27 February 1992
What are the most influential tracks of the ’90s? ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, ‘The Drowners’, ‘Wannabe’ and ‘…Baby One More Time’ are in there for sure. To those, I’ll add Mariah Carey’s 1990 debut single, ‘Vision Of Love’.
I don’t even mean the entire track, a really good retro R ‘n’ B ballad that Mariah mostly croons soulfully. It’s what happens in the final chorus: first Mariah hits a sky-scraping whistle-register high note, then the music drops out to showcase her somersaulting melisma. Not even ’60s Aretha Franklin or ’80s Whitney Houston grandstanded so extravagantly and superfluously on the lead vocal of a hit single. Add the context of a US music industry rocked by the emerging Milli Vanilli lip-syncing scandal; now here was a new singer with genuine technical gifts. ‘Vision Of Love’ topped the US Billboard charts, made Mariah Carey an instant star, and set the ’90s template for female pop vocalists: showy melisma and loud money notes. Céline Dion and Björk may well have become ’90s mainstream stars anyway, but Mariah surely helped clear the way.
I mention it here because 1992 is when the Mariah-influenced records really come to market, and ‘Stay’ is one of those. Would it have been such a smash hit, with Marcella Detroit’s high notes front and centre, in a pre-Mariah world? It’s certainly not typical of the rest of Shakespears Sister’s output, such as their other singles from Hormonally Yours or their great 1989 hit ‘You’re History’, where Siobhan Fahey’s feline growl is the lead vocal and Marcella’s soprano the backdrop. The cliche is to say that she has a voice to break glass, but in fact her voice is glass: hard, glossy, with no feature or texture, and no way in. I don’t find it dramatic or emotional; in fact I find it difficult to like at all. That said, I’ll take this over a certain other number one later in 1992, perhaps the most notorious example of the ’90s diva vocal style. Oh Mariah, what had you done?
