While I realize that the death of Whitney Houston is a bit of a departure for a site that generally covers geek culture, one thing is for certain: we all know who Whitney Houston was. We all know she had a superhuman voice, devastatingly gorgeous face, and many, many personal problems. But nothing can take away her talent, and nothing can take away the memories of a generation of adolescents when songs like “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” came out, and then The Bodyguard came out and “I Will Always Love You” flooded the airwaves. Allow us to present a snark-free zone filled with a celebration of Houston’s achievements and some good, old-fashioned nostalgia. Please feel free to leave recollection of your own private Whitney Houston concerts in the comments section.
Yesterday, at 3:55 PM PST, Houston was pronounced dead after being found in the Beverley Hilton hotel earlier in the hour. An investigation is currently taking place to determine the exact cause of her death, but there was no evidence of foul play or illegal drugs after the initial search. Police are seeking a search warrant to find out if there was anything related to her death that wasn’t in plain sight. Houston was at the hotel to perform at her mentor Clive Davis‘ annual pre-Grammy party, which took place as scheduled. The Grammys air tonight, and a tribute is being planned.
Before the world knew she could sing — even though her hometown of Newark, New Jersey was familiar with her gospel talents — Houston was a teen model. She was actually the first African-American woman to make the cover of Seventeen magazine. The fact that she was the daughter of Cissy Houston, who sang backup for Aretha Franklin (the younger Houston’s godmother), and the cousin of Dionne Warwick, didn’t hurt her career, either. While still a teen, she started singing backup for acts like Chaka Khan and started performing in New York City. That’s where record producer Clive Davis discovered her, and just out of her 20s, she had been signed and recorded her first album.
In the 1980s, her image was fun and innocent, backed up with this flawless, powerful, adaptable voice. She could do pop, she could do ballads, she could do gospel, she could do R&B. Her voice could scale five octaves effortlessly. Her landmark second album, Whitney (1987), made her the first woman to have an album hit the Billboard charts at number one and it contained four number one singles. Her third album, I’m Your Baby Tonight (1990), had three number one hits. She won her first Grammy (Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female) for “Saving All My Love For You” in 1986, and for that performance on that broadcast, she won an Emmy for Best Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program. She won her second Grammy in 1988 for “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me).” That year, Forbes Magazine named her the 8th highest earning performer — the highest African-American woman overall and the highest-earning entertainer behind Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby.
All that, and she still hadn’t done The Bodyguard yet. Before that movie came out and set all kinds of records for its soundtrack, Houston performed this almost impossibly perfect rendition of the National Anthem at the Super Bowl in January 1991:
There you go! A perfect version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” and then she was done. Like a gourmet chef just made you the best macaroni and cheese you’ve ever had in your entire life.
Then came The Bodyguard, Houston’s first acting role. While the movie itself wasn’t known for its acting (Fun fact: It was originally supposed to star Steve McQueen and Diana Ross), it was the soundtrack, featuring all those Whitney Houston songs, that really blew up. Produced by Houston and Davis, it became the best-selling soundtrack of all time, was certified diamond (sales surpass 10 million) and sold 17 million copies by 1999. To date, it is still the best-selling soundtrack album and has sold 44 million copies. (Expect that number to rise, if downloads also count.) It had five hit singles for Houston on it, two of which were nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars (though neither one), and the album itself won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1994. The soundtrack also made Houston the first artist (male or female) to sell over one million copies of an album in a week.
After The Bodyguard, Houston continued to find success in movies that either let her showcase her voice (The Preacher’s Wife, which made her the highest-paid African-American actress of the time) or get in on the soundtrack (Waiting to Exhale). Many credit her poplar starring turns in movies with nearly all-black casts as a major step in the direction of similar movies. (Not unlike the doors she opened in pop music.) She also starred as the Fairy Godmother in a racially diverse, made-for-TV version of Cinderella, which starred Brandy. By the mid-1990s, she’d hit her stride, found time to return to her roots and record a gospel album, and then come back to pop music again by 1998 and release My Love Is Your Love.
But in the 1990s, she married Bobby Brown. While the marriage produced a child, Houston’s only child, Bobbi Kristina, many point fingers at Brown for getting Houston into drugs and basically ruining all that magic we just talked about.
After My Love Is Your Love (which won Houston even more Grammy awards and hit singles), Houston never really returned to her glory days. She and Brown were caught with drugs, her bad reputation for being late and erratic started becoming more and more difficult for people to deal with; she was fired from performing “Over the Rainbow” at the Oscars in 2000. And then she did that reality show, and suddenly, everyone knew that Whitney Houston had some serious problems.
Rather than go into the sad, destructive parts of Houston’s life, I’d rather acknowledge they existed and then remember the great parts. She’s gone now. Rubbing it all in just seems pointless. We’ve lost a woman whose musical talents came as naturally to her as having another appendage. She wielded that voice like a sword, or a bow and arrow. And then, she faltered, tragically.
I remember being an adolescent, hearing all those Bodyguard songs on the radio, constantly. And as sick as we all probably got of them, part of (some of) us really wished we could sing like that. Whitney made it look so easy, to have that kind of beautiful power inside of us. This was before I’d been able to embrace my geekery, when I was still way too self-conscious to draw any kind of attention to myself, even though watching someone so talented made me want to find my own talent. “I Will Always Love You” was one of the first songs I learned to play on the piano, and I still wish I could have nailed it. Between that, performing every sketch from Roundhouse in the privacy of my basement, and writing fan fiction during social studies class, Whitney Houston reminds me of a time when my creativity was taking flight. Now that she’s gone, I feel like I have to stop wasting my time and get back in the saddle. Because we have no idea how many chances we might have at a comeback, if we get one at all.
If you have any memories or thoughts about Whitney Houston, you invited to share them in the comments section below. As I said before, I’m going to designate this a snark-free zone, so any wannabe/struggling/failed “comedians” trying to be edgy and make tasteless jokes claiming that “it’s what everyone is thinking,” please go somewhere else. I will fling my tear-soaked neon green scrunchie at your face.
(information via The New York Times, Wikipedia)
