Mariah Carey By Jermaine Dupri

Teen People got Jermaine Dupri to write about working with Mariah Carey in celebration of the magazine honoring her with their ‘Artist Of The Year’ award. “When I was in the studio with Mariah working on ‘The Emancipation of Mimi’, everybody asked me how [I could get her to] compete with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera,” Dupri writes. “And I was like, ‘Why are we even having this conversation?’ They can’t compete with her because they look up to her! The original is back! She put songstress divas on the map. And ‘We Belong Together’ [which Jermaine coproduced] is the biggest record of my life, and it only took a day to do, start to finish. To do a record that big, that quickly, says a lot about Mariah.”