Mariah the Scientist Is an R&B Upstart Making Her Way Through a Dumb Man’s World

The young singer is bringing a perspective that the genre needs.
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Photos by Jaylin Jackson

Strolling through the gates of Saint John’s University’s campus in Jamaica, Queens, Mariah the Scientist begins to point out personal landmarks. There’s Carey Hall, the dorm where she used to live. There’s the house across the lawn where the owners had huskies. There are the huskies on the porch. There’s the flat building where she took music classes. As she continues this blasé tour through her former life, it feels like she’s visiting a place she last saw decades ago. But she only dropped out of Saint John’s in 2018. If she hadn’t, she’d be another senior headed to the library.

Mariah says she doesn’t expect to run into anyone she knows, but a parade of people wave to her like the local celebrity she kind of is. You can glean bits of how she ended up in New York, after coming of age in her native Georgia, on her debut Master, a cinematic R&B EP about having your heart broken by a pompous goober. After high school, she followed a boy to Saint John’s, where she found herself on a pre-med path, studying science and earning her nickname. She intended to become an anaesthesiologist, a choice she made in part because it seemed like a gentle and undramatic sphere of medicine. As the relationship soured, she became more despondent and more stoned.

Eventually they broke up and she got into another difficult relationship. Hoping to communicate in a language the new boy, a musician himself, would understand, she turned some of her personal writing into a song. She recorded it in a studio nearby and delivered it, a sort-of ode for an audience of one. Things snowballed slowly from there, with her friends encouraging her, and her music made its way to SoundCloud and eventually to RCA Records. Those early tracks haven’t changed much since then, and the bones of Master, even with its slightly beefed-up production, are what she created in Queens.

The details she discusses in her songs resonated with a lot more people than she originally anticipated. Not that she totally understands why. “It’s strange to me that people say shit like they really feel me because… they don’t!” she says. “You don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. At the end of the day, you don’t know. You’ll never know.”

Mariah’s songs are specific, and she says they’re completely true to life. But they’re not literal narratives, instead something closer to autofiction via ballad. Her observations are wry, charming, precocious, but not pretentious. And, as a 21-year-old woman making her way through a dumb man’s world, she has a perspective not always prevelant in R&B, as her thoughts on love include critique, not just lamentation. It’s as if someone wrote the woman’s perspective to the debauchery bragged about in the Weeknd’s songs: If his music offers tales of aspirational ridiculousness told live from the party of a lifetime, hers gives us the view of the girlfriend who had to live with his ego when he woke up the next the morning after doing too much coke.

On “Beetlejuice,” her first single, she uses her Georgian drawl to bemoan her infatuation with a boyfriend who alternately entices and irritates her. It’s the kind of relationship that everyone around her knows is doomed, but to her the stakes are life and death. “Ask if I’d be your muse, and go and paint me blue,” she sings, a patient partner up for anything to make him happy, even if she’s not so sure she believes in his talent. “It seems so strange that I love him/He gon’ drive me insane,” is the unfortunate, but very real, way the song ends.

After leaving Saint John’s as the sun sets, we walk over to Regina’s, a pizza and pasta place Mariah frequented as a student. She’s been living between Miami and Atlanta as of late, and apparently they don’t have garlic knots like this in the South, because no one has been happier to order them than her. Over three weeks’ worth of carbs served in red plastic baskets, she unfurls both her life story and her future plans. She’s noticeably more excited about what has yet to happen.

Pitchfork: How did you start writing?

Mariah the Scientist: It sounds so corny when I say it, but I feel like my first notions of writing were poems in my dorm room. It was to no beat. It was just things that rhymed.

Why is that corny?

It’s almost uneasy for me thinking about it sometimes, because I feel like my whole life my parents really instilled structure. The creative thing wasn’t as appreciated in comparison to hard work and academics.

What were you writing about initially?

Anything, anything. I started harping on the fact that in the back of your head there’s something called a hypothalamus, right? And that’s where all of your hormones are secreted, and your hormones are responsible for every feeling. Back in the day, I was smoking a lot of weed, so I was doing a lot of research on how THC affects your hypothalamus, and the secretion of hormones, and little things like neurotransmitters, and how when you smoke weed it falsifies your sense of happiness, because it’s secreting dopamine. I was writing about that kind of stuff.

You were writing science papers for school about it, or you were just writing for yourself?

It was a combination of the two. I feel like when I think about it now that’s probably why I liked doing it, because I could combine what I was learning in school—because I really do fuck with science, that’s a real thing for me—with the shit I was going through, wondering why I was feeling the way I was feeling. I couldn’t help but try to dissect that. So it’s like: Your heart is broken, and you feel so shitty, what is responsible for that? And then it turned more sentimental, almost like storytelling.

When did you decide you wanted to turn that into songs?

Everybody I ever talk to has this story of like, “I was 5 years old and I really wanted to be a singer,” you know? I just don’t have those stories. So that’s probably another reason why I feel so, not ashamed, but almost more reserved about it. It’s not that I feel undeserving, but there are people who work so hard and really wanted it from the beginning of time, and then for me it was like, Boom. I felt this way one day and I just went and made a song.

There was a guy who would play music I had never heard for me. And that was one of the things I really, really liked about him, he was so creative and different. He was playing this song by [avant-garde R&B singer] Spooky Black for me, and I was like, “Oh my God, what the fuck? This is amazing.” Then I realized there’s a whole other world of stuff that I don’t know about. I just liked him so much. I felt like I had been living in a box my whole life. It was so crazy to me.

An artist like Spooky Black really operates on mood, though, whereas your songwriting is so much about specificity.

I find it really hard to write about anything that I have not felt or experienced.

So far you’ve mostly written about heartbreak and unhappiness.

Bittersweet is a 50-50 word, right? It’s half bitter, half sweet. But some of my songs are more like 70 percent bitter and 30 percent sweet. For my next project, I started writing some music that is at least 60 percent sweet, 40 percent bitter. I’m trying to go in that direction. It hasn’t always been easy, though.

In the beginning of “Not a Love Song” you say, “I don’t like to admit it, I have depression sometimes,” in a really blasé way, like you’ve owned up to it and now just want to move on.

All of it is stuff I could have told my ex-boyfriend. Still to this day he tells me all the time that I am the most mysterious person he’s ever met. And in the beginning it was cool with me. But then things were lost in translation. If you’re a passive person, you can try to express yourself, but if the person doesn’t understand you, you’re not going to try to force them to understand where you’re coming from. And I just started to feel like I was forcing telling him how I felt. After we broke up, obviously I still loved him and I still miss him to this day. Even if we have so many issues. I still want him to know that’s what I think, even if it didn’t mean shit to him. It was a real turning point for me. Realistically, I changed my career for the sake of him hearing me out.

How’s your love life now?

I’m not trippin’, it’s cool. Nothing bad. I’m dating. Yes. Mmmhmm. It excites me, because I get the chance to make the memories I want to make. And even if it’s not serious, even if it doesn’t work out, I’m just currently in the business of enjoying myself. You have to be content with being yourself. Everything I felt in the past to try to please that guy, make him think more of me, even going as far to make music, knowing that he made music, so that maybe we could connect on that level—now, I just feel like I don’t want to change. I don’t want to compromise anymore.