The thing about Me. I Am Mariah Carey… The Elusive Chanteuse, is despite its terrible album name, over-length, and just plain weirdnesss, is a really good album. If you can work your way through it, there is a goldmine of potential hits and while, yeah, I’m the schmuck who thought “#Beautiful” would break big last year, still songs as great as “Cry” and “Make It Look Good” are as good as it gets.
But it only sold 55K copies in its first week, which means Mariah hasn’t gone past her core audience and that means her manager, Jermaine Dupri, is taking the hit. Dupri, associated closely (haha) with Janet Jackson, as well as names like Da Brat and Nelly, apparently peaked around ten years ago and why Mariah is with him, I am not certain.
Meanwhile, Dupri reacted to the heat with this missive:
“Okay enough is enough!! I can’t continue to let you think, what you see or don’t see is a result of me not knowing what I’m doing. This is bigger than me and in the music business things don’t go as fast as you would always like them to.
“If you know my history, you know I want to go down as one of the greatest producers of all times. I want to be mentioned with the greats like Berry Gordy and Clive Davis when people talk about putting out artist.
“So for me, allowing you to believe I don’t care about the promotion of the Mariah record and I don’t see you screaming at me, that this song and that song needs to be a single, goes against everything that I’m about, believe me! Everything that you question will be answered ASAP!!!!””
