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The 15 Best Whitney Houston Singles

Houston's best songs are a testament to not just her gift for interpretation, but her ability to out-sing just about anyone.

The 15 Best Whitney Houston Singles

Upon Whitney Houston’s death in 2012, Slant’s Andrew Chan lamented both the limits of the singer’s catalog and the detached appraisals of her music that failed to dig through the rough. In his piece, Chan wrote: “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.”

Well, gather them up we did, and even Chan agrees he gave Houston’s ability to transcend her calculatedly curated material short shrift. That she didn’t write her own songs is starkly juxtaposed by the fact that her performances make it virtually impossible to imagine anyone else singing them. The most quintessential Whitney songs were covers (“Greatest Love of All,” “I Will Always Love You,” “I’m Every Woman”), further testament to not just her gift for interpretation, but her ability to—in her prime—out-sing just about anyone. Sal Cinquemani

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15. “My Love Is Your Love”

By the late ’90s, Whitney had fully embraced R&B, but almost all of the singles from her 1998 album My Love Is Your Love were given gaudy house remixes that rivaled or exceeded the original versions in popularity. Wyclef Jean’s reggae-infused album mix of “My Love Is Your Love,” however, is unmatched in its effortlessness and remains her most soulful single. Further disproving the suspicion that she was incapable of conveying emotion in any form other than shouting, Whitney’s restrained vocal performance here rides a smooth, shuffling groove into eternity. Cinquemani



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14. “Step by Step”

The sole uptempo offering on the ballad-heavy soundtrack to Houston’s 1996 holiday film The Preacher’s Wife, the inspirational anthem “Step By Step,” a cover of an Annie Lennox B-side, fits snugly among the album’s more explicitly gospel material. Producer Stephen Lipson, who also helmed the original, gives the track a balmy house rhythm, while Whitney turns in a dramatic but understated performance, her words of perseverance rendered more poignant by the revelation that the singer suffered a miscarriage just days after the film’s release. Cinquemani

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13. “The Greatest Love of All”

You can thank Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann for making it marginally more respectable to be 100-percent gay for Whitney’s squarest anthem (yes, even counting “The Star Spangled Banner”). Or you can just continue to embrace the Yamaha DXY-drenched, unashamedly masturbatory song of oneself, as confident a coming-out as any new pop vocalist has ever dared. As RuPaul is fond of saying, “It do take nerve.” Or just the raw talent to sell a high note for the gods. Eric Henderson



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12. “Million Dollar Bill”

By the time Whitney’s final album, I Look to You, dropped, critics were quick to carp that her voice sounded, well, not like a million-dollar bill. But great disco is great disco, and it’s certainly elevated more problematic vocals. The genre is and always has been a vehicle for transcendence of all sorts. And thanks to some pitch-perfect pastichery by writer-producers Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz, “Million Dollar Bill,” even with the burden of 20-20 hindsight, still plays like a full-on phoenix rising moment. Henderson

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11. “Thinking About You”

A deep cut off of her debut album, this Top 10 R&B hit never crossed over to the pop charts, and it’s perhaps most notable today as a brilliant showcase for Kashif, one of the great R&B producers of the 1980s. Still in her early 20s, Whitney sounds chirpy, girlish, and (despite her already evident vocal skill) not particularly distinctive, her star-making bravado subdued by a swirl of synthesizers, drums, and background vocals. But that doesn’t stop the song from being a deeply seductive gem—and one of the most teasingly erotic of all her dance-floor jams. Andrew Chan



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10. “So Emotional”

Though some critics turned their noses up at the rock-inflected “So Emotional” when it was released in 1987, the track is animated not by its scorched-cheese electric guitars, but by Whitney’s elated performance. Like that of Mariah Carey’s “Emotions” a few years later, the song’s soaring slogan—“I get so emotional, baby!”—is so nebulous as to say absolutely nothing at all. Passion transcends words, of course, and Whitney’s ecstasy practically verges on religious. Cinquemani

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9. “My Name Is Not Susan”

Long before Becky, there was Susan. In the twilight of the new jack swing era, Whitney used the jagged edges of the beat-heavy genre to stab at a two-timing lover who mouths the name of a side chick in his sleep. A close cousin to “I’m Your Baby Tonight,” the song placed modestly on the pop charts, but it’s one of the most deliriously entertaining of the singer’s kiss-offs, full of snarling sass and quirky, Michael Jackson-like jabs of falsetto. At times, Whitney seems to be having so much fun that you forget she’s chastising a man who did her dirty. It’s hard not to wonder how much more multifaceted her discography might have been if she’d been allowed to follow this noisier, more aggressive sound to its limits. Chan



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8. “How Will I Know”

