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Mariah Carey’s smash-hit Christmas track reaches No. 1 in the charts (finally!)
By Anna Brech
6 years ago
Quarter of a century after Mariah Carey’s Christmas hit first blasted onto the airwaves, she’s finally making dreams come true with a top spot in the Billboard Hot 100.
It’s the eponymous festive hit that has provided the soundtrack to end-of-year parties and ice-skating rinks since time immemorial. Well, since 1994 anyway.
But until now, Mariah Carey’s Christmas giant of a track, All I Want For Christmas Is You, has eluded the No. 1 spot.
The song was originally released as an EP rather than a single, so it didn’t qualify for America’s Billboard Hot 100 chart.
One of Carey’s most popular releases only made it into the charts after the rules changed in the year 2000 – and it’s been steadily climbing its way up ever Christmas since.
This week, the moment everyone was waiting for arrived, as All I Want For Christmas Is You was crowned No. 1 in the States.
With this long-overdue validation in the bag, Carey celebrated in true style with a series of exuberant emojis on Twitter.
This was followed by a gleeful meme taken from the track’s original music video, which – as fans will know – was shot in the form of a documentary-style home video.
Carey has been dubbed the “songbird supreme” by the Guinness World Records, for her pitch-defying vocal range that spans five octaves.
Her ability to stretch out a syllable over the course of one, gut-wrenching belter of a note is notorious, and very much in evidence in her much-loved Christmas classic.
All I Want For Christmas Is You was written in August 1994 by Carey and her songwriter partner, Walter Afanasieff.
It famously took them just 15 minutes to come up with the catchy lyrics, which went on to outlast generations of successive Christmas hits.
The track found fresh fame in the 2003 rom com Love Actually, where it was performed on-stage at a school performance during which Hugh Grant and Martine McCutcheon’s characters finally hook up following an entire film-load of brewing sexual tension (above).
The song’s current resurgence in the charts has been fuelled by the popularity of streaming services such as iTunes and Amazon Music.
Billboard says it has garnered 45 million streams, 34 million radio plays and 27,000 digital sales in the past week alone.
The occasion also marks Carey’s 19th US No. 1, the most for any solo artist and one away from the record for any act (held by the Beatles, with 20 US hits).
Surely, its comeback is all Carey wants for Christmas – all together, now…
Images: Getty
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