Mariah Carey, 51, just threw it back to one of her best music videos ever! The New York native once again donned the prosthetics and costume from her “Obsessed” video as she took on TikTok‘s Wipe It Down challenge. The video opened with Mariah rocking a green face mask and a cozy pink robe (bedazzled with rhinestones) as she begins to clean her mirror. “Wipe, wipe, wipe it down, wipe,” BMW Kenny raps over a beat, as her own tune cuts in. “I was like, why are you so obsessed with me?” Mariah then said along to her song, rocking a low cut gold sequin dress and leather blazer.
She looked straight off of the cover of Emancipation of Mimi in the ensemble, with her glowing skin and perfect makeup. With another wipe, Mariah then appeared as a male. The Meaning of Mariah Carey author looked nearly unrecognizable with the baseball cap and fake facial hair — which was the same ensemble she donned back in the 2009 music video, directed by Brett Ratner. In the song, Mariah sings about about a male attempting to pursue her that she doesn’t know. “Why you so obsessed with me? Boy, I wanna know/Lying that you’re sexing me, when everybody knows/It’s clear that you’re upset with me, oh oh oh,” she croons.
The single served as the lead single off her twelfth album, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel. Curiously, Mariah’s male counterpart looks a lot like Eminem — who was believed to be the inspiration for the song and video after the Detroit native implied the pair had a brief relationship back in 2001. Eminem name checked her on his own 2009 track “Bagpipes,” rapping, “Mariah, what ever happened to us, why did we have to break up… Nick Cannon better back the f*** up. I’m not playing, I want her back, you punk.”
Mariah responded back on “Obsessed” with several thinly veiled references of her own. “It must be weed, it must be the E… Why are you so obsessed with me?” she says at one part, adding, “you’re delusional, boy, you’re losing your mind.” Notably, Mariah declined to include any references to Eminem in her 2020 memoir. “There’s some songs that I can sing in response to [the situation with Eminem], but I will not do it. If somebody or something didn’t pertain to the actual meaning of Mariah Carey, as is the title, then they aren’t in the book,” she said to Vulture. More recently, Eminem mentioned her on a his 2019 track “The Warning.”