From ImitationOn its opening track, “It's Like That,” Carey signals her desire to put an end to the past. Over Dupri's whistling synths and drum machine, she draws a line, drawing the line at “stress” and “battles”: “Mimi's emancipation/A cause for celebration,” she chirps. “I won't let anyone's drama bother me.” The drum machine has a dull click at the start, a common tick in the crunk era, but it's a decent amount dink which allows Carey to soar between the drums and the bell. In the trio's lyrics, she telegraphs that regardless of her superstar status, her ears are turned to the club: “All the homies keep looking at us/Me and my girls on the floor, what?/While the DJ keeps on spinnin' ' our cut,' she sings, ragged in a way that would inspire two decades of runways to mimic her pose, before memorably dropping 'Caution, it's so explosive' with 'Them chickens is ash and I'm lotion'.
Carey was lotion, and she was a flip flop. She displayed her apathy for drama on “Shake It Off,” the midtempo radio hit built on a piano bounce. As she reads off a list of a lover's indiscretions, including “this and that by the pool, on the beach, in the streets,” her voice is soft and almost relaxed to suggest her nonchalant indifference: Can't you bother to pronounce completely consistent. The whispery quality of her background vocals – “Gotta shake, shake, shake you off” – sounds like salt thrown over the shoulder to stave off bad luck, a gentle inner monologue that gives the song its nimble quality. On “Say Somethin',” another chrome single — and, along with the cute “To the Floor,” her first collaboration with the Neptunes — Carey rolls her eyes and flirts with a disappointingly low-key, smoky persuasion Snoop Dogg. as her foil rapper. (The album track, however, remains slightly inferior to the superb So So Def remix with Dem Franchize Boyz.)
Those three singles, as well as the giant breakup hit “We Belong Together,” are notable for what Carey doesn't do on them: She doesn't do vocal gymnastics, she doesn't hit impossibly high notes, she doesn't go anywhere. close to music that could be considered overly emotional or even rough. It's easy to get caught up in the mere fact of Mariah Carey's voice, which is striking and seductive, but invites the listener to be blown away by her technical brilliance—her four-and-a-half-octave range, her whistles, her melismatic backflips. This ability can eliminate emotion within any song, and beyond Imitation In particular, she exercises a characteristic rarely mentioned in outbursts of her genius: her absolute self-restraint. “I just never wanted to paint alone,” he told the New York TimesLola Ogunaike. “And when I sing with my breath, it feels more intimate.”
