Mariah Carey

By spring 2007, Carey had begun to work on her eleventh studio album, E=MC², in a private villa in Anguilla. When asked about the album title's meaning, Carey said "Einstein's theory? Physics? Me? Hello! ...Of course I'm poking fun." She characterized it as "Emancipation of Mimi to the second power", and said that she was "freer" on this album than any other. Although E=MC² was well received by most critics, some of them criticized it for being very similar to the formula used on The Emancipation of Mimi. Two weeks before the album's release, "Touch My Body", the record's lead single, reached the top position on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Carey's eighteenth number one and making her the solo artist with the most number one singles in United States history, pushing her past Elvis Presley into second place according to the magazine's revised methodology. Carey is second only to The Beatles, who have twenty number-one singles. Additionally, it gave Carey her 79th week atop the Hot 100, tying her with Presley as the artist with the most weeks at number one in the Billboard chart history." Carey has also had notable success on international charts, though not to the same degree as in the United States. Thus far, she has had two number-one singles in Britain, two in Australia, and six in Canada. Her highest-charting single in Japan peaked at number two.
E=MC² debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 463,000 copies sold, the biggest opening week sales of her career. With six number one albums, Carey is tied with Britney Spears and Janet Jackson in the United States for the third most number one albums for a female artist, behind Madonna with seven and Barbra Streisand's nine chart toppers. In 2008, Billboard magazine ranked her at number six on the "Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists", making Carey the second most successful female artist in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Carey and actor/comedian Nick Cannon met while they shot her music video for her second single, "Bye Bye", on an island off the coast of Antigua. On April 30, 2008, Carey married Cannon at her private estate on Windermere Island in The Bahamas. Carey had a cameo appearance in Adam Sandler's 2008 film You Don't Mess with the Zohan, playing herself. Since the album's release, Carey had planned to embark on an extensive tour in support of E=MC², describing its production and direction in several interviews. When asked to describe the tour's theme, Carey explained "I'm thinking elaborate. I like elaborate. We only do substantial. That's what my jeweler says. I haven't gotten the looks in mind just yet, but we're going to figure it out soon enough." Despite continued plans for a tour, and announcements made on The X Factor in the United Kingdom in November, the tour was suddenly cancelled in early December 2008. Heavy speculation suggested that Carey had become pregnant, and had abandoned plans for a tour as a result. Many reports were made claiming that Carey had been visiting a famed gynecologist's office in Los Angeles. Additionally, Carey's newly slimmed figure began to change, as she stopped her exercise routines and gained weight. Carey did not address those allegations until two years later on October 28, 2010, which was the same day she announced her new pregnancy; she admitted that she had indeed been pregnant during that time period, and suffered a miscarriage. For that reason, she cancelled the tour, and lost the child only two months later.
On January 20, 2009, Carey performed "Hero" at the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball after Barack Obama was sworn as the first African-American president of the United States. On July 7, 2009, Carey – alongside Trey Lorenz – performed her version of The Jackson 5 song "I'll Be There" at the memorial service for Michael Jackson. At the sight of Jackson's casket, Carey's voice, overwhelmed with emotion, cracked in the opening line of the song. She later apologized on The Today Show, explaining how she did her best effort despite the circumstances.
In 2009, she appeared as a social worker in Precious, the movie adaptation of the 1996 novel Push by Sapphire. The film garnered mostly positive reviews from critics, as had Carey's performance. Variety described her acting as "pitch-perfect". Precious won awards at both the Sundance Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival, receiving top honors there. In January 2010, Carey won the Breakthrough Actress Performance Award for her role in Precious at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. On September 25, 2009, Carey's twelfth studio album, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, was released. Reception for the album was generally positive, but mixed in certain aspects; Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic called it "her most interesting album in a decade", while Jon Caramanica from The New York Times criticized Carey's vocal performances, decrying her overuse of her softer vocal registers at the expense of her more powerful lower and upper registers. Commercially, the album debuted at number three on the Billboard 200, and became the lowest-selling studio album of her career. The album's lead single, "Obsessed", became her 40th entry on the Billboard Hot 100 and her highest debut on the chart since "My All" in 1998. The song debuted at number eleven and peaked at number seven on the chart, and became Carey's 27th US top-ten hit, tying her with Elton John and Janet Jackson as the fifth most top-ten hits. Within hours after the song's release, various outlets speculated that its target was rapper Eminem, in response to his song "Bagpipes from Baghdad", in which he taunted Carey's husband, Nick Cannon. According to MTV, Carey alludes to drug problems in "Obsessed", which Eminem opened up about on his sixth studio album, Relapse. The album's follow-up single, a cover of Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is", failed to achieve any significant chart success in the United States, or much throughout Europe, but managed to break airplay records in Brazil. The song spent 27 weeks atop the Brasil Hot 100 Airplay, making it the longest running song in the chart's history. On December 31, 2009, Carey embarked her seventh concert tour, Angels Advocate Tour, which visited the United States and Canada. Though stateside, the tour spanned few international dates, such as in Brazil and Singapore, where Carey played to over 100,000 spectators. The tour ended on September 26, 2010. On January 30, 2010, it was announced that Carey would release a remix album of Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel; titled Angels Advocate (an R&B remix album featuring a collection of newly remixed duets with some of Carey's favorite artists). The album was slated for a March 30, 2010 release, but was eventually cancelled.