The Soul of Pop Folk
Reassessing the complex musical legacy of a vulnerable giant
I always found Whitney Houston perplexing.
She first appeared on my radar in early 1986—New York City’s still-plentiful record stores were plastered with posters of her debut album, released a few months earlier—when I began hearing her the second of her record-breaking streak of seven straight number-one singles, “How Will I Know?” Houston was not exactly my core demographic, that of a suburban white boy with thoroughly predictable musical tastes. But even I could sense something remarkable in the combination of power and urgency in her vocals in a song that continues to hurtle across the airwaves, animated by a voice that leaped and surged like nothing I ever heard—before or since.
More often than not, however, Houston recorded what I considered dreck. (“Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all”—blech.) She was the once-in-a-lifetime find for Arista Records founder Clive Davis, a storied executive who signed acts ranging from Janis Joplin to Alicia Keys. (And, I’ll note in passing, Bruce Springsteen.) For the most part, however, Davis had little direct artistic impact on his acts, unlike Houston, whose repertoire he shaped in large measure because she was an ingenue he discovered when she was twenty years old in 1983. Houston was a pop act, and to my mind—and, for that matter, a lot of minds that were far better attuned to these things than I was—she was making music that was not fully worthy of her. In the words of one recent reviewer of the new movie about Houston’s life, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, “Her songs weren’t generational anthems but rather sonic carpeting for the grocery store.”
It's not hard to see why some listeners were impatient. Houston was born into a musical aristocracy. Her mother, Cissy Houston, was a renowned gospel singer who went on to a recording career that included singing on records of Wilson Pickett, Elvis Presley, Paul Simon, Bette Midler, Carly Simon, Luther Vandross, and many others. Of particular note in this context is Aretha Franklin, who young Whitney would refer to as “Auntie Ree,” a reference to Franklin’s nickname. (Cissy was one of the backup singers chanting it on Franklin’s signature 1968 hit “Respect.”) In addition to her niece Dionne Warwick, Cissy was also the cousin of opera singer Leotyne Price on her mother’s side, all of which suggests the degree to which young Whitney was marinated in an exceptionally rich musical heritage. Cissy, who for decades led a choir at the family’s Baptist church in Newark, was a powerful figure who guided her daughter’s musical development—gospel is the bedrock of Houston’s art, and she was a great singer of spirituals—though the wider environment of her blended family could be chaotic, and her father, a Newark politico, managed her finances disastrously.
Houston often found herself caught in the middle amid people dismissing and tussling to control her. She spent much of her youth in a closeted gay relationship with a woman named Robyn Crawford, who as far as I can tell is probably the person who had her interests most at heart. Because this was bad for her image, Houston’s handlers coaxed her to date men—what we would today call a queer identity was often met with even more hostility in black America than white, which led to a series of romances that culminated in her problematic marriage to New Jack Swing pioneer Bobby Brown, a bad-boy who appeared to love her but also seemed to feed her worst habits, notably drug addiction. But at least initially, the marriage killed two birds with one stone: it quelled the gay rumors (the mass media hadn’t really gotten a purchase on bisexuality yet), and Brown’s position—temporary, as it turned out—at the vanguard of black music eased criticism that Houston was an “Oreo” pandering to mass tastes. It was in these years that Houston recorded quality R&B songs, notably “I’m Your Baby Tonight” in 1990 and “It’s Not Right (But It’s OK)” in 1998. But in the first decade of the new century, a downward spiral took hold, leading to her death from a drug-induced accidental drowning in a bathtub at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2012.
In some ways, this is a sadly familiar showbiz story captured as such in the workmanlike biopic (the best part of which comes when Houston, capably played by Naomi Ackie, responds with cool anger to a disk jockey’s charge that she’s too white). Actually, Houston reminds me of Elvis Presley, also memorialized last year in the more cinematically ambitious film directed by Baz Luhrmann. Both Houston and Presley were dogged for much of their careers by perceptions that they compromised their gifts with inferior material—both made their careers as interpreters, not writers—and too much attention to superficial glitz. Which I happen to believe is true in both cases. But both were capable of breaking out of those constraints and complaints with unpredictably timed performances that could be truly startling in taking popular music to new heights. Elvis was still doing this in the 1970s with songs like “Suspicious Minds” (1970) and “Burnin’ Love” (1973).
For Houston, such lightning struck twice. The first came in her staggering live performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Super Bowl in Tampa. The event was held during the Persian Gulf War against Iraq, giving it an extra charge. There had been memorable performances of the national anthem before—Jimi Hendrix gave a hideously beautiful one protesting the Vietnam War at Woodstock in 1969, and Marvin Gaye gave a memorably improvisational reading of the song against a drum machine at the NBA All-Star Game in Inglewood, California in 1983, a direct inspiration Houston’s. But she rendered what many regard as the greatest version ever performed of this notoriously difficult tune, changing its time signature from 3/4 to 4/4 to allow her to stretch and change the pace of her vocals in a tour de force interpretation showcasing her remarkable range. For many years, I began my U.S. history survey by playing the Hendrix and Houston versions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and asking them to consider these two deeply engaged dialogues with our national identity by two important African Americans.
The greatest of Houston’s masterpieces is her towering performance of “I Will Always Love You,” from the hugely successful soundtrack to The Bodyguard (in which she starred with Kevin Costner) and which became the number one song of the year in 1993. Part of what makes this record so striking is the way it reinvents the 1973 original recording, written and performed by Dolly Parton. Parton’s record is a classic in its own right, and it seems appropriate in a context of lives cut tragically short to recognize the longevity of a career now in its seventh decade. But Houston took “I Will Always Love You” to an entirely new level, transforming a country song into a torchy ballad that is inimitable. Because it’s such a staple of the airwaves and streaming, it may be easy to overlook just how striking it was to have a 45-second acapella introduction in a pop hit. I’ll confess I find the arrangement of what follows, notably the treacly keyboards, to be grating. But not enough to fail to be awed by Houston’s singing every time I hear it.
I largely enjoyed I Wanna Dance with Somebody, particularly as it charts Houston’s rise. The latter part became a grim slog, both as a matter of the film’s unnecessary length and the tragic end of a life that seemed painful to witness again. But I came out of the movie with a sense of gratitude, less inclined to focus on what remained unrealized than the transcendent power of what was. What is. Thank you, Whitney Houston.