The schools Mariah attended (Thomas J. Leahy Elementary, Oldfields Junior High, and Harborfields High School) were just south in Greenlawn, a solidly middle-class bedroom community with a small but established Black community. Still, racist incidents, including one involving the poisoning of the family dog, were a fact of life for her growing up. From a young age, Mariah was keenly aware she was caught amidst a significant racial divide. From as early as she could remember, Mariah’s ambitions and imagination were focused approximately forty miles west, in New York City. Writing in her memoir, she shared a formative memory from her days above the deli, when she was about seven years old: We were living in [a] cramped apartment on top of [a] deli, and I used to love hearing the sounds of the radio coming up into our windows. I remember swaying, posing, and singing with Odyssey: ‘Oh, oh, oh, you’re a native New Yorker / You should know the score by now.’ I didn’t know what ‘knowing the score’ was, but I wanted that fabulous New York feeling even back then. Radio became her constant companion and her syllabus. Mariah studied the airwaves with the same voracity that her more academically inclined classmates applied to science tests. The ’70s and ’80s were a golden age of New York radio, when FM stations like WBLS (“The World’s Best Looking Station”) and WKTU (“The Beat of New York”) and, later, WRKS (“Kiss FM”) and WQHT (“The Hot New Music Mix”) beamed the latest club hits across the New York Tri-State area. In a time before the internet, these stations were a lifeline into the city for young music heads and club kids in training, “trapped” in the sprawling suburbia of Long Island, Westchester County, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Sneaking a portable radio under covers at night, Mariah’s ears grew sharply attuned to emerging music trends.
their supper club gig, Mariah entered a recording studio for the first time, and immediately fell in love with the process. “Like being in the ocean, when I was there, I felt weightless,” she wrote in her memoir. NATIVE NEW YORKER Throughout her life and career, Mariah Carey has expertly navigated between different and sometimes diametrically opposite worlds. Black and white. Urban and suburban. The safe, middle-of- the-road fare of her Tommy Mottola years, and the Tunnel-era club bangers she made a few years later with Mobb Deep and the Lox. For perspective, it’s valuable to take a deeper look at her upbringing as a mixed-race child on the economic fringes of Long Island, the dense suburb wholly defined by its relationship to New York City. Patricia and Alfred, Mariah’s father, met in Brooklyn, where they married and had Morgan in 1960. The couple divorced not long after Mariah’s birth in 1969; Patricia settled in Long Island with Mariah and Morgan while Alfred, an engineer, remained in Brooklyn with Alison. Mariah, by her own count, moved thirteen times growing up, largely within the Huntington area on Long Island’s North Shore. The North Shore, sometimes called the “Gold Coast,” is known for its many Gilded Age mansions, built by industrialists with names like du Pont, Vanderbilt, and Guggenheim. The Careys’ digs were far more spartan. “We lived in shitty places among other people’s nice houses in the suburbs,” Mariah wrote in The Meaning of Mariah Carey . These “shitty places” included an apartment above the Midway deli in Northport, a quaint maritime village on the Long Island Sound, and a cottage (referred to by Mariah as “The Shack”) on Knollwood Beach, across the harbor from William Vanderbilt II’s Eagle’s Nest estate in nearby Centerport.
94 WaxPoetics
( top left ) Pat Carey’s 1977 album, To Start Again (UU Records). ( top middle ) Mariah’s yearbook photo from her senior year at Harborfields High School in 1987.
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