Right out of the gate, Whitney’s vocal pyrotechnics were an odd match for the sort of Arista-engineered lyrics that stressed her emotionally tender-footed artistic persona. And so it is that you got unexpected reserves of dramatic tension from some of the most purposefully palatable pop music of the 1980s. How will she know if he truly loves her? How could she care? Of all her early hits, though, “How Will I Know” at least sonically met her halfway, with producer Michael Nareda Walden delivering the same engine-revving flourishes he just finished servicing Aretha Franklin with. Not that her tank needed to be topped off. Henderson

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7. “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay”

Both the clubs and pop airwaves opted for the jackhammer subtlety of Thunderpuss’s remix, and that dance chart-topping version arguably remains the definitive iteration. But the true power of “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay,” incidentally Whitney’s first track to earn her Grammy respect in the R&B categories (and her last competitive win), lies in the contrast between the version that topped the pop charts and it’s far more poker-faced album mix. Thunderpuss emphasizes the “not right” half of the equation, the receipt-checking, caller ID-peeping half. Rodney Jerkins’s can’t-be-bothered smoothness emphasizes the “it’s okay” half, assuring that, as angry as Whitney is and always will be, she also knows no man will ever truly measure up. Henderson



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6. “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)”

In the end, it might be a slow dance that Whitney’s craving to cure her dusk-inflicted loneliness, but with its parenthetical title, gummy bassline, schmaltzy horns, tinkling keyboards, and half-step key changes, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” is definitive ’80s dance-pop, beseeching the lion-maned, mini-skirted divas in us all to take a chance for a burning love that will last at least three to four weeks, depending on the severity. And it hurts so good. Cinquemani

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5. “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)”

A fiery diva voice might not seem like the most comfortable fit for a song whose message amounts to a noncommittal, que-sera-sera shrug. But the marriage of Whitney’s voluptuous tone with Babyface’s exquisitely nuanced production made for one of last great hurrahs for crossover quiet storm. Moving from one vague display of big-sister wisdom to another (“Sometimes you’ll laugh, sometimes you’ll cry”), Whitney disciplines her voice to a grown-and-sexy whisper, signaling with her sweetly diaphanous sighs that she can’t be bothered to work up a sweat over life’s unsavory inevitabilities. What starts out as a compendium of throwaway self-help slogans becomes something much more profound and mysterious: a gospel revival masquerading as a sonic massage. Chan



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4. “I’m Every Woman”

Whether it’s the album version’s faithful update of Chaka Khan’s original 1978 disco hit or Clivillés & Cole’s amped-up house mix, which quotes both Teddy Pendergrass’s “You Can’t Hide from Yourself” and the obscure Eddy Grant B-side “Time Warp,” one thing remains: Whitney’s performance of “I’m Every Woman” is one of sheer vocal muscle. She simply out-sings Khan, but it’s unfair to compare the two: Whitney’s vocal run at the end of the song’s bridge that follows her self-declaration that she’s beyond comparison is nothing short of supernatural. Cinquemani

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3. “I Have Nothing”

You’ve got to hand it to a ballad that had to live in the long shadow of “I Will Always Love You” and still clears a space around itself to this day. With more strings than 400-plus percale, “I Have Nothing” is a basement-flooding battleship of feigned subservience, a comically aggressive-passive love song. “Take my love, I’ll never ask for too much/Just all that you are, and everything that you do.” Right off the bat, a possessed Whitney claims she’ll never change all her colors for him, but she’ll sure ‘nuff change keys in melodramatic fashion. And her romantic conquest doesn’t get a thing to say about it. Henderson



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2. “I’m Your Baby Tonight”

Roundly dismissed at the time of its release, Whitney’s third album sought to prove that the singer could be viable in a more authentically “urban” idiom—perhaps as a response to the backlash against her allegedly whitewashed persona. The album’s title track is a relentless whirligig of rhythm, drenched in synths and building to a sustained climax that has Whitney belting a string of fast-paced, syllabically intricate cadences that would leave even Beyoncé breathless. It’s a vocal tour de force, one that demonstrates how much pleasure Whitney could wring out of doing battle with a sick beat. Chan

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1. “I Will Always Love You”

No pop hit of the 1990s brought more allure to the art (and athletics) of singing than this monster ballad, which finds Whitney delivering a tender, unassuming Dolly Parton composition as if from the peaks of Mount Olympus. “I Will Always Love You” may not qualify as a work of restraint, but as far as Whitney performances go, it’s minimally embroidered, with enough slow-burn dynamics, hushed intimacies, and elongated vowels to showcase the pure beauty of her timbre. From the a cappella opening to the dramatic caesura that precedes the final chorus, producer David Foster’s onslaught of shameless gimmickry is calibrated for maximum impact. What gives the song its emotional authenticity, though, is the way Whitney glides through each vocal hurdle with a mix of urgency and self-assurance, like someone relying on her God-given talent to whip some sense into her own broken heart. Chan

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