With the weird blend of investment and helplessness that typifies kin, we’ve watched Whitney Houston die in front of us, slowly and unmistakably, for more than a decade. Now that she is dead at the age of forty-eight, found at the Beverly Hilton, we face a new and weirder blend: the grief you feel for someone you didn’t really know but are unable to pretend you weren’t tied to, and the awkward truth that they’ve met the end you expected. Do we shrug, and walk away, humbled by the brutality of the body’s chemistry? Do we wag our fingers even harder at our kids, as if we can somehow scare their brains into being 2.0 brains? Considering how many times Houston confronted her own addiction in public, her end confirms that the pull of addiction can be stronger than the pull of dignity.
Houston was one of the few artists to work in the same field as Michael Jackson, a place where several decades of African-American music were synthesized into a new kind of pop. Both artists were repeatedly accused of abandoning some version of their own roots, whether it was gospel, blues, soul, or R&B. That kind of reductive critique ignored how both Jackson and Houston were talents that had to sprawl, that were naturally destined to complicate and stymie genres.
Houston’s bona fides were almost laughably promising: her mother was the gospel singer Cissy Houston, her cousin was Dionne Warwick, and she was the goddaughter of Aretha Franklin. It may be reductive or even dull, but maybe what Houston really did was waltz into the world and combine her family’s work. Her voice was big enough to fill a mall, and her taste was varied enough to allow her entry into the pop world to actually be a kind of stealth victory. The first songs she released, “You Give Good Love” and “Saving All My Love For You,” made it look like she was aiming to take on the R&B ballad field. But one of the two dance numbers on her début, “How Will I Know,” was a big enough hit to allow her the room to shift.
Her second album, “Whitney,” laid out the rough scheme she followed for the rest of her career: ballads as the crossword puzzles she would complete minutes before you, and dance numbers as her firing range. Michael Jackson represented the ecstatic and the untouchable; Whitney Houston was always human, along every axis. Her triumphs felt like things you could imagine, just barely. The peak of “Whitney” was “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” which forms a perfect companion to Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” his expression of loss of self within the joy of dance. Houston’s spirit never made her seem distant, so it was plausible (the pliable listener wanted to believe) that she might dance with us, though by the time she got to the chorus she might easily be anywhere, with anyone. Her voice was good to vowels, and this time around it was “o” that won the lottery.
Her biggest hit gave the stage to “I,” a first person that is so easily recognized that if you even mumble “and I” with some kind of melody, whoever’s standing there will assume it’s “I Will Always Love You.” Originally written and recorded by Dolly Parton, “I Will Always Love You” was momentarily ceded to Linda Ronstadt, but Houston owns it now. The song broke through a dozen different ceilings because of the first person chorus, but just start with the first forty-five seconds, which is Houston singing without any accompaniment. She states the first verse, moving carefully through her own filters, not even hinting at how bright the lights can get. The second verse casually drops in some heavier flashes and then the second chorus comes out as if Houston is no longer any kind of regretful—she is using her magnanimous nature to flatten whoever’s chosen someone over her.
The ballads in Houston’s catalog reveal the most about her, like “I Have Nothing,” which is ostensibly a ballad in the way many of her ballads are. Houston begins in a mode that seems cowed, maybe sad or wearied, and then the voice takes over and she becomes entirely invincible, at odds with any lyric that hints at weakness. Watching her decline, in public, was especially hard because she was someone who had so little use for musical fragility or any songs that trucked in self-pity. Her biggest late period hit was possibly her hardest, thematically. Houston tended towards the uplifting, as a song picker, but by 1998, Houston’s troubled marriage to Bobby Brown and substance problems had come into view. So “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay,” which exonerates an unfaithful lover, was about as close as Houston would come to claiming she’d accept a loss.
Was this a form of magical thinking, then, this pose of invincibility? Her last album, “I Look To You,” avoids expressions of power, implicitly acknowledging that there are forces that might just prevent her immortality. She settles for being cheerful, and “Million Dollar Bill” served as a reasonably fun piece of retro disco. But her voice is heard multi-tracked over and over—we rarely hear the instrument all by itself, doing what only it could do, breaking the sung note into infinitely small and mobile units. No, by the end, she’s mostly comforting herself, as if she knew what was coming.
Photograph by Phil Dent/Redferns
