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IT'S hard to know what to expect from a meeting with Mariah Carey. A spoilt diva? Having a fabulous career dumped in your lap at a such a tender age could give you a complex. Carey's late arrival at a recent Press conference at the Grand Formosa Regent Hotel Taipei, Taiwan less than 24 hours after flying in from Japan, wasn't an encouraging sign.
But here's what we got: a young woman in a simple grey halter neck top teamed with a dark mini-skirt, and a dark wool sweater tied casually at the waist, beautifully-manicured finger-nails, as well as a flirtatious smile.
And in her dark brown strappy stilettos, the 1.73-metre-tall Carey clears 1.8 metres.
"I'm sorry to keep you guys waiting," she said in her husky voice. "I had an insomnia attack."
The 27-year-old looks very young, as if she has been preserved in a gilded cage most of her life.
She's now picking up where she left off before her marriage to music industry mogul, Sony Music's Tommy Mottola. She was already singing at 18 and was groomed as the "official voice of Nineties romantic ballads".
And now Carey is cautiously returning to it.
"I enjoy listening to a lot of hard-core stuff like rap music, something that people don't think I listen to," said the award-winning singer.
In her earlier albums, Carey collaborated with rappers Puff Daddy, Q-Tip and so on. Joining her in her new album, Butterfly, is rap group Bone Thugs `n' Harmony for the track Breakdown (which was released as a single in the US recently).
She continued: "Some of my fans thought that the results of these joint efforts were too heavy for my voice. I think it's fine because first of all, I enjoy doing stuff like that and more collaborations of that sort are on the way."
But Carey feels strongly about her African American roots, (she is the third child of white Irish-American opera singer, Patricia, and African American engineer Alfred Roy Carey). She is also adamant that she is an R&B vocalist regardless of how many pop hits she has.
"All I ever wanted to do was sing. And my mum always told me, `you are...