We are now used to seeing Mariah Carey mainly around Christmas. This year, she is not waiting until after Halloween: the singer is releasing the single Type Dangerous on Friday. It is her first new work since 2018.
“What is your type?”, Carey asks her fans in a short video on social media announcing the release of her new single. It turns out that she falls for dangerous men, according to Type Dangerous.
In that song, which she wrote with, among others, r&b artist Anderson .Paak, she sings about how she left her unhappy marriage with record boss Tommy Motola behind and that she had several flings. For example, she describes a motorcyclist who turns out to be a speed demon, a “computer boy toy” who turns out to be a hacker (and cheats), and a construction worker who is actually a drug dealer.
Her love life is certainly not boring if we are to believe her lyrics. The song has a strong r&b and hip-hop-based sound with elements of her style from the late nineties.
This will not be limited to just this one new single. In the announcement video, Carey is in a car, and the license plate reads ‘MC 16’. That refers to the upcoming sixteenth album of the singer. That record will be the successor to Caution, released in 2018. That ten-track album with contemporary, relaxed r&b songs and hip-hop influences did not achieve major commercial success at the time but was unanimously praised by reviewers.
For the real Carey fans, there has been plenty to experience around their idol outside of the Christmas holidays in recent years. The singer, who prefers to call her birthday an anniversary and does not want to reveal her year of birth, celebrates the anniversaries of her successful albums extensively. For example, 25 or 30 years after the release of albums such as Butterfly, Music Box and Rainbow, she released new versions with previously unreleased songs from the archives and new remixes.
Last week, she released a new version of The Emancipation of Mimi, in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the album. With this album, Carey put herself back on the map in 2005 after a number of years of disappointing success and personal problems. Her comeback with the hit single We Belong Together was seen in the United States as one of the greatest in pop history.
Although Carey is most active around the holidays, where her Christmas hit All I Want for Christmas Is You is heavily promoted every year, she also performs regularly throughout the rest of the year. For example, she can be seen 24 times in Las Vegas as part of The Celebration Of Mimi and is touring through China and Brazil. Later this year, performances are scheduled in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan, among others.
Carey is not the only one rediscovering her earlier music. The young audience on TikTok has already unearthed several of her songs and made trends out of them. For example, there is a lot of dancing to Touch My Body (2008) and Obsessed (2009). The latter song is currently even her most popular song on Spotify. It is hoped for Carey that the TikTokkers will quickly have a choreography ready for Type Dangerous.