mind that Barry Manilow used these approximate lyrics in 1980's I Made It Through the Rain; Carey herself turned in almost the exact same vocal performance on 1993's Hero.
Much of Charmbracelet follows this pattern: Carey makes vague allusions to her recent problems while musically cannibalizing her back catalog. There are a few moments when she reveals enough to make the formula interesting, as on the playful Clown, a mid-tempo revenge song that responds to Eminem's sexual innuendo with the lines, "You should've never intimated we were lovers/When you know very well we never even touched each other." But mostly Charmbracelet feels like a hedge. There are the guest rappers (Jay-Z, Cam'ron) of Carey's late '90s hits, the chipper ballads of her multiplatinum middle period and even the glass-shattering dolphin shrieks of her early days. But there's a surprising lack of hummable hooks, and all the nostalgia drains Charmbracelet of exuberance, the one thing no pop album can live without.