A couple days had passed since Whitney Houston died, and I was still flipping through the channels looking for her name. If the grotesquely ironic circumstances of her death already seemed banal within a few hours of the news sinking in (thanks in large part to cable TV's dependably crass repetition of the details), what was it I was still looking for? Some critic or musical collaborator who might confirm her genius and validate my fascination? The gratification of seeing my fan-grief shoved down everyone else's throats? It seems right to be self-deprecating and embarrassed about my inability to let go of that voice booming out of my speakers, her beautiful image on the TV screen—as I know I must now that this weeklong coverage is mercifully over. But upon learning of her death, my reaction was similar to what Frank O'Hara described in his great roundabout elegy to Billie Holiday: However briefly, I started sweating and stopped breathing.
Some time in middle school, almost 15 years ago, I went from being a die-hard Whitney fan to feeling more or less indifferent toward her music. At my most rabid I was saving up allowance money to buy all of her singles, scrounging the Internet for bootleg video tapes, and engaging in inane debates with other online fans about whether "I Will Always Love You" or "I Have Nothing" was the more challenging song to sing. But for those of us who didn't have access to her increasingly strained TV performances, 1998's My Love Is Your Love—her fourth full-length studio album, and her first in eight years—was surprising not so much for its hip-hop flavor or clever hit singles, but for the fatigue in her voice. Each new spin made it harder to ignore that her ad-libbing had become less dexterous, her belting dimmer and scratchier. She remained as strong as any other pop vocalist of the moment, but her sound was no longer thrilling, let alone transporting—so I just gave her up. As early as then, I had also become aware of a hierarchy of taste that dictated that real music was to be found in neo-soul or, better yet, old Stax and Motown records. When serious critics deigned to write on Whitney at length, they usually parroted the same assumption: that she was commercial fluff, the main progenitor of a kind of vocal excess that now stood for inauthenticity.
"If somebody loves you," Whitney once sang, "won't they always love you?" During her long period away from music in the last decade, I didn't feel invested enough to be curious about or even stung by her public implosion. But I caught up with it as I followed the campaign for her 2009 comeback album, I Look to You, and I started thinking about her again, about how when you're seven years old and you hear a voice like hers belting out "And I-eee-I…" through the family car speakers, you don't censor your response. You have no way of knowing that this level of athletic singing, its technical perfection as well as its believability, would become extraordinarily rare in pop music 20 years later, despite the advancement of pitch-correction technology. You're not aware of how many records she's selling, the racial barriers she was groomed to break, or the frequent claim that she's insufficiently black. Instead you just think, "I want to hear that again," or foolishly, "I want to sound like that too." Contemplating her for the first time as an adult, I couldn't decide whether I was still secretly passionate about her voice, or if it was the memory of having had this first musical love that was making me so sentimental about her purported sobriety, the warmth and charm she showed in the Oprah interview, and the new album's valiant attempt to put her sandpapery voice back to work.
A cursory look through YouTube reveals that good singers are a dime a dozen in this country, that there are even unsigned talents capable of hitting notes Whitney couldn't. So how significant is it that she, almost right out of the gate, was nicknamed "The Voice," a Stradivarius among ordinary violins? The regal title emerged with its own context, at a time when female R&B was ruled by aphrodisiac altos like Anita Baker and Phyllis Hyman, slightly over a decade after Aretha Franklin and Chaka Khan had fully asserted their genius. Both Franklin and Khan were close to the Houston family, and as singers known for cutting deep, they provided an obvious blueprint. Their influence is felt in the one technique that came to symbolize Whitney's mastery: her sumptuous belting register. Pre-Aretha, it's difficult to name a pop hit in which the vocalist repeatedly swoops up to fifth-octave G's and A's (and beyond) in chest voice, not growling the note, but hitting it with blinding brightness and clarity. As daring as John Coltrane experimenting with atonality, the squalling soul diva risks sounding too unhinged for mainstream radio. Whitney was born of a church tradition that had trained her for this aggressive style, but in the end what made her so universally palatable was her knack for harnessing the intensity of Aretha while also letting the ear-caressing tones of quiet storm share the foreground.
Low to high, Whitney's timbre was so clean that when she did sustain a note at the very top of her chest range (for instance, in the climactic moments of "I'm Every Woman"), there was none of that danger, that premonition of something about to snap, so integral to the drama of deep-soul testimony. Such was the nature of her seductiveness that, during the span of time you were listening to her, she sounded definitive, a perfect machine of sound, a Total Voice. This enabled her to appear before us seemingly unburdened by the tumultuous history into which she was born or the archetype of the tortured blues woman. Aretha had cried "freedom," but Whitney, even at her most impassioned, gave the impression she didn't know she was ever not free. The way her image muffled her political significance made it easier for non-black singers to mimic her without being accused of cultural theft, and the following decade witnessed an accelerated de-racialization of African-American vocal tradition. The shift has been so complete that virtually every new female pop star expecting mass acclaim for her instrument must now be equipped with an arsenal of techniques that a few decades ago would have marked her as too "soul," too "urban," too black for the white audience.
The myth of "The Voice" emphasizes how natural it all was for Whitney and how easy she made it look, but that's not quite true to who she was as a performer. The labor of singing was not only apparent in her body language, it was also what made her such a presence on stage. On high notes she would tilt her head back, exposing her swan neck and the musculature rushing in to produce all that volume. Leaps into her silvery head voice were punctuated with a closing of the eyes, a wiggle of the fingers. Her faults as a stylist were sometimes on display: Out of what might have been boredom with her original recorded interpretation of a song, she would start lagging a little too lazily behind the beat, or linger agonizingly over one phrase before dispensing impatiently with the next. By the Bodyguard period, her vocal peak, she had brought her live act to an exhilarating level of cockiness, pumping her arms up and down like her own conductor, smiling mischievously before a key change.
Perhaps Whitney exhausted all her interest in the power ballad on those Bodyguard songs. She never cut another adult-contemporary track as blatantly ambitious as "I Will Always Love You," "I Have Nothing," or "Run to You," songs as ludicrous as they are sublime, each arranged (by shlockmeister David Foster) as a series of increasingly intimidating vocal hurdles threatening to break the singer's cool. Those colossal productions obscured the seductress on forgotten gems like Whitney Houston's "Thinking About You," Whitney's "Just the Lonely Talking Again," and I'm Your Baby Tonight's "I Belong to You"—irresistible confections that make you want to forget how much trash she wasted her gift on. The general color-blindness of The Bodyguard was followed by projects that appealed specifically to black audiences, the first of which, Waiting to Exhale, includes her greatest vocal performance. Rejecting the grandiosity of her preceding singles, the Babyface-penned "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)" is strung together from delicate gestures and half-assed wisdom. At the choruses, Whitney's lead is subdued by the background vocals, the same cooed phrases circling again and again around some unmentionable grief. When the bridge swells up to the song's one big note, it feels like it's over before it even started; the singer's come up for air, now she's diving back in. Fitting for an artist who wasn't much of a musical rebel, Whitney found her most convincing soul voice singing about emotional resignation and the banality of pain.
If we were to gather up all such instances where the material was working for Whitney's greatness rather than against it, we might not be able to fill half of a CD. Still, I've been surprised that the appraisals of Whitney's career this past week have felt so bizarrely detached. Is it because music critics can't bring themselves to wade through all that mediocrity? Or because we don't like to make personal, unironic testimonies about how pop music has changed our lives? Well, here's mine: Seven years ago, I came out to my parents, things didn't go so well, and despite no longer considering myself a Whitney fan, I found myself digging up one of her songs I'd loved as a kid. Probably the first piece of black gospel we listened to seriously in my Catholic household, "I Love the Lord" features Whitney riffing up a storm alongside the Georgia Mass Choir, revealing a spontaneity you don't hear in her secular work. Her solo intro begins soft, fluttery, with spare piano accompaniment. Then, several measures in, on the first syllable of the word "troubles," she unleashes one of her rafter-shaking belts before sliding back to a quavering near-whisper. That one note had a heft and solidity that straightened my back and blasted through my self-pity. It made me feel ridiculous and powerful at the same time. And for me, that's what the absurd miracle of American popular music boils down to: one ear, one voice, communing in that single fleeting moment.
I'm tired of the narritive by serious rock music critics that Whitney's music was mediocre or "trash". Any one of today's singers, or from any musical period, would have killed for a song as well written and produced and timeless as many of her biggest hits. I think it's not the songs that critics don't like, it's Whitney. No she wasn't much of a musical rebel and yes, her music was designed for multi-format, multi-demographic appeal, but so was the music of Michael Jackson, Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross, and indeed all of Motown, none of whose artists ever were as critically savaged as Whitney Houston. For decades critics have seemingly been in a competition to outtrash Whitney, usually pulling out the same dry criticisms that she was a vaccous, hollowed out pop product, she doesn't 'feel' what she is singing, she doesn't write her own music, yadda yadda… It's as if everyone always expected her to be just like Aretha Franklin, Anita Baker or Luther Vandross. Sure, Anita and Luther were more R&B, more obviously a part of the soul tradition, but I couldn't name you one of their albums that contained as much joy, diversity and memorable songs as many of Whitney's best albums. I would suggest for all serious rock music critics to relisten to some of Whitney's biggest and best hits, close their eyes and pretend that someone other than Whitney Houston was singing them, some unknown artist. I think they might have a revelation.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2103164/Whitney-Houstons-REAL-tragedy-giving-female-partner-Robyn-Crawford.html
I don't think this is a very good 'tribute' anyway since the writer spends half of his essay describing all of the things wrong with Whitney and her music. Here are some of the descriptors of her music from the essay:"trash she wasted her gift on", "half-assed wisdom", "If we were to gather up all such instances, where the material was working for Whitney's greatness rather than aginst it, we might not be able to fill up half of a CD" and "all that mediocrity". They should have gotten an actual Whitney fan, rather than somebody who used to like her and grew up and now listens to 'serious' and 'cool' music, to write a tribute to her instead. Even Mariah Carey gets more respect from Slant than Whitney Houston. It's ridiculous…
I think it's pretty clear how much I love Whitney. Only an artist I love could inspire as much frustration in me. If I could change this article, though, I'd make sure the "Exhale" part couldn't be misconstrued as backhanded compliment. Through the simplest of means, that record took quiet storm to a whole new level of profundity, and her vocal — not just her voice, but her interpretation — is genius.
You're right it is clear how much you like Whitney and you are entitled to your opinion, which you express very articulately. It's just that I have heard/read all of those criticisms before and I feel like a lot of artists that have followed in her wake, like Mariah Carey, aren't subjected to them. I suppose it is a complement however that people expected more from Whitney (than others) because of the size of her talent. By the way my Whitney 'coming out' song is "Greatest Love of All".
I don't think Mariah has been let off that easy, but I see your point. She does seem to appeal to the preferences of a lot of critics: for those who are drawn to hip-hop "authenticity" or soul nostalgia (here I'm guilty), she can ride a Bone Thugs beat, quote Ahmad and Mobb Deep, then turn around and do a vintage soul number with Stax horns and Motown hooks. For those who like their artists to have creative autonomy, she co-writes and produces her own stuff. So she's given the critics and musicians who tend to be suspicious of straight-up pop or pure vocal prowess something to admire.
You took the words right out of my mouth. Despite my bias for Whitney I can admit Mariah is more involved in her music(writing and producing) and also more willing to engage with younger, hipper musical styles. Other artists who did not write much or any of their own music include Diana Ross, Donna Summer, Britney Spears and Aaliyah. All of whom recieve more critical favor than Whitney Houston. Songs like "Love Hangover", "I Feel Love", "Toxic" and "Are You That Somebody" have appeared on various Spin (and many other critc's) best of lists. I never see Whitney on any of those kinds of lists. "I Wanna Dance.." did make Blender's list of 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born and her debut album did make Rolling Stone's list of 500 Greatest Albums but that's about it. Of course I recognize the genius of those songs and artists I listed but doesn't Whitney deserve to be in there somewhere? Even with "I Will Always Love You"?… I don't know, but I think her rightful place in the pop cosmos, with serious critics anyway, is still in question.
Andrew, it was indeed clear – to me, at least – what Whitney meant/means for you, to the point that you made me shed a few tears while reading your article. Your painstakingly detailed analysis of specific notes and sung words (like "troubles," which had a similar effect on me too) shows that you have been, at least at a point in your life, a true diva devotee. And that is a state of being only those who have experienced it can understand or have an opinion about. It's not only about 'liking' an artist's music; it can be life changing. That is the power of a voice like Whitney Houston's.
And by the way, genius diva Mariah Carey has hardly been a critic favorite. Although I simultaneously see Andrew's point (who sees kaiboy's point), I think she is as much underestimated as Whitney in the abovementioned regard.
"Wait a minute, this is too deep" to go any further at this point, but I may return.
Actually, I think the author is just not a very good writer. The article is insulting, not to meniton a tired repetition of the same old crap wannabe critics threw at Whitney her entire career in an effort to make themselves seem more erudite.
Whitney Houston has a catalog of timeless songs, that are special because of the unique tone of her voice and her singular ability to infuse the lyrics of songs with deep meaning. There is no singer in the last hundred years with Whitney Houstons combination of flawless technique, breathtaking tone, vocal range, clarity, interpretive skills, and emotional depth. Not one, period.
That the author would even mention Mariah Carey is laughable. Mariah's catalog to date is completely forgetable. I can say with complete certainty that Whitney houston's catalog will still be plaed by music lovers 100 years from now, and I can say with equal certainty that the junk Mariah has recorded to date will have been long forgotten. If there ever was a singer who squandered her gift, it has been Mariah. She really should have better recordings, especially since she can't sing live to save her soul.
This article would be funny if it weren't such a sad commentary on what passes for music commentary. I guess folks had better not bother buying recordings of Billie Holliday, Gladys Knight, Roberta Flack or a host of other "scratchy' voiced singers. And don't bother with Whitney's Preacher's Wife Soundtrack, a work of genius, 'cause she's got that "scratchy" sound there for sure.
When Whitney houston's story is written 100 years from now, the sad narrative won't be one about drugs. It will be about the conceit and folly of the desperate to be superior music critics of her day who failed to recognize her musical genius during her lifetime.
All I have to say to Mr. Chan is, since you barely can find a handful of worthwhile songs by Whitney Houston, why ever did you bother wasting your valuable time on this article? Surely you could have conveyed your contempt for her lifes work in a paragraph.
Apparently, if a person wants to remain igonrant and narrow-minded,and express that state of mind in an aggressive and insulting way, then there is nothing one can do. And this description is with regard to the comment left by MusicFan.
Anyone who actually devoted time to read the piece Andrew Chan wrote so meticulously with a sharp sense of music understanding, while infusing it with a personal tone that made it only more relateable to people who admired Whitney Houston, would understand that it comes from a loving place, which by no means excludes criticism, nor does it imply that even I agree on every single remark (for instance, I don't find Whitney's vocals on the "My Love Is Your Love" album indicative of fatigue, but representative of another musical approach).
That MusicFan would be so naive to claim that Whitney's "timeless" songs "are special because of the unique tone of her voice" is of no surprise, since what the person fails to realize is that their statement indicates that it was Whitney's voice in the first place that made the songs appear timeless, instead of the actual compositions. Let's debate about how timeless a song like "Love Is a Contact Sport" is, if not for the latter vocal climax of Whitney's, following the instrumental breakdown.
Not only this, but their inability to appreciate the different music approach of Whitney's great peer Mariah Carey shows how limited their interpretation of vocal artistry is. In fact, MusicFan feels so confident to display an unparalleled cockiness of future foresight into how music consumption will be 100 years from now that they claim to be absolutely certain about it, as well as about the correctness of their musical evaluation of Ms Carey. Apparently, album cuts like "I Wish You Well" and "Subtle Invitation" or more "alternative-sounding" cuts like "Candy Bling" – displaying a completely individual sound in terms of vocal layering – would make no impression upon the (paradoxically named) MusicFan since they have predetermined their value, presumably without even listening to them.
Even though I am not using comparison as a means to desrespect any of these two great divas, as they are both utterly accomplished in what they have individually done, it would be intriguing to see how MusicFan interprets "junk" against "timeless" when one puts Mariah's "Long Ago" next to Whitney's "If I Told You That" (both state-of-the-art urban tracks), "Vision of Love" next to "You Give Good Love" or even "We Belong Together" next to "One of Those Days."
Even though one has to recognize that MusicFan comes from a place of loving Whitney Houston and wanting to see justice been made towards her artistry and vocal genius, it is at the same time utterly shameful to attempt to voice their opinions while attacking another artist that not only had the respect of Whitney herself but has displayed on several occasions a style all their own, that is after all not completely dissimilar from Whitney's approach.
Finally, as much as these artists have shown an extraordinary ammount of talent, the fact remains that they have operated within an industry, a business setting, and as much as we want to sanitize art, their songs are part of a brand as they are artistic expressions. In that respect, Whitney, Mariah, the amazing Roberta Flack and other great performers have surely recorded songs that are worthwhile but also songs that seem substandard to what they can do at their best. That I think is also Mr Chan's point.
It is obviously not merely about sounding "scratchy" or not. It is an attempt to delineate a more complete picture of what an artist like Whitney Houston stood for, vocally and otherwise.