The tinsel string that ties Mariah Carey and the Eraserheads
On paper, there aren’t many contexts where Mariah Carey and the Eraserheads belong in the same sentence. One is a pop diva who conquered the world with her musicality and the melismatic force of her voice. The other is a band of college students who redefined OPM with catchy rock songs about the everyman, sung in the voice of the everyman.
Imperial phase
But by the mid-1990s, following a string of successful albums, both acts had built significant momentum and eventually entered an imperial phase—a term coined by Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys to describe that purple patch in an artist’s career when creative power and massive commercial success collide.
Carey had her first—but certainly not her last—imperial phase in 1993 with “Music Box,” the US Diamond-certified juggernaut that sold around 30 million copies and spawned two of her 19 No. 1 hits, “Hero” and “Dreamlover.” The album, which cemented her superstardom, also marked her gradual assertion of creative control as a songwriter-producer despite the constraints of her label.
The Eraserheads had theirs in 1995 with “Cutterpillow,” reportedly one of the five bestselling albums in the Philippines. Certified 11x platinum, the seminal record defined a generation, encapsulating the pop culture zeitgeist of the era with modern-day classics: “Ang Huling El Bimbo,” “Overdrive,” and “Huwag Mo Nang Itanong.”
With both acts boosting revenues for their labels and topping charts in their respective domains, the logic dictated that they didn’t fix what wasn’t broken. For Carey, that meant bigger belting and more adult contemporary ballads and for the Eraserheads, more relatable anthems that spurred resounding sing-alongs.
Limbo for fading stars
But during that period of dominance, Carey and the Eraserheads did something unthinkable for artists just in their mid-20s: The year after their most commercially successful records, both music acts released Christmas albums. In 1994, Carey released “Merry Christmas”; the Eraserheads released “Fruitcake” in 1996.
It was unthinkable because the idea of doing a Christmas album is typically seen as uncool—a limbo of sorts for fading artists. You know, like how once-supreme artists that used to skip the Philippines suddenly start visiting for quick cash-grab tours? Indeed, Carey was initially apprehensive when her label pitched the idea because she felt she was far too young to take it on at such a crucial point in her career.
The thing about being in an imperial phase, however, is that it creates an aura of invincibility. Cultural clout and fan adoration grow so strong that an artist seems to do no wrong. Or can they?
Because their success created a creative safety net, Carey and the Eraserheads were free to treat the studio like a playground. In a 2020 interview with ABS-CBN, the Eraserheads’ erstwhile frontman, Ely Buendia, described “Fruitcake” as the band challenging themselves as songwriters. “The way to do that was to put a limitation—every song would be about Christmas,” he said.
The result was the band’s first true concept album—a “Sgt. Pepper’s”-inspired odyssey that follows a girl named Frannie Wei through the fantastical world of Mono Viruses and music boxes known as the Fruitcake Heights.
Genre-meshing, holiday style
Musically, it’s a departure from their previous works. They blended free jazz and instrumentation with a psychedelic edge. There are surreal and melancholic undertones in the title track, “Fruitcake,” and a tongue-in-cheek bite in “Styrosnow.” “Lightyears,” on the other hand, strikes a sweet spot between the pop rock sound they had perfected and the spacey, atmospheric textures that would appear more prominently in their later albums.
Thematically, it isn’t so much a collection of carols as it is a critique of holiday consumerism wrapped in a Technicolor dream. But perhaps the most jarring change for many is the absence of Tagalog songs, which were then seen as the band’s attempt to align themselves with international acts.
While the Eraserheads treated their Christmas album as an explicit challenge, Carey—whose natural inclinations toward hip-hop and “urban” music had been suppressed to maintain her mass market appeal—used hers as an opportunity to incorporate those tendencies without completely rocking the boat.
Just as she had previously slipped in snippets of genres she loved that didn’t fit the label’s desired output—sampling “Blind Alley” by The Emotions in “Dreamlover,” for example—Carey used the sheen of the holiday format to infuse soul, gospel, and even dance music into her original songs and covers of well-loved holiday tunes.
Her take on “Joy to the World” feels almost like a church club jam, with Carey interplaying traditional Christian hymns with ’70s pop rock and ’90s house music. “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” now a bona fide classic, may be overplayed to retail workers’ irritation, but it remains a study in harmonic nostalgia by way of Wall of Sound production, and ultimately, a testament that she could write new songs that felt like they had existed forever.
Commercial success from their previous works carried over to a certain extent, but critical reception for both Christmas albums was mixed. The Manila Standard described “Fruitcake” as musically accomplished and clever, though borderline precious. The Manila Times, on the other hand, noted that the all-English tracklist could risk alienating the Eraserheads’ fanbase.
While “Merry Christmas” was lauded for its festive and soulful genre-meshing, Carey was criticized for oversinging—a frequent complaint from critics at the time. The New York Times accused her of turning “expressions of devotion into narcissistic displays.” The Baltimore Sun, however, trained its ears beyond the technical and saw the album not as a cash grab but as “the work of someone who genuinely loves music.”
Impulse for risk-taking
So, can artists at the peak of their careers really do no wrong? Of course not. Not always. In the case of Carey and the Eraserheads—though, more precisely, not at the time—their choices mostly worked, at least until hindsight allows us to reassess.
In retrospective appraisals, “Fruitcake” is credited for its creative daring and boundary-pushing. And while the album and its songs aren’t “sentimental favorites” in the way Jose Mari Chan’s or Gary Valenciano’s Christmas songs are, Buendia told Esquire in a 2012 interview that he still stands by the album as a whole.
Meanwhile, Stylus Magazine calls “Merry Christmas” a definitive album that captures Carey at her “absolute and creative peak.” And at this point, the numbers are hard to dispute. The album has just been certified Diamond in the US, while “All I Want for Christmas Is You”—described by The New Yorker as a “worthy modern addition to the holiday canon”—is now the longest-running No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, with 20 weeks in the top spot.
They probably didn’t mean or know it at the time, but their forays into holiday music may have also served as a breather from the paralyzing pressure to outdo their previous works. Or, perhaps more plausibly, it was a subtle bridge that helped facilitate the impending shift in their sound. The year after their respective Christmas albums, Carey put out “Daydream” (1995), which saw her leaning harder than ever into hip-hop and R&B. The Eraserheads, meanwhile, went full experimental with the psychedelic electronica cocktail that is “Sticker Happy” (1997).
There are still not—or may never be—many contexts in which Carey and the Eraserheads naturally belong in the same sentence. But for a brief moment in the mid-1990s, when they were expected to double down on what made them big, Carey and the Eraserheads shared the same impulse to use their success as permission to take a merry risk.
