Mariah Carey reveals battling identity crisis during start of music career
January 13, 2021
Mariah Carey came forth laying bare all her insecurities that she faced after entering the music industry.
The five-time Grammy winner talked about being a 'woman of colour' in the Hollywood music scene, while chatting with Questlove (né Ahmir Thompson) in an all-new episode of his podcast Questlove Supreme.
"I know some people, Ahmir, like to have everybody else's input and their perspective," said the songstress about her memoir The Meaning of Carey.
"But what I wanted was to tell my actual story, which doesn't begin with, 'Mariah Carey put out Vision of Love in 1990.' No, it doesn't begin with that. It begins [with me] coloring in the 'wrong' crayon with a brown crayon for my father, so they all freak out at me."
"It begins with, 'I don't understand my hair because I'm [half-black],'" recalled the star. "It begins with all these identity issues, these issues of race, these struggles. Then it goes to the issues of control."
Carey added, "There's a thing where there's a constant theme [with] being a woman in a male-dominated industry. Then [I was] a woman of color with all this ambiguity and [had] people deciding how they're going to market me [at the time]."
