"We don't look at her as a dance-pop artist," Columbia Records president Don Ienner noted to Rolling Stone about his latest signing Mariah Carey in 1990. "We look at her as a franchise." It's fair to say that some pretty lofty expectations were placed on the diva ahead of her first studio album's release.

With her unearthly five-octave vocal range, Mariah Carey has been so firmly fixed in the highest echelon of pop music for so long, it’s hard to remember she was once a complete unknown. We didn’t yet know which one is her good side (the right,