Songoftheday 1/5/20 - Oh when you walk by every night, talkin' sweet and lookin' fine I get kinda hectic inside...

"Fantasy" by Mariah Carey
from the album Daydream (1995)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (eight weeks)
Weeks in the top-40: 23

Today's song of the day comes from pop star Mariah Carey, whose third album Daydream had spun off four huge pop hits with "Anytime You Need A Friend", "Without You"/"Never Forget", "Hero", and "Dreamlover". She also paired up with Luther Vandross to remake the classic pop hit "Endless Love", which made the runnerup position on the American pop chart in the fall of 1994. Also at that time, Mariah released a holiday album titled Merry Christmas, and one of the original tracks from it, "All I Want For Christmas Is You", started to get radio airplay, enough so that even though it wasn't released as a commercial single, the song rose to #12 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 Airplay chart, starting its slow but steady journey to becoming the most popular modern Christmas classic of all time and the current Billboard #1 song on the Hot 100. (But that's a tale for another day.)

Mariah returned in the fall of the following year with her fifth studio album Daydream. Bringing back Walter Afanasieff, who produced Merry Christmas, and recruiting a bunch of current big names like Jermaine Dupri, Dave Hall, and David Morales, she set about to update her sound for this album to match the current state of music instead of pursuing the same adult contemporary path that might skew her audience older. That would show itself first in the lead single "Fantasy", produced and co-written by Hall, who had previously worked with Mary J. Blige. Using a prominent sample of the 1982 quirky alternative soul hit "Genius Of Love" from the Talking Heads spinoff The Tom Tom Club, the track had her vocals bouncing about instead of soaring, as she ponders the man she's secretly in love with. The sample was a "genius" move, and a bold one for such a mainstream artist to grab another record to build a single from, but it worked, capturing her fans as well as those outside who listen to the Tom Tom Club...

"Fantasy" became Mariah's ninth #1 pop hit in the U.S. in September of 1995, spending two months (eight weeks) at the top. The song was only the second, after Michael Jackson's "You Are Not Alone", to debut at #1 on the Hot 100. "Fantasy" also took six weeks at the top of Billboard's R&B chart, while peaking at #8 on their Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart, staying there for a half a year (26 weeks). The club remixes of the song, mostly done by David Morales with re-recorded vocals from Mariah, helped the record spend three weeks at #1 on the Dance Club Play chart as well. Internationally, the single topped the charts in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, while reaching the top ten in Finland (#2), Belgium (#3W/#9F), the UK (#4), France (#5), Denmark (#5), Italy (#9), Ireland (#10), the Netherlands (#10), Switzerland (#10), and Norway (#10). At the Grammy Awards in 1996, the song was nominated for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, which went to Annie Lennox for "No More I Love You's".

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For the first time, Mariah decided to release a remix of "Fantasy" than prominently featured rapper Ol Dirty Bastard from the Wu-Tang Clan. Promoted to both urban and younger-skewing mainstream stations, and with a separate video edited for MTV and BET, the different version was a huge hit and a trailblazer for not only subsequent singles of hers but of pop music altogether in its willingness to fuse hip-hop to mainstream pop music...

The "house music" treatment of the song by David Morales in the "Def Club Mix" helped it top the club chart, with jacked up backing singers and a alternate vocal from Mariah...