Mariah Carey Went Punk for 'It's Time.' Ella Langley Already Took Her Hot 100 Record

At midnight on Nov. 1, right on schedule, Mariah Carey posted her annual It's Time video and declared the Christmas season open. Nobody voted on this. There was no hearing. A woman simply announces every year that the calendar now belongs to her, and the entire Western retail economy says yes, ma'am. The Pope can't do that, and he's got a much bigger building.

This year's opens on a card reading New York City, October 31, with a countdown running in a dive bar. Carey's on stage in a short red wig, fishnets and dark lipstick, fronting a punk set with "Hermit," a song by Chick, the 1990s side project behind the album Someone's Ugly Daughter, which she didn't own up to until her 2020 memoir. She stage-dives, the screen cuts to black, the clock hits midnight and she turns up as the topper on a Christmas tree, singing the song. LADbible counted more than 700,000 likes by the time it went to press, and I'd guess a good many of them are from people who have never been within 40 feet of a dive bar and believe a mosh pit is a kind of fruit.

It's a good bit, and I'll say why. A woman kept her punk rock secret for the better part of three decades, then dug it up to use as the warm-up for a jingle. That's the most honest thing anybody has ever said about the music business. You can have all the rage and fishnets you like, as long as you're on the tree by midnight.

All I Want for Christmas Is You came out in 1994 and didn't reach No. 1 in the United States until 2019. That's a 25-year wait, and I know of parole boards that move faster. Since then it's been the most reliable annuity in show business, and she reportedly makes £2 million to £3 million a year off it, which is a lot of money for four weeks' work and a good deal of defrosting.

Here's what the elves aren't telling you, though. The song had the record for most weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100, at 22, and it doesn't anymore. Ella Langley's Choosin' Texas passed it in September and stood at 25 weeks as of the chart dated Oct. 31. Carey's song got four weeks at the top in both 2024 and 2025, so if Langley stopped today, Mariah would take it back by Christmas. I don't expect Langley to stop. I do expect a very long December, with a pop icon and a country song both looking at the same calendar, and each of them looking at it the way a woman looks at another woman's plate.

They say the seasons change because the earth tilts on its axis. Maybe so, but I notice nobody ever cleared £3 million a year off the tilt.