It's been a little under a year since her boyfriend, rapper Young Thug, was released from jail following a 2022 arrest on gang-related charges and the longest criminal trial in Georgia history. Through it all, Mariah appeared faithfully by his side, even when others' faith might have wavered, like when Thug's jail call with another woman leaked last Christmas. Matters like these test the heart, and it's this experience and others that helped to fuel Mariah's fourth album, HEARTS SOLD SEPARATELY.
It instantly caused an uproar online most notably among Carpenter's young fans, who weren't on Tumblr in 2015, or weren't aware of the way the Sun newspaper wrote about Madonna every day of the 1990s and 2000s, and therefore didn't realise that discourse around whether pop stars should or shouldn't be allowed to sexualise themselves is older than pop music itself, and almost always inane.