Mariah Carey Covers Complex Mag Talks Pioneering Pop/Rap Collabs "I’ve grown up on this"

On Her Throne. ..

Mariah Carey covers Complex Magazine 2016 with an amazing Queendom style photoshoot, but it was the interview that solidified her as the Queen. Having sold over 200 million records world wide Mariah Carey is one of the most successful and greatest singers of all time. She is a pioneer in many ways, but one that many do not give her credit for is her efforts in crossing over hiphop to the pop charts something many before her didn’t. Pop/Rap collaborations simply weren’t a thing before Mariah Carey introduced it to the world.

Mariah Carey has collaborated with “Jay Z, Snoop Dogg, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Nas, The LOX, Rick Ross, and Jeezy”, but it was the Ol Dirty Bastard collaboration that sparked a movement in the industry and a world wide acceptance selling millions of copies world wide and charting world wide with the “Fantasy Remix” with Bad Boy and Ol’ Dirty Bastard which Mariah states is the reason for a lot of the sales from the record.

Complex X Mariah;

“Back then, she fought for the ODB feature and won a concession from her label, Sony, whose execs saw it as an appropriative move rather than an acknowledgement that Carey was part of the culture. ‘They were like, ‘Oh, she’s interested in this little rap music,’” she remembers. ‘I was like, ‘No, I’ve grown up on this. You think it’s something new. You’re kidding me!”’

“‘I love the grimiest rappers in the world,’ she says. ‘That’s my favorite.’ Carey remembers driving around New York one night listening to Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones” when she got the idea for ‘The Roof,’ an album cut from 1997’s Butterflyabout fleeting romance. She was similarly inspired in 2002, when she heard Cam’ron’s ‘Oh Boy’ and flipped the beat for her single ‘Boy (I Need You).’ Carey flew Killa to the island of Capri to record; he returned the hospitality by giving her a guided tour of Harlem in his Lamborghini. When she pointed out landmarks that even he didn’t know existed, Cam realized she was just as comfortable uptown as he was.

‘I was always in a bubble that they put me in, but I was always punching out. It was a tough line to walk.’ – More

Mariah Carey is extremely influential to hiphop’s growth world wide and she deserves her credit. Check out her amazing shoot: