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Rolling Stone
By Rob Sheffield, August 6, 2001
Rating: 3 stars/5 stars
Mariah Carey called her last album Rainbow and the one before that Butterfly. So many Mariah fans will probably be disappointed that she didn't decide to title this one Unicorn. (Or how about Kitten? Maybe Koala?) But damn if Glitter isn't a big step forward in terms of maturity for one of pop music's eternal kids. One of the many deeply weird things about Mariah is that she's never had much interest in growing up: She blew up big in the great teen-pop boom of 1990, and she's stayed teen pop all the way to 2001, coming across as a sweet, suburban middle-school girl who's crazy about hip-hop but always makes it home by ten. Only Mariah could make a record with Ol' Dirty Bastard or enjoy a much-publicized, much-denied public canoodle with Q-Tip and still project herself as such an innocent. Even her fashion sense remains that of a twelve-year-old playing dress-up in her mom's closet, which is one of the reasons Mariah has always kept it real with her devoted pubescent-girl fan base. She never tries to pass herself off as true hip-hop - she's not stupid, G. Instead, she just comes on as a pop singer who doubles as a true hip-hop fan.
With Glitter, Mariah takes a step toward staking her claim as a grown-up. It's the soundtrack to her first movie vehicle, Glitter, in which she plays a hungry young aspiring singer named Billie who's hanging around the club scene in the early Eighties, trying to break into show business. (Judging from the title, it sounds like her version of Sparkle.) Accordingly, Glitter is a concept album about the dance sounds of the early Eighties, the moment when New York Latin disco and hair-salon soul and this new sound called hip-hop were slide-slide-slippity-sliding together all across the radio, bringing the perfect beats of the big-city clubs to a worldwide audience of underage superfreaks. Talk about high-concept: Mariah covers club classics "I Didn't Mean to Turn You On" and "Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life," she duets with Cameo and, for the conceptual coup, she gets Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to produce half the tracks. The vintage-flavored music evokes classic R&B groups like Ready for the World, Atlantic Starr, Skyy and even my beloved Klymaxx. As disco time travel goes, Glitter sure beats the hell out of Moulin Rouge's "Lady Marmalade."
Of course, there's a load of contemporary hip-hop in the mix. Mariah kicks it with the usual horde of A-list rappers, including Ludacris, Da Brat and Mystikal, all of whom help her pull up to the bumper. "Loverboy," "If We" and "All My Life" have more bounce than you expect from Mariah, but the killer is her DJ Clue-produced cover of Indeep's 1982 disco hit, "Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life," one of the greatest songs ever written about being a girl, listening to the radio or any combination of the two. Busta Rhymes and Fabolous cut up on the mike, teaching an old bass line new tricks. And when Mariah comes in to deliver the payoff line, "There's not a problem that I can't fix/'Cause I can do it in the mix," you can hear an emotional hunger that she's never come close to before. As Klymaxx used to sing, divas need love, too.
The downside of Glitter is the downside of all Mariah Carey albums. They're called "ballads," and Mariah still likes them big and goopy, with zero melodic or emotional punch. Glitter's gratifyingly few ballads are better than usual, especially "Lead the Way." But they make you wonder why a singer with such a famous voice can't resist such anonymous material. Her hits are always huge, but when they're gone, they're gone: Mariah still has yet to score the kind of hit that goes down in history. Only her hardest-core fans can tell "Dreamlover" from "Fantasy" from "Honey" from "Heartbreaker," and although she once had a song that stayed at Number One for sixteen weeks, you can't even remember how it went, much less what it was called. Whitney had her "I Will Always Love You," and Celine had her "My Heart Will Go On," but Mariah still hasn't found her theme song, the one people will remember her voice by. Glitter is good enough to make you hope she finds it. It's not too late, either - Whitney was a veteran if not a has-been when she hit her peak with The Bodyguard. It's nowhere near unthinkable that Mariah, for all her success, is just now starting to get her music together. Wouldn't that be something?
Slant Magazine
By Sal Cinquemani, 2001
Rating: 3 stars/5 stars
Mariah Carey's new movie, Glitter, has finally given the singer an excuse to dig out her old high school 45s and fully transform herself into the '80s discoball diva she is at heart. For years, Carey has attempted to shed her Adult Contemporary beginnings, incorporating hip-hop into her music by shamelessly enlisting the talents of rappers like Ol' Dirty Bastard and Da Brat. The soundtrack to Glitter (which happens to be a studio album in its own right) is the vehicle through which Carey attempts to complete her transposition, breaking further from her humble crossover-pop origins and her former label, Sony Music.
