Mariah Carey’s last album, 2008’s E=MC², marked the spot where she broke Elvis Presley’s record for Number One singles by a solo artist — and it also boasted the biggest opening-week sales of her career — but it also ran out of steam pretty quickly, petering out after being certified double platinum, a pretty steep comedown after selling 10 million copies of 2005’s The Emancipation of Mimi. Carey has, in other words, a thing or two to prove with Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel — which is the situation she’s been in pretty much since 2001’s Glitter imploded in what seemed at the time to be a career-destroying cloud of ice cream and cleavage. She has, to her credit, done an outstanding job of staying relevant in the post-Top 40, post-TRL, and largely post-record industry world, even at the much-ballyhooed expense of everything that made her music special in the first place; she has, in fact, reached the point where the splash surrounding every new album is just as important as its musical contents. She’s an artist who’s famous largely because she’s famous — sort of the MTV equivalent of Charo, albeit with a much stronger set of pipes, not that you’d really know it from listening to anything on Memoirs. (more…)