Humanizing The Vacuum

Twenty years before listeners praised Adele for being “classy,” for Being Able To Sing, Whitney Houston occupied that space, and she enjoyed every privilege of a musical existence in which chart positions and platinum awards still mattered. Custom-designed by a genuinely awed Clive Davis for global consumption, Houston delivered; the world responded, year after year. Houston was already so big in the late spring of ’86 that my small private elementary school corralled every girl to sing a rendition of “The Greatest Love of All” at the year-end awards night; I can’t remember a time when Houston didn’t generate this kind of attention if not worship. When my family spent its week on Sanibel Island, the video for “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” competed with the Iran-Contra hearings for saturation.

It marked the last time in years that, pinpricks aside (“Love Will Save The Day,” “I’m Your Baby Tonight,” the “I’m Every Woman” cover, updated to take notice of a waning demi-star named Lisa Stansfield), Houston moved me. A wanton expenditure of kinetic energy, irrespective of its target or the means of reaching it, was her metier after 1987. Take the trilogy of #1 Whitney songs: a number called “So Emotional” that wasn’t emotional in the slightest. The title of “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” now looks apt and poignant if imprecise. Forget the “almost” — she did have it all, and settling for less in her productions meant acknowledging limits. Look at those titles again. “All At Once.” “All The Man That I Need.” Excepting the hushed reverie “Exhale (Shoop Shoop),” over and over she confused eros and will. A man wasn’t flesh: he was a peak to climb, an obstacle to triumph over. Remember the moment at the 1:20 mark in the “Run To You” video when she actually chases after Kevin Costner across the clouds dressed like an extra from Clash in the Titans? Sure — run FROM you more like. In a recent Populist entry, Tom Ewing noted how Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” far from being the tragedy realized by Dolly Parton, “is an elemental struggle, each bludgeoning crescendo a deliberate raising of the stakes.” Frank Kogan wrote years ago about her “animal competence”:

…but really there’s no animal in it, it’s more like a jet engine preening and showing its parts. Which can be powerful enough….And from here on she’s just blaring away, trying to power all the windmills in Holland, and the song disappears in the whoosh.

The whoosh could still sound impressive in the late nineties. The Thunderpuss remix of “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay” got more play in gay clubs in 1999 than anything with Madonna’s name on it. The place would go wild when Whitney busted out her still-impressive voice to sustain those high notes.

Although not a fan, I don’t understand the complaints that she “wasted” her talents. A few have even grumbled about why she couldn’t have recorded more performances as delicate as her rendition of Hugh Hopper’s “Memories” for Material in 1982. Try selling that recording in the hundreds of millions; it’s incommensurate with her wish to want it “all.” In a sense, though, she did. For skeptics of eighties and nineties R&B crossover there was “Memories.” For the rest of