Explaining to the uninitiated in the future how incredible a
voice Whitney Houston had may merely require noting that she never
had to dress up as a French whore to get the watchers of her videos
to listen to her songs. Donning a meat garment to grab an
audience’s attention wasn’t her style. Fame arrived without
resorting to primping as a pig-tailed Catholic schoolgirl. All
Whitney Houston had to do was sing, which is strangely no longer a
prerequisite for becoming a singer.
Whitney Houston died on Saturday at 48. She was apparently
found in the bathtub of her hotel room alongside a trove of
pharmaceuticals, among them Lorazepam, Valium, and Xanax. Unlike
their peers in sports, musicians prefer performance inhibiting
drugs to performance enhancing ones. Houston’s long decline of
bizarre behavior and haggard appearance followed by death is a
replay of the dying days of Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Amy
Winehouse, and so many other megastars. They all violated the show
business rule of leaving the audience wanting more rather than
less. Nobody preferred fat, sweaty, slurry Elvis, and nobody liked
seeing the glassy-eyed, disheveled Whitney. We want our kings
kingly and our divas divine.
Her death may have been a music-industry cliché. Her
career was anything but. Houston recorded eleven number one
singles. Foremost among these was the monster hit “I Will Always
Love You,” which spent a record fourteen weeks atop the charts. She
set a record by placing seven consecutive songs atop
Billboard’s chart. Her eponymous first album was then the
bestselling debut by a female artist.
Her musical alchemy transformed the songs of others into
her cultural property. Great covers, such as The Beatles’ “You’ve
Really Got a Hold on Me” or Van Halen’s “(Oh) Pretty Woman,” add
something to but rarely eclipse the original. Does anybody today
even identify “I Will Always Love You” as a Dolly Parton number or
remember that “The Greatest Love of All” originally predated
Houston in a film made about Muhammad Ali’s life? Even “The Star
Spangled Banner” became a Whitney song, with her rendition at the
1991 Super Bowl becoming the benchmark performance by which to
judge all others. That she could turn the national anthem, an
obligatory number set to a recycled tune, into a top-40 hit attests
to the power of her voice.
Houston’s death on the eve of the Grammys, where she
picked up six awards over her career, was seen as symbolism of some
sort. “It’s her favorite night of the year,” Clive Davis said of
his annual pre-show industry party on Saturday night, so “who knows
by the end of the evening” if she would perform. But she would be
dead before the evening had started.
But the real symbolism wasn’t dying on the eve of the
Grammys but doing so at the close of a week that began with the
buzz over Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime show. Rosie O’Donnell
tweeted, “Madonna=perfection.” Ryan Seacrest fawned that “she
nailed it.” But the most perceptive reaction came from (Who else?)
Paris Hilton, who declared: “That was one of the best halftime
shows I’ve ever seen.” When you see music, it’s not really
music.
Complete with a tight-rope walker, Roman/Egyptian/Viking
costumes, and gymnast dancers who rivaled the athleticism of the
players on the field, the Super Bowl performance certainly was a
spectacle. But spectacles are for the eyes, which tricked our ears.
The lip-synched extravaganza was a metaphor for the music industry,
particularly as it pertains to female songstresses. The visual
makes the aural insignificant. Piped-in music and Autotune make the
gauge of a performance how well the performer distracts the
audience from the fact that they’re not listening to live music.
That nobody seems to have noticed that Madonna faked her vocals
makes her an amazing performer of some sort.
The music industry follows the Madonna rather than the
Whitney model in manufacturing pop princesses. Katy Perry, Lady
Gaga, and Nikki Minaj do image over audio. Adele and Kelly
Clarkson, like Houston, experience success without sluttishness.
But they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Whitney Houston recalled a time when singers sang.
Whatever the reality of her private hell, her stage persona
projected grace, class, and a strength that emanated from her soul
rather than from her cleavage. This wasn’t because she lacked
physical beauty. She just knew that sex gimmicks would have
diverted attention away from her voice, which is precisely why
Madonna, Paula Abdul, and so many of Houston’s contemporaries used
them.
The “singer” is dead. So, unfortunately, is this
singer.
