THE lights at Madison Square Garden were dim on Wednesday night. Mariah Carey wasn’t onstage yet. But her recorded voice was booming through the speakers, dispensing clichés to the cheering crowd.
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Mariah Carey with Jay-Z, who made a guest appearance Wednesday.
For instance: “Sometimes life can be kind of like a roller coaster.” And, from time to time we all get “a moment of peace.” Also, our lives are “part of God’s bigger plan.” And finally, inevitably, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
At the time it seemed as if Ms. Carey was talking about the ups and downs or her life and career. Her recent years in the music-industry wilderness are by now a big part of the Myth of Mariah, even though in retrospect they don’t seem all that dire. “Glitter,” the movie and the album, were absolute bombs, but the semi-successful follow-up album, “Charmbracelet,” was pretty good, and it demonstrated that there would probably always be a million or so people willing to buy a pretty-good Mariah Carey album. Still, it was last year’s “Emancipation of Mimi” (Island Def Jam) that really put her back on top, and she’s clearly relieved. During Wednesday’s concert two of the most effusive dedications went to L. A. Reid and Doug Morris, the executives who helped make “Mimi” last year’s best-selling CD.
How could we have known, at the beginning of a totally entertaining and slightly weird night, that Ms. Carey’s clichés would come true, right there onstage? The show included a few guest appearances (Jay-Z and Da Brat during “Heartbreaker”; Diddy during “Honey”), lots of ovations and all the costume changes you’d expect. But it also gave Ms. Carey a chance to demonstrate her singular talent for embellishment, vocal and otherwise. Give her a molehill, she’ll make you a mountain. Give her a chance for a concert that should be a victory lap, she’ll make it feel more like — yes — a roller coaster. There were plenty of not-quite-life-threatening ordeals that must have made Ms. Carey stronger.
She chided DJ Clue, who had his own podium next to her band, when she mentioned his name and he didn’t respond with an appreciative scratch or shout-out. She saw an expression she didn’t like on the ever-smiling face of Trey Lorenz, her duet partner (for the Jackson 5 hit “I’ll Be There”), and wondered aloud whether he was in a bad mood. And before nearly every song, she fretted about the dire threat of throat-parchedness; luckily, her water bottle was usually in exactly the right place.
Her concert, like the great “Mimi” album, emphasized club jams over ballads. Early on, a show-stopping rendition of “My All” came back to life as a thumping house track. And she often emphasized the extremes of her vocal range: the smoky low notes and the smoke-alarmy high ones.
Throughout, she betrayed a charming anxiety about pleasing the crowd. After “Vision of Love,” the song that made her a star, she said, “At first I wasn’t doing my first single, ’cause I was like, I don’t know if people want to hear it, or whatever.” And before “Don’t Forget About Us,” she said, “Thank you for making this my 17th No. 1 single.” But who’s counting?
In recognition of the importance of following God’s plan, perhaps, she sang “Make It Happen,” a bombastic disco-gospel inspirational that compresses many of her tendencies into a four-minute song. And she tried her best to stick to the plan during “Fly Like a Bird,” which was supposed to begin with a few words from a pastor. Ahem. Pastor? For a few tense, strange minutes he was nowhere to be found.
“I’m not trying to be a diva,” Ms. Carey said, adding, ominously, “We went over this.” Eventually he showed up: another crisis averted.
Near the end,Ms. Carey sang “Hero,” and she dedicated it to a friend whose father had recently died. She seemed to tear up, so she made a request: “If you want, sing along with me.”
In true Mariah Carey style, she sang that request instead of saying it. And in even truer Mariah Carey style, she added some further instructions: “Just for the first part. So I can get it together.”
And the crowd followed her instructions to the letter. Surely that qualifies as a moment of peace.
