4 Weird, Unexpected Collaborations Of Famous Musicians

4Mariah Carey Made a Grunge Album

In 1995, a division of Columbia Records released an album by proto-riot grrl band Chick called Someone’s Ugly Daughter, which is the most 1995 sentence ever written. After failing to really go anywhere, the album quietly fell out of print, and Chick disappeared. Well, not really. Chick wasn’t really a band so much as a composite of various studio personnel, a relatively unknown alternative musician named Clarissa Dane, and her former roommate/Columbia’s shining star, Mariah Carey.

Carey was recording her hit album Daydream at the time and, as the kids say, really going through it. Some might say she never really got through it, but there was a lot riding on the album, and her brand new marriage to producer Tommy Mottola was already failing harder than Glitter. To blow off steam after long Daydream recording sessions, she created the “alter ego” of “a dark-haired brooding goth girl who wrote and sang ridiculous tortured songs.” Hey, some of us eat pizza rolls and play Candy Crush, while some of us become new people. Fun fact: This character later evolved to become the Jerry O’Connell-stealing vixen of the “Heartbreaker” music video. 

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What a wasted opportunity for a rap battle.

In fact, we never got to hear as much of this character as we could have. Carey brought in Dane and the ridiculous tortured songs she’d written and recorded Someone’s Ugly Daughter over the course of several months of late nights, but when she decided to actually release the album, the label insisted on centering Dane’s vocals so as not to tarnish Carey’s squeaky clean image, unaware that she’d do it for them within a few years, one manic TRL striptease at a time. They also insisted she change the band’s name from Eel Tree, but she created the album’s cover art with “pink lipstick over a Polaroid picture Tommy had taken of a giant dead cockroach in Italy,” directed the music video for an extremely third-wave feminist single called “Malibu” … 

4 Weird, Unexpected Collaborations Of Famous Musicians
Source: Pinoy Daily News