Sweet Destiny

Mariah Carey “Vision of Love”

“Vision of Love” may be the best debut single of all time. It introduces Mariah Carey as a fully-formed artist – a vocal powerhouse who can sing with a lot of nuance, a songwriter with an exceptional gift for melody, a lyricist with a distinct intelligence and clever vocabulary. It’s one of the most consequential songs in pop history, not simply for launching one of the most successful singers ever, but in how it established melisma and multi-octave range as the dominant vocal style of mainstream pop. Whitney Houston put this trend in motion, but it was Carey who set the bar for pop singers at “superhuman.”

Many singers have tried to emulate her, but most have failed. That’s mostly because Carey’s remarkable vocal prowess is always just a means to achieving her ends as a songwriter. A mediocre singer only hears the theatricality, and the flex of hitting the whistle register. It becomes an athletic thing, or an equivalent of how amateur guitarists could get obsessed with Eddie Van Halen’s finger-tapping technique without ever picking up on his skill for writing hooky riffs.

“Vision of Love” isn’t ground breaking in form. It’s a ballad rooted in soul and gospel, somewhat old-fashioned in the context of pop at the dawn of the 1990s. But it’s a masterful composition, dialed-in at every level. Carey wrote the song around the time she was 18 with her early collaborator Ben Margulies, and I can’t imagine they had any idea they were writing something that could become a massive hit at the time. It reaches multiple bombastic crescendoes but is nevertheless a slow burner, and it’s far more musically ambitious than a majority of what was crushing the charts in 1989. Carey and Margulies were nobodies, but were approaching songwriting like they were making luxury products.

“Vision of Love” is a love song, but that aspect of the lyrics is almost secondary to how it expresses Carey’s will to triumph over her difficult and largely unhappy youth. The lyrics are very direct, but also noticeably wordy. Not in the sense that it ever sounds clumsy, but in that you can find yourself surprised by how smooth the phrase “now I know I’ve succeeded in finding the place I conceived” can sound in a song. This is one of the most charming aspects of Carey as an artist – she’s a woman who hears the melodic possibilities in prosaic words like “eventually,” “desperation,” “visualized,” and “alienation.” Pop songs typically land on universality with vague language, but Carey gets there with precision.

Buy it from Amazon.