Maybe she’s just been out of the game a little too long, but Mariah Carey sure is making a mess of a return.
Wednesday night the singer revealed in a video the title of her long-delayed album, which will finally drop May 27. The name? “Me. I Am Mariah . . . the Elusive Chanteuse.”
Mariah revealed in the video, with the aid of a bizarre whisper effect, that the first half of the painfully dumb title comes from a self-portrait she drew when she was 3 ¹/₂ years old. As for the second part, she says it’s her latest nickname, in the vein of “Mimi” and “MC.”
The news comes the same week that Billboard reported in a cover story that a Beyoncé style surprise album was in the works, according to multiple sources involved with the record.
Let’s just ignore how ineffective announcing a surprise album in advance is and move on to the fact that days later her label Def Jam sang a different tune, saying it would get a normal release.
Note that normal release here means four years after she began working on it, with multiple pushbacks and more than one failed single.
The whole debacle’s culmination with this awkward title led Twitter users to take “The Elusive Chanteuse” to snark city.