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Thursday, January 31, 2013

Mariah Carey – “Always Be My Baby”



  We start out with Mariah riding on a tire swing near a river or a lake, whooshing back and forth from the bank to the more serious depths of the water while moonlight caresses both her body and her cute little country-girl outfit. She’s acting like she’s having the best time out here on her own and wanting nothing more than to straddle a giant piece of rubber, but you know full well there’s an army of stylists just out of view, ready to rush in and comfort her with beauty products the very second that the director hollers “Cut!”

  We zoom in for some close-ups of Mariah’s face, just so we can make sure it’s really her braving the wilderness as well as admire her latest hairstyle. She seems to be a little pensive about something, and we’re probably supposed to wonder what she might be thinking about, but all I’m really thinking about is the size of that ring on her finger. Girl, why you gonna wear that while you’re airborne over some pond? That ring could end up in the belly of a catfish and eventually on the dinner table of someone named Bubba.

  Quick shot of what appears to be a young boy sitting on a bed in one of those cabins they have at those camps where distracted parents send their kids for the summer. He doesn’t introduce himself so it’s not immediately clear what his purpose might be.

  Back to Mariah, who is now really invested in giving that tire swing a workout. She’s basically laid full out on the tire, using both her pointed toes and her hair to get some serious swinging going on. (That sound you hear is the gasp of one of her personal assistants who will probably lose her job if Mariah’s hair actually touches the filthy country water.)

  This is followed by another shot of the boy in the cabin, or maybe it’s another boy, because his shirt looks a little different. It’s hard to tell what’s going on with the cabin boys, since it’s very dark, just like it always is in slasher movies when bit-players are getting killed before the lead actor figures out what’s going on and tries to save the head cheerleader because she has second-billing and that’s what he’s supposed to do.

  More of Mariah and her pointy toes swinging, mixed with tight shots of her head posing seductively next to one of the ropes. She even reaches down at one point and runs her hand through the water, causing the panic-stricken personal assistant to dial 9-1-1 and request a Hazmat Unit. But Mariah just smiles and carries on with the back and forth, so I guess she’ll be just fine after having poked a manicured nail into water that wasn’t double-filtered by her staff in Italy.

  Cabins again, and it appears that we are seeing two different  people, a boy and a girl, both of them tossing restlessly in their separate cabins, unable to sleep because of unmet needs. (This sequence is mixed with more shots of Mariah and her ring endlessly swaying to and fro as she waits for someone to hand her the latest Hot 100 list from Billboard.) The boy (we’ll call him Bucky) puts on a cute little hat, which we’ll assume gives him superpowers of some kind, and he hops out a window of his cabin.

  We get a shot of the girl (we’ll call her Bambi) as she sits there in her non-feminine soccer shirt and waits for her life to get better. This happens roughly three seconds later, when Bucky appears at her window, helping her leap to freedom, and they both scamper off to do whatever it is that unsupervised children do at camps late at night when all the counselors are busy playing slap and tickle in the woods.

  Mariah chooses this moment in the plot to reposition herself in front of a nice campfire. I guess she’s standing too close to the flames, because the heat forces her to unbutton her blouse to a risky degree, meaning she really shouldn’t do any jumping jacks at the moment or someone will get a black eye. Happily, Mariah’s hotness does not stop the fleeing children from achieving their goal of running through the night forest with complete abandon.

  Bucky and Bambi run past another location where some adults (are these the counselors that aren’t paying attention to the kids?) are sitting around another campfire and smiling in a way that might indicate alcohol-consumption. B and B don’t want any part of that, so they keep running, because when you’re young and haven’t been beaten down by a meaningless job for thirty years, you still have lots of energy.

  This kicks off a montage, with Mariah and her easy-access shirt harmonizing together at the one campfire, the adults getting festive and possibly intimate at the other campfire, and Bucky and Bambi running hither and yon as they work the sugar snacks out of their system. (Side note: Mariah really likes to raise her hands over her head. Was she one of those over-eager people who loved answering questions from the teacher in junior high?)

  Eventually, Bed and Breakfast make their way to the shore of whatever body of water caused the nearby Camp Abandon-Kids-for-the-Summer to be built. (Presumably it’s the same water where Mariah was previously swinging in her own personal cove, but who knows. Mariah might be in another state and they just left things up to the video editor.) Bucky and Bambi appear to be very excited about arriving at their destination, but first we cut back to Mariah for a while, so she can do more things with that tire swing.

  Brief shot of the moon for no apparent reason. Are werewolves about to be involved in some way?

  Oh wait, now Bucky and Bambi have found their own tire swings, and they attack these conveniently side-by-side swings with a vengeance, more of that youthful exuberance that comes from not having to pay monthly bills for eternity. Cut to Mariah on her own swing, with her standing up on the tire and wailing some especially-high notes that may or may not have something to do with the way she is clenching one of the swing ropes between her legs as she whizzes past us in a frenzied manner.

  More shots of the adults (supposedly) at that one campfire where nothing is really happening other than an overall sense that an orgy is not out of the question. People seem to be bouncing to some music that we can’t hear, that’s about the only certainty. Otherwise, this could be a gathering of Jesuit Priests and their confused groupies or a meeting of Naturist Streetwalkers and their favorite customers. It’s completely up in the air.

  And Mariah’s not explaining anything, because she’s back on that swing, currently focused on dipping various body parts in the swamp and achieving maximum velocity so that her pimped-out rubber ride can do a 360 around the old oak tree that just wishes all these people would go away and quit tying things to its limbs.

  Okay, new development, as both Bucky and Bambi leap from their swings and plunge into the fetid water that is so troubling Mariah’s Personal Assistant #423, who will most likely be replaced within minutes of this video ending. As Mariah continues to whiz through the air like a Grammy-winning piñata on overdrive, B and B swim toward one another underwater and share a kiss while bubbles and bubbling hormones float around them.

  Meanwhile, I still have no idea about the purpose of the people at the second campfire. Are they from Child Protective Services, conducting an investigation? Are they Mariah’s team of lawyers? Are they waiting for raves to become popular in this part of the country?  Is there a sale at Macy’s and they really, really want to be first in line?

  Mariah just smiles and swings. You’ll have to wait for her next album to get the 4-1-1…


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