So is this the Foreigner track?…
[Website]
[4.64]
Doug Robertson: Yes, it is the Foreigner track, yes, it sounds pretty much exactly like you’d expect Mariah Carey covering Foreigner to, and no, it really wasn‘t worth her going to all that trouble. The choir definitely should have been given the day off.
[3]
Ian Mathers: Aww, here I was all prepared for a generic power ballad; I was going to jokingly complain that I wish she’d covered Foreigner’s classic hunk of cheese instead. But she did. And it’s great. My mind, she is blown.
[7]
Pete Baran: She replaces the plaintive bombast of Lou Gramm with an almost alien sense of love. Rather than being another “misfit cast upon love’s rocky shores” of the original, she is a sexy lady alien about to scupper Captain Kirk’s paydirt with a cock of her head and an “I Want To Know What This Thing You Call Love Is Captain?” Spock and Bones are snickering at the door again, and Mariah dooms the Enterprise to certain death. There follows a deathmatch where Kirk’s shirt gets ripped, Mariah turns into a hideous creature dripping drool and there is a last minute save by Spock where Mariah overdoses on love endorphins. Come on JJ Abrams, there’s your Star Trek 2 plot THERE. How hard can it be?
[3]
Chuck Eddy: Little known fact: The New Jersey Mass Choir actually released their own version of this song (used to own the 12-inch, stupidly don’t anymore) after gospeling on Foreigner’s own earth-shattering version — just like Junior Walker released his own version of “Urgent” after saxing on that Foreigner classic. Don’t think Duane Eddy ever released a version of Foreigner’s #42 1995 hit “Until The End Of Time” he guitared on (which I didn’t even know ’til now), but he’s apparently still alive so he still has time! Soul Asylum, oddly enough, used to cover “Jukebox Hero” live in the ’80s before becoming famous, yet they never even appeared on a Foreigner album! Nor did M.O.P., who hit with their rap version of “Cold As Ice” in 2001. So what Mariah’s doing here does have a clear precedent. It’s also quite possibly her best single in 13 years or more, though I should probably go back and re-listen to her rendition of Def Leppard’s “Bringin’ On The Heartbreak” sometime.
[7]
Al Shipley: At the end of a subdued but annoyingly verbose album, it’s refreshing to hear her reach for bombast and whistle notes, but as a single or a career move it’s a dead end.
[5]
Matt Cibula: Good song choice, but she brings nothing new to the party and along the way gets outsung by Lou Gramm in a pretty extreme fashion. Definition of a fiver.
[5]
Keane Tzong: Reassuring as it is to know that Mariah’s voice is not actually completely gone, as her recent run of whisper-sung singles might suggest, this is not actually very interesting. I might change my mind if she goes crazy again soon, though.
[6]
Dave Moore: Gotta say, after listening to a whole album of The-Dream and Mariah awkwardly accommodating each other without quite clicking (but at least producing some interesting one-liners and squeal-collage), it’s kind of nice to hear an unabashed throwback to her early 90’s sound. Dream usually just uses her higher register whale-call as a mere paintbrush in his arsenal, but dammit sometimes I just want her to let loose on her terms — wild and sappy and loud and free. Apparently safe interpretations of MOR power-ballad standards is the only way she can do it, ‘course they fade the thing out just as it starts getting good!
[7]
Edward Okulicz: Speaking charitably, the song’s a standard rather than a cliche, but Mariah’s handling of it is the latter and nothing else. Tastefully restrained singing and arrangement at the beginning, all the better to SHOCK AND AWE YOU with the vocal gymnastics at the end. Don’t get me wrong, this is “good” singing, but nothing you can’t imagine just conjuring up the sound in your head. Anyone who loves this song (with or without irony) might as well just listen to Tina Arena’s version from a decade ago which was better than this.
[5]
Hillary Brown: Oh, girl, don’t go back to this gospel pastiche pablum, just when I’ve started to appreciate your work. Sure, it seems heartfelt, but it also seems… sucky.
[3]
Martin Kavka: Carey continues to believe that holding back her talents and singing with weak breathiness allows her to express Raw! Vulnerability! As Whitney and Susan Boyle have taught us this year, this is utterly false. It’s a matter of finding a different timbre in your voice, or of exercising vocal control. Whitney’s shown us that the drugs do work; that new raggedness has led her to record one of the most compelling vocals this year. And juxtaposing the first two refrains of Carey’s IWTKWLI with the verses of Boyle’s “Wild Horses” shows that one can sing softly and maintain vocal power. Yet Carey refuses to try to learn how to sing differently; she’s been robotically oscillating between Belt and Purr for over a decade now. Perhaps she’s just not capable of doing anything else. Even when she does the high melismas that are her signature (after the clichéd Key Change Announcing Deep-Seated Emotion), her voice sounds as processed as Velveeta.
[2]
Tal Rosenberg: Wanting to know what love is carries the implication that, while a hypothetical someone does not know what love is, they know that whatever love is, it’s something that is worthwhile enough that it’s worth knowing about. In Foreigner’s original, the song starts with a deep pulse, an ominous keyboard, and an aching voice. The performance imparts, from the beginning, that this intuition of love’s power is primal, innate, human — which is why the song went to #1 in both the UK and the US: Because it believably expresses the inherent, human inclination to want to know what love feels like. The song’s also too long, and has been overplayed, so it’s lost a lot of its initial grip. But at least it expresses drama, unlike this Mariah version. With Mariah’s pipes, this seems like an ideal cover, but the opening piano is all gas, no blood, and therefore has little of a heartbeat. And so where Mariah could have sung this with heart and feeling, the only thing that she’s blowing through those broad, thickened pipes is a whole lot of hot air.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Mariah’s always loved eighties R&B, so it’s no surprise why she chose this exemplar of white soul. Her ugly rasp approximates Gramm’s, but the one-shop stop instrumental arrangement can’t match the slowburn synths that underpin Foreigner’s. However welcome mud and silt are to a Mariah Carey track, its application is like Bunuel getting Catherine Deneuve all dirty — not believing it for a second is part of the joke.
[5]
Iain Mew: It’s not Mariah’s fault that hearing an old song covered like this, I now keep expecting it to get interrupted by “That’s four yesses. You’re through!”, followed by the stirring strains of “Rule the World” kicking in. To be honest, though, it would be a bit of a relief if it did.
[3]