That Time Mariah Carey Went Grunge

And sang about Malibu Barbie

Welcome to That Time, a series of articles about a time in a musical artist’s career that was particularly memorable.

This week: That time Mariah Carey masterminded an alternative rock-themed side-project called Chick.

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Twenty years ago, I picked up a stack of cassette tapes for really cheap at a liquidation place. Cassettes were dying out as a medium, and most places had stopped selling them. I don’t remember everything that I purchased, but there was a compilation of punk rock love songs, albums by Dramarama and Dinosaur Jr. and something by a mid-90’s band named Chick called Someone’s Ugly Daughter.

I did listen to the album once and thought it was fairly generic ’90s alternative rock in the vein of bands like Hole.

I’m not sure what happened to my copy of the tape because I was moving around a lot my first month in college, and it likely got lost at some point.

I forgot about Chick for another fifteen years until I heard about who was really behind the short-lived band. It came up again recently in a conversation I was having, and I knew it had to pop up as a piece here on Musings.

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By 1995, Mariah Carey was one of the biggest pop stars in the world. She had released four studio albums and had a new one on the way called Daydream. She’d had a string of number one singles. In a nutshell, Mariah Carey was a big deal in the 90s.

Being one of the biggest pop stars in the world as well as one who was also married to the head of Sony music (first husband Tommy Mottola) was not easy for Carey, and she began to relate to artists like Hole and Sleater-Kinney who had the opposite image.

In her memoirs, Carey later said:

"I created an alter-ego artist and her Ziggy Stardust-like spoof band. My character was a dark-haired brooding Goth girl who wrote and sang ridiculous tortured songs. I was playing with the style of the breezy-grunge, punk-light white female singers who were popular at the time. They could be angry, angsty and messy, with old shoes, wrinkled slips and unruly eyebrows, while every move I made was so calculated and manicured. I wanted to break free, let loose and express my misery - but I also wanted to laugh."

Basically, Carey was frustrated by the limitations of her fame and the marriage she was in. This side project, tentatively named Eel Tree, was a way of coping with that.

Among Carey’s collaborators for this project was her longtime friend, Clarissa Dane. Dane is credited as a cowriter on all of the tracks except one: a cover of the Cheap Trick classic “Surrender”.

Because I was listening to Cheap Trick’s version “Surrender” a lot twenty years ago, I specifically remember Chick’s cover.

While the album version is currently not online, there is an acapella version that claims to feature Carey’s original vocal. For anyone who ever wanted to hear Mariah Carey sing Cheap Trick, here’s your chance.

Carey herself has the same number of co-writing credits on the album, only she’s credited as “D. Sue”. There is speculation that she took this pseudonym as a play on the French word “déçue”.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary website, déçue means the following:

déçue= D. Sue.

Anyway, getting back to the topic of who else was involved with this project, Discogs lists Walter Afanasieff and Gary Cirimelli as the other two members of Chick. A quick search tells me they are both frequent Mariah Carey collaborators.

Because I am writing this from a non-fan perspective, I had to flex my research muscles.

Walter Afanasieff was heavily involved in Mariah Carey’s career. He cowrote a bunch of Carey’s hits, including “All I Want For Christmas Is You”, and also is the man responsible for who produced Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”. On Someone’s Ugly Daughter, Afanasieff is credited as “W. Vlad”, a combination of Walter and his birth name, Vladimir.

Not only had Gary Cirimelli been involved with Carey’s recordings, but he’d also worked with Michael Bolton, Kenny G. and Celine Dion.

Even if Sony hadn’t gone into panic mode over Someone’s Ugly Daughter, there was a chance some people could have seen Afanasieff and Cirimelli credited as part of Chick and known something was off about the band.

But for anyone who wasn’t familiar with them, it’s easy to have not known this was anything but some alternative band who’d been snapped up by a major label’s edgier subsidiary (Epic’s 550 Music, home of Ben Folds Five) in the middle of the 90s alternative boom.

Watching the video for Chick’s debut single “Malibu” again made me notice something. On the album, Clarissa Dane isn’t the only one using an alias. She is also the only member of Chick not wearing a mask in the video.

