Mariah Carey (born March 27, 1969 or 1970) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress. She rose to prominence after the release of the first
single taken from her
eponymous debut album in 1990, "
Vision of Love". More than two decades later,
Rolling Stone defined the song as an influence on "virtually every other female
R&B singer since the ninties".
Mariah Carey produced four chart-topping singles in the US and began what would become a string of commercially successful albums which solidified the singer as
Columbias highest selling act. Carey and
Boyz II Men spent a record sixteen weeks atop the
Billboard Hot 100 with "
One Sweet Day", which remains the
longest-running number-one song in US chart history. Following a contemptuous divorce from
Sony Music head
Tommy Mottola, Carey adopted a new image and traversed towards R&B with the release of
Butterfly (1997). In 1998, she was honored as the world's best-selling recording artist of the 1990s at the
World Music Awards and subsequently named the best-selling female artist of the millennium in 2000.