A Potentially Controversial Ranking of Every Mariah Carey Album From Worst to Best

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It’s no secret that I’m a huge Mariah Carey fan. I own all of her albums on vinyl and cassette both, I saw her in concert on February 29, 2020 in Las Vegas and somehow didn’t contract covid, part of my recording backdrop is bootleg Mariah merch in the form of an absurd quilt with all of her album covers on it …

… I could go on and on. And I will, right now! In celebration of last week’s release of her sixteenth studio album, Here For It All, here is my own personal ranking of every Mariah Carey album, from worst to best.

17. Merry Christmas/Merry Christmas II You

The headline told you this list might be controversial! We’re currently looking down the barrel of the holiday season, a time of year that has become synonymous with the name Mariah Carey. And I get it! She had a fluke hit that turned into one of the most enduring and beloved Christmas songs of all-time. Here, I’ll link to it in case you’ve never heard it.

As neat as that is, it has also had the unfortunate effect of turning Mariah into some kind of Christmas ornament that we trot out every December and then promptly forget about for the other 11 months of the year. She deserves better. For my money, Christmas is the least interesting thing about Mariah Carey’s career and music. Also, I just kinda don’t like Christmas songs that much. Sorry.

16.  Emotions

History has retroactively decided that Mariah’s sophomore album, Emotions, is actually pretty decent. I still disagree. The lead single/title track is an irrepressible banger …

… and the album’s other two singles (“Can’t Let Go” and “Make It Happen”) are quality tunes. The rest sounds like early ‘90s C+C Music Factory bullshit to me, probably because a lot of it was produced by the C+C from said Music Factory.

For most of her career, Mariah Carey has been way more ahead of the curve when it comes to what’s happening in pop music than most. On this album, though, she was chasing what pop music was doing at the time instead of showing pop music what it should do next.

15. Me. I Am Mariah ... The Elusive Chanteuse

The title alone places Mariah’s 2014 effort near the bottom of this list. What am I, made of free time? It’s also, by far, her most underwhelming album of the 21st century which, otherwise, is one of the most critically acclaimed eras of her career. It’s not a bad album by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s probably not one you’ll reach for regularly either.

14. MTV Unplugged

This, in theory, shouldn’t even be on the list seeing as how it’s an EP and not a full studio album. However, it’s way too important to Mariah’s career to not mention it. This was recorded and released at a point where there were lots of questions and concerns over her lack of live performance experience, and it went a long way toward putting that talk to rest. It also features her cover of The Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” which is worth the price of admission alone.

13. Music Box

I think I’m supposed to love this album more than I do on account of how it’s got the song “Hero” on it. That’s one of Mariah’s biggest and most memorable hits. But that song is kind of an anomaly in her catalog. If you really dig into it, you’ll find she’s not really the “inspirational ballad” type. The reason “Hero” sounds the way it does is because she initially wrote it for Gloria Estefan, but Carey’s then-husband, Tommy Mottola, heard the demo and insisted she keep it for herself.

On the bright side, she always plays that song last in concert, which means I get to bail early and beat the crowd getting home.

In general, the albums released under the Mottola reign are among my least favorite. The lead single, “Dreamlover”, absolutely slaps, though.

12. Charmbracelet

It should come as no surprise that Mariah Carey’s ninth studio album, Charmbracelet, does not rank among her best or most memorable. It was released during one of the most tumultuous times of, honestly, any musician’s career ever. This was her first post-Glitter/post-emotional breakdown album, and it’s clear she’s not completely back on track yet. It’s not terrible, but also not the comeback she or anyone else was hoping for at the time.

11. Here For It All

After decades in the “best singer in the world” trenches, we’ve finally reached the point in history where time is catching up to Mariah Carey’s voice, and that is exactly what makes her sixteenth and most recent studio album so endearing. That she’s not throwing in the towel just because the whistle register isn’t quite what it used to be is exactly the kind of shit I want from an artist. Champions adapt, baby!

Hearing Mariah Carey sorta struggle to hit a note just makes her seem like a human being. It’s not the worst thing.

10. The Rarities

This is another one that shouldn’t technically be on the list. This isn’t a studio album, it’s a compilation of outtakes and rarities from the first 30 years of Mariah’s career. That said, it’s also a fantastic collection of songs that play like one of the more cohesive albums in her catalog. The second disc, a complete recording of a 1996 Tokyo show from the Daydream World Tour, doubles as the only full-length live album she’s released, so it’s got that going for it too.

9. Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel

I feel like there’s a significant portion of the public who think Mariah Carey faded into drug-addled obscurity after her famous breakdown, when the truth is that the years after that bump in the road are among her most successful both critically and commercially. This album completes a holy trinity of three consecutive 2000s releases that, in my opinion, mark the absolute peak of her career creatively. This one is notable for including the song “Obsessed”, a diss track directed at Eminem that blew up years later on social media on account of a very sad girl dancing to it.

8. Daydream

While Tommy Mottola was still lurking around in the background by the time the Daydream album was released, it still marks the point in history where Mariah started to come into her own as a musician. She kinda freaked out her record label by featuring Wu-Tang loose cannon Ol’ Dirty Bastard on the first single, “Fantasy”, but it turned out to be a brilliant move. No better way to shatter that pop princess image than letting the world know you and Ol’ Dirt Dog go back like babies and pacifiers.

Along with that famous collaboration, this album features two of her most enduring hits, “One Sweet Day” and “Always Be My Baby”. While I can take or leave the former, if you don’t like the latter, you are dead inside.

7. Caution

Hell yeah, Caution! The public didn’t appreciate it the way it deserved, but Mariah Carey’s fifteenth studio album is her most consistent and brutally efficient release ever. Ten songs, 39 minutes, not an ounce of fat to be found. It’s her highest rated album on Metacritic, and deservedly so.

6. Rainbow

Rolling Stone also recently published a ranking of Mariah Carey albums, and those lunatics named Rainbow as her second worst. Not a shocking turn of events from the outlet that called Weezer’s Pinkerton the worst album of 1996, only to later add it to their list of the 500 greatest albums of all-time.

On top of featuring one of her most beloved singles ever (“Heartbreaker” featuring Jay Z), it also has a song on it called “Bliss” that is easily top five when it comes to her best non-singles/album tracks.

While the album before this one was the first without Tommy Mottola at the helm, it was released in such close proximity to their famous divorce that his presence is still palpable. With Rainbow, it felt like she had completely freed herself from his influence. That would turn out to not be true, but you can tell she was hating life a little less by this point in her career, and that makes Rainbow an especially enjoyable listen.

Also, it’s probably her most iconic album cover. No idea why.

5. Mariah Carey

The album that started it all. In 1990, Mariah Carey emerged from the obscurest of obscurity to release a truly remarkable debut album. She became the first act since the Jackson 5 to have their first four singles all reach #1 on the charts in the United States. One of those singles, “Love Takes Time”, was actually written for her second album, but upon hearing it, the label insisted on it being added to the debut. As a result, lots of early copies of the album either don’t list the song on the track list or don’t include the song at all. Also, I have a cassette copy of the album from Thailand that, for reasons unknown, lists the title of that song as “Gang Green".

4. Butterfly

If nothing else, Butterfly is Mariah Carey’s most aptly-titled album. It was the first album she released after her divorce from Tommy Mottola, who played a major role in crafting her image at the start of her career. In that way, you could argue that this is the first real Mariah Carey album. This was the first time we got Mariah as she wanted to be heard and seen both, and it was evident immediately that the direction she’d chosen for herself was the correct one. It’s not my absolute favorite Mariah Carey album, but it might be the most important Mariah Carey album.

3. Glitter

Man, don’t get me fucking started on Glitter. Sure, the movie was a disaster, even if it’s in a kind of funny and charming way. The album, though? Completely different story. If you’ve dug around far enough back through the articles I’ve posted here, you already know that I consider Glitter to be maybe the most underrated pop album of all-time. The things it was criticized for, like an overabundance of guest features and ‘80s samples, are the exact things every pop and R&B act would lean on heavily for the next couple of decades at least. Check out this quote from a review at the time:

"The whiff of desperation grows more pungent on Glitter in Carey's gratuitous coloratura and transparent enlistment of street-cred boosters such as rappers Ja Rule and Mystikal."

And now think about how insanely common the thing she’s getting criticized for became almost immediately after that review would’ve been published.

It’s telling that lots and lots of the reviews from the time bring up that famous breakdown. By this point in history, Mariah Carey was seen as a punchline, because that’s how we treated people with mental health issues back then. The negative reviews for Glitter, to me, read like people piling onto the “Mariah is a joke now” narrative as opposed to being honest assessments of the music.

Meanwhile, as mentioned in that article I just linked to, half the reason she suffered that breakdown was because Tommy Mottola conspired with some of the producers of the Glitter album to steal ideas she was working on and funnel them to Jennifer Lopez, who went on to get all sorts of praise and acclaim for working with people like Ja Rule. But Mariah did it first and Mariah did it better.

Never forget.

2. E=MC2

That thing I mentioned earlier about Mariah Carey having a trio of 2000s albums that, in my opinion, feature her at the absolute height of her powers? This album is the middle part of that trio. It suffered a little commercially from some highly questionable choices when it came to what songs to release as singles. Because of that, E=MC2 isn’t remembered as fondly as it should be, but that is completely immaterial to the quality of the album. All it really means is that, if you’ve never listened to this record outside of the handful of singles, you still haven’t heard a whole bunch of Mariah Carey’s very best songs.

1. The Emancipation of Mimi

Here’s the thing. If you don’t think The Emancipation of Mimi is Mariah Carey’s best album, you are a dumbass. This isn’t just a nearly perfect album, it is an inspirational tale of overcoming the odds. It is a musician seemingly at the depths of their career coming from out of nowhere to reclaim their well-earned place in history.

If you weren’t alive for it or if you were just too distracted with all of that “war on terror” bullshit to pay attention, then you probably don’t understand just how hard Mariah Carey had fallen by the time this album came out. She’d been institutionalized, she lost a huge recording contract over it (although they did buy her out), the Glitter movie had only 9/11 to thank for it not being the biggest disaster of September 2001, and her first attempt at a “comeback” album, Charmbracelet, didn’t land with people the way anyone hoped it would. Things were bleak, to say the least.

Then came The Emancipation of Mimi, an album I love so much I named my cat after it.

On the strength of two absurdly good singles that preceded the album’s release (“It’s Like That” and “We Belong Together”), The Emancipation of Mimi became Mariah Carey’s first album to debut at number one since 1997’s Butterfly. It went on to become the best selling album of 2005 and has sold 10 million copies worldwide since. It was nominated for eight Grammy Awards and won three. Billboard Magazine named “We Belong Together” the best song of the decade, for fuck’s sake.

It’s a really great album, is what I’m getting at. It didn’t revive her career by accident. When Mariah Carey was at her absolute lowest professionally, she turned things around by being at her absolute best professionally.

The Emancipation of Mimi is a flawless album that has aged like goddamn wine in the two decades since it was released. Stop reading this and go listen to it right now (the article is over anyway).

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