You Don't Know What to Do

Album: Me. I Am Mariah…The Elusive Chanteuse (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • This upbeat, emancipating song finds Carey leaving her lover and feeling good. Rapper Wale adds a couple of verses in which he tells his girl that he thinks they should stay together and work through their problems. Carey debuted the song on the Today show during the show's summer concert series.
  • Carey wrote the song in Atlanta with co-manager and longtime collaborator Jermaine Dupri ("We Belong Together," "Always Be My Baby").
  • The song interpolates Inner Life's 1979 disco rave up "I'm Caught Up (In a One Night Love Affair)."
  • This is the fourth single from Carey's 14th studio album, Me. I Am Mariah…The Elusive Chanteuse. According to Bryan-Michael Cox, another of Carey's longtime collaborators who shares a songwriting and producing credit on the track, the singer started working on the album four years before its 2014 release. She took a break when she became pregnant with twins, whom she gave birth to in 2011. "She was committed to making it before she got pregnant," he told MTV News. "Then she got pregnant and she took the time off. Then after she came back, we started really vibing again and we picked up right where we left off. I just feel like between Jermaine, myself and her, we came up with a few things that [are] really, really a solid body of work."
  • In the fourth verse, Wale likens their romance to a tennis match by referencing tennis rivals Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, who battled for the world's top-rank spot throughout the '90s.

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