There’s two guys shown briefly, and they’re both wearing masks. It’s uncertain if they are Cirimelli and Afanasieff. The clear focus here is Dane.

According to Mariah Carey fans on YouTube, there is at least one hint dropped in the video that Carey was involved with Chick. The dog in the video is supposedly Mariah Carey’s dog, Jack, who appeared in a number of her own videos.

Sony were not happy with the album. They refused to release it with Carey’s vocals intact, and by all accounts, it was a label decision to rename Eel Tree Chick.

One could imagine Mottola was likely not happy with a number of the lyrics. Carey was writing these songs to vent her frustrations.

“Malibu” contains such passages as:

“If I were Malibu Barbie
And you were Suntan Ken
I’d probably dump your ass for G.I. Joe”

And:

“You know I think you’re kinda stupid
Why can’t you get it through your big fat head
I hate you, I hate you
I wish you were dead”

Not to mention that the chorus contains the lyrics:

“You don’t care that I don’t care at all
Coz I’m only using you”

Much has been written about the marriage between Mottola and Carey over the years, as well as the alleged feud between Carey and Jennifer Lopez that may have had its roots in Lopez's working with Mottola after Carey had left Sony.

I’m not using this space to go into detail about that. It’s clear their union wasn’t a happy one, and the lyrics to “Malibu” prove this.

This was probably the first time Carey was able to express herself creatively without her husband or her label pulling the strings. In another ten years, Carey, after a pair of unsuccessful albums away from Sony, took control of her career and masterminded a successful comeback with her album The Emancipation Of Mimi.

That was all a decade away, however. In the meantime, Sony decided to remove Carey’s vocals and have Dane sing over her vocal parts.

This wasn’t the last time a major recording artist wanted to record different material. Country superstar Garth Brooks also wanted to experiment with other genres. He recorded a pop album as Chris Gaines. A fake Behind The Music Special about Gaines was recorded, and the whole thing was treated like a concept album.

This could have also been done with Chick, but it’s hard to say how the entire thing would have gone over. Carey, for the most part, has stated that she did create an alter ego for the project. There’s some speculation as to whether or not this was Bianca, a character Carey has played in a series of videos starting with 1999’s Heartbreaker.

It’s hard to say how alternative music fans might have reacted had Carey been able to keep her vocals on Someone’s Ugly Daughter and appear alongside Dane in the videos.

Side-projects were a dime a dozen 20-30 years ago and still are. You had Matt Sharp of Weezer popping up as the frontman of The Rentals. Jack White lent secret vocals to the Electric Six smash “Danger! High Voltage”, and he also fronted The Raconteurs.

Most of these artists already fell into an alternative category and weren’t much of a risk. What could have been perceived as “risky” was the biggest pop star on a major label deciding to front a fake grunge band. Sony (and Mottola) likely threw a s**tfit.

Efforts were made to promote the album. “Malibu” popped up on an episode of Beavis and Butthead where the duo use misogynist language to describe Dane and then proceed to comment about the name of the band. It’s one of their more offensive music video roasts, and Carey was likely grateful she didn’t have to be subjected to it.

Accounts vary as to how much promotion Sony wanted to put into the album. A second single, “Demented”, was released. This time, no band is shown alongside Dane.

“Demented” isn’t very good, but I wouldn’t have liked this regardless of who was involved. Still, the fact that a Mariah Carey-led version of a track like this exists somewhere actually fascinates me.

While I mentioned Garth Brooks’ attempt to take on an alter ego, “Demented” is more along the lines of what Alanis Morrisette was doing.

Morrisette was an unknown outside of Canada before Jagged Little Pill, which might have helped her case. Before that, though, she’d scored a string of dance-pop hits in her home country and was well known as simply “Alanis”.

I also touched on a similar case last fall. Canadian pop band One To One had a bunch of pop hits before reforming as Artifical Joy Club.

Carey finally admitted her involvement with Chick in her 2020 autobiography, and the ensuing revelation sparked interest in the project. Carey has found her long-lost lead vocals, but it remains to be seen whether the album will be released in its intended form or not.

Allegedly, copies of Someone’s Ugly Daughter were going for $800 at one point. I’m going to have to dig around to try and find mine.

Next Week: TBA