Carey's dive into '80s retro seems purely natural thanks in part to the fact that she recruited '80s veterans Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis to produce half of the album's material, including a flawless rendition of Cherrelle's "Didn't Mean To Turn You On" (later made popular by Robert Palmer). If the track's swirling synths sound more than authentic, it's probably due to Jam & Lewis's sampling of the original song's entire backing track, which is sewed seamlessly beneath Carey's built-in kitsch. "All My Life," a collaboration with Rick James, would make a daring yet commercially viable single. Its Studio 54-era synth-flutes and sultry vocal could, at the very least, rub up against the boundaries of pop radio like no other Carey tune has since 1995's "Fantasy." "Want You," a duet with Glitter co-star Eric Benet, is another retro gem, featuring grinding bass and Carey's distinctive vocal phrasing (she uncurls seemingly verbose adjectives like "painstakingly" with unrivaled ease).
But not all of Glitter is, ahem, gold. Carey is relegated to a virtual hood ornament on "If We," "Don't Stop," and a remix of the album's first single "Loverboy." (The trio of otherwise gratifying songs include no less than seven guest rappers combined.) "Loverboy" is a super-sexed abstraction of Carey's time-tested uptempo hit formula (including "Emotions," "Dreamlover" and "Fantasy"), featuring metaphors that are less subdued than those on the irresistibly drippy "Honey" ("When he invites me over/I come every time"). A cover of Indeep's 1982 post-disco classic "Last Night A DJ Saved My Life" personifies Carey's ambition like no other song she's ever recorded: "If it wasn't for the music/I don't know what I'd do." Producer DJ Clue's signature "hollas," however, are beyond irritating and, along with Busta Rhymes, his presence completely dilutes Carey's sexy yet restrained performance. One can only sit and wait for the inevitable remixes and, hopefully, a rapless radio mix.
Of course, Glitter includes the requisite handful of syrupy-sweet ballads. "Never Too Far" and "Lead The Way," which reunites Carey with longtime songwriting partner Walter Afanasieff harbor over-the-top performances worthy of "Star Search" (more than fitting considering the film's '80s-era rags-to-riches storyline). "Reflections (Care Enough)" tells the tale of an estranged mother figure and its sparse arrangement recalls the simple beauty of Carey's early balladry. The song's bridge is bizarre, though, eerily alluding to abortion: "You could have had the decency/To give me up/Before you gave me life." In light of Carey's recent tribulations, the elegant "Twister" is serendipitously autobiographical (in the vein of previous stand-out album cuts such as "Looking In" and "Petals"), although the track is actually a requiem of sorts for a lost friend and associate: "She was kind of magical/Her laughter sent you casually/Floating through a moment of release."
Like Carey's last release, Rainbow, Glitter's biggest flaw is in its effort. The concept of "all or nothing" seems foreign to her, and, with the exception of 1997's Butterfly, it has proven cumbersome for the singer to find a balance between hip-hop and pop. Carey's edgier tracks are inundated with so many guest artists that her sound ultimately becomes muddled; her pop tunes are so formulaic that it's difficult to distinguish one from the next. Yet while the album may have its flaws, it is for the most part a successful period piece that clearly displays Carey's appreciation for all that has come before her.
All Music Guide
By Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Rating: 1.5 stars/5 stars
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Mariah Carey's first album for Virgin Records was supposed to be a triumph, an album that confirmed her status as pop's reigning diva, while serving as the soundtrack to a film that proved her crossover status was every bit as potent as that of her unexpected arch-rival Jennifer Lopez. Instead, Glitter proved to be an utter meltdown - the pop equivalent of Chernobyl. It's hard not to sympathize with everybody involved, actually, from Mariah herself, to all the musicians and producers involved in this and the film, plus the label that shelled out millions of dollars for a proven quantity that suddenly stopped delivering the goods. Because Glitter is a catastrophe - it captures Mariah on a downturn of creativity and popularity, just when she needs to shine the brightest, and then it was paired with an extremely public emotional breakdown, highlighted by a bizarre appearance on TRL, where she was seemingly dressed only in a T-shirt and handing out Popsicles, plus a scarily suicidal message posted and then quickly deleted from her website. Poor Mariah! Poor Virgin! Who could have predicted this pop perfect storm? And, when you're seeing it unfold, or listening to it unspool, it's hard not to be shocked by the miscalculation of every aspect of Glitter. Superficially, it's not that all far removed from her last Columbia album, Rainbow, but if that record illustrated the freeing effect of her divorce from Tommy Motolla, this album shows that Mariah needs some guiding force, something to keep her on track. Otherwise, she sinks into gormless ballads, covers of early-'80s funk tunes that sound exactly like the originals, hip-hop funk that plays plastic and stiff. This touches on everything Mariah tried before, but nothing works - not the oversinging, not the sentimental, not the desperate attempts for street cred. If she indeed was paranoid about Lopez's career and success, as certain tabloid reports indicated, she shouldn't have made a record that seems to ape On the 6 the way that album slavishly followed prime Mariah. It's an embarrassment, one that might have been easier to gawk at if its creator wasn't so close to emotional destruction at the time of release.
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