Music

Mariah Carey Has Kicked Off The Festive Season With A Typically OTT Video

Finally, some good news.

by Jared Richards  2 November 2020
Mariah Carey welcomes Christmas 2020 in OTT video

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Each year, Mariah Carey’s modern Christmas classic ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ skyrockets in streams as December comes closer — to the point that last year it even charted at #1 in the US for the first time, 25 years after it was first released. And now that it’s November, the elusive chanteuse has let her fans know that yes, it’s finally festive season.

Year in, year out, Carey lets us know when’s socially acceptable to start blasting her Christmas albums, posting short videos of herself simply saying “not yet”. This year, she simply tweeted it, after programmer Mike Nicolella pointed out that Google searches for ‘All I Want For Christmas’ were already beginning to rise in October.

And now we’re over the Halloween hump, Carey has posted a video of herself in a more festive spirit, having created a Christmas oasis inside her own spooky-decorated house. In the short video, a creepy costumed figure opens a cobweb and blood-stained door to reveal Carey in a Christmas onesie, underneath a tree.

“It’s timeeee,” she sing-speaks, and the song begins to play. And so it is.

2020 has been a big year for Carey, beginning with ‘All I Want For Christmas’ as her 25th #1 on the US Billboard charts —  marking her fourth decade of #1s, spanning the ’90s to the ’20s. Carey has also recently released an acclaimed memoir, The Meaning Of Mariah Carey, as well as a compilation album The Rarities.

The Guardian called the memoir “a carefully pieced together self-portrait of one of this generation’s most fascinatingly idiosyncratic, frequently misunderstood artists from the ground up”, while other critics have celebrated its raw detailing of Carey’s traumatic early life and relationship with Sony label head Tommy Mottola, and how her bi-racial identity and impoverished upbringing shaped her into the ‘diva’ persona we know today.

In the memoir, Carey reveals she once recorded an entire grunge album for a laugh in the ’90s, and plans to release it down the line. She also explored her own relationship to Christmas, describing how one particular visit to her ‘guncles’ house over Christmas was a rare moment of comfort in her childhood, and perhaps why she’s always romanticised the holiday in her life and career.

Find Carey’s 2019 recording of ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ below.