sampled by Dave Hall, brought instant pangs of nostalgia for those who remembered. “It felt like all the fun that I had missed out on in my childhood,” Mariah wrote of “Fantasy” in her memoir. “Fantasy (Bad Boy Remix)”—for most, the definitive version— featured Ol’ Dirty Bastard, in one of the all-time great rap cameos, and Mariah’s first collaboration with the artist-producer then known as Puff Daddy. Mariah directed the video, which was shot at Westchester amusement park Rye Playland (just across the Long Island Sound from the gilded homes of the “Gold Coast”), and it too epitomized young, summertime fun. Cory Rooney, who’d been one half of the songwriting and production team behind Mary J. Blige’s early hip-hop soul hits like “Real Love” (along with the late Mark Morales, better known as Prince Markie Dee, of Fat Boys fame), was now a vice president of A&R with Sony Music, helping support Mariah in her new streetwise direction. (Rooney would later head up A&R for Mariah’s short-lived Sony Music imprint, Crave Records). “One night, we went to dinner at Sylvia’s in Harlem—me, Tommy, and Mariah,” Rooney recalled in a 2016 Billboard interview. “On our way back, we were riding in the limo and every club, every car was bumping ‘Fantasy.’ Mariah put her sunglasses on, and tears came down her cheeks, because she couldn’t believe her record was getting played all through the hood. That was the beginning of her not turning back to pop.” The influence of “Fantasy” went beyond Mariah’s own career. As Danyel Smith recently wrote in the New York Times , it “institutionalized hip-hop’s marriage to pop soul,” effectively setting the tone for the last three decades of popular music. As the decade went on, Mariah’s engagement with hip-hop deepened. Jermaine Dupri and Da Brat became some of her steadiest collaborators, as well as confidants. DJ Clue, the pre-eminent voice of the late ’90s mixtape explosion, was a steady presence, setting off Mariah’s 1999 Rainbow album with his hype talk on “Heartbreaker.” With “Fantasy,” Mariah had struck on a formula she would revisit on successive singles like “Honey” and “Heartbreaker,” blending nostalgia-fueling samples from the ’80s (the World Famous Supreme Team’s “Hey DJ” and Treacherous Three’s “Body Rock” on “Honey”; Stacy Lattisaw’s “Attack of the Name Game” on “Heartbreaker”) with timely cameos from the moment’s most relevant rappers (Mase, the Lox, Jay-Z). Mariah also apparently excelled at putting her collaborators in the right headspace to make studio magic. “She had all the medicine we needed to get our minds right when we went up there,” Bone Thugs-n-Harmony’s Krayzie Bone told Billboard , speaking on the recording of “Breakdown,” another Butterfly single. “She had the Hennessy for us,” Bone Thugs rapper Wish Bone added. “We were just like, “Oh wow.” It’s Mariah Carey, bringing the goodies. We’re dapping each other up under the table like, ‘You see this shit?!’” Mariah wrote “The Roof (Back in Time)” following her first rendezvous with Derek Jeter, right as she was breaking away from her stifling marriage to Tommy Mottola. As Mariah shared in The Meaning of Mariah Carey , she heard Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones (Pt.
midnight, then go to the studio and work till seven in the morning on the album, sleep, then do the whole thing again, day after day. No one helped me out [financially], and I lived on very little money.” EPILOGUE (FANTASY) “They kept trying to smooth me out while I just wanted to get a little more rough.” - Mariah Carey, in The Meaning of Mariah Carey A dozen years after she graduated from Harborfields High School and began her three-year crash course on the New York City studio scene, Mariah returned to Greenlawn, Long Island, to record Mariah Carey’s Homecoming Special , a one-hour concert film that aired on Fox TV in December 1999. The main performance segment, which featured cameos from Jay-Z, Jermaine Dupri, Missy Elliott, and Da Brat (while DJ Clue held her down on the turntables wearing a Harborfields basketball jersey), was recorded in the gymnasium of Oldfield, the junior high she’d been attending during her earliest forays into studio life and performing. The audience for the performance was made up of students from both the junior high and high school, and children from Camp Mariah, a performing arts summer program for New York City kids she’d founded in 1995. Mariah might have had one foot looking out the front door during her high school years (a detail confirmed in the special by faculty members, who noted her frequent absences and lateness). But, at age thirty, she basked in the opportunity to return “home.” “It’s hard to describe the feeling that I got when I went back to my junior high, and I sang for the kids,” Mariah said in one of the special’s interview segments. “It made me feel like I’d come full circle. I had so many issues within myself growing up that I think this was a very important part of my healing process.” By this time, Mariah was several years deep into her career’s second act, a period that saw her shed the pop princess image fashioned by her now ex-husband Tommy Mottola in favor of a sound and aesthetic closer to her own taste. In short, her music had gotten Blacker and, paradoxically, more youthful. It was an evolution that kicked into gear with the 1995 release of one of her most beloved singles, “Fantasy.” “Fantasy,” in both its original and remixed form, prominently sampled Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” a track Mariah had grown up hearing on WBLS and Kiss FM in the early ’80s. Dave “Jam” Hall, who had produced “Dreamlover,” the Music Box smash built around a sample of the Emotions’ “Blind Alley,” co-produced “Fantasy” with Mariah, bringing a similarly nostalgic quality to both tracks. Tom Tom Club had been a side project of the Talking Heads’ Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, but “Genius of Love” had been inspired, and embraced, largely by hip-hop. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (“It’s Nasty”) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (“Genius Rap”) issued notable rap versions of the track in 1981, the same year of its release. Fourteen years later, the track’s bubbly melody, as
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( opposite ) Stills from 1995’s “Fantasy” video, directed by Mariah Carey.
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