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Mariah Carey was my first love She was 30, I was 10, but we seemed to share in the struggle to come to terms with the zeitgeist We were introduced in 2001 through a cover of Phil Collins’s ‘Against All Odds’, which appeared as a duet with the Irish boyband Westlife After the third verse Mariah takes off in an unchecked howl ‘Wait for it,’ I’d say, playing the song over and over again in the car to my dad, ‘here it comes, now she’s killing it,’ as if talking about a guitar riff on a Doors’ track I had come into consciousness under the bombardment of Aqua, Spice Girls, Britney and Christina Aguilera, and didn’t know that it was Mariah to whom the last decade belonged In that first year of the new millennium, ‘the best selling female artist of all time’ seemed to me a niche discovery, rescued from oblivion   Part of the reason for this was that the pop game had changed The new rules privileged youth, styling and story above all else Voice was something almost tacky – in Aguilera’s case, for instance – and technique entirely foreign What sold records was Britney being a virgin, and J-Lo being from the block Pop stars were manufactured in two moulds: those audiences want to fuck, and those audiences want to be At 14, when pressured to name a woman I desired, I shrugged and suggested sheepishly: Mariah? Needless to say, I didn’t want to fuck her I don’t know that anyone did Not because she hasn’t always been beautiful, but because she seemed lonely – without context, somehow For the same reason I didn’t want to be her, not for all the pink penthouses in the world I was desperate to be Britney, happy and horny and laughing like a toddler What a blissful life that would have been My attachment to Mariah was more like a sense of adjacency and of inching along in parallel weather; being really really good at pretending, while being always outside ourselves, and outside everything else, too   In 2020, on