31 Years Ago Today: Mariah Carey's 'Fantasy' Ruled the Hot 100 — and the ODB Remix Changed Pop Forever

On October 19, 1995, Mariah Carey's Fantasy was the biggest hit in America — entrenched at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Thirty-one years ago today, the lead single from her album Daydream was deep into a chart run that would keep it at No. 1 for eight weeks after it debuted in the top spot.

Before Fantasy, Carey had already sold millions of records and scored eight No. 1 hits with acrobatically sung torch songs and love ballads aimed squarely at the mainstream pop market. Fantasy marked a sharp turn: it's built on an interpolation of Tom Tom Club's 1981 hit Genius of Love — a childhood favorite Carey heard on the radio and got the band's enthusiastic permission to use — with producer Dave "Jam" Hall layering strings and a bass groove steeped in '90s hip-hop.

That sound announced the start of Carey's R&B and hip-hop era. She commissioned Sean "Puffy" Combs to orchestrate a rap remix, and convinced Ol' Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan to drop a verse on it. Her label boss and husband at the time, Tommy Mottola, hated the idea — he worried the unpredictable rap icon would alienate her fans. Carey was thrilled with it anyway.

The remix became an innovative moment in '90s music, merging pop with rap and helping the single reach octuple-platinum status. It's still held up as one of the definitive examples of how hip-hop reshaped the pop mainstream in the mid-'90s.

Thirty-one years later, Fantasy still sounds like a mission statement: the moment Mariah Carey stopped following the soft-rock lane her label had mapped out for her and followed her own ear instead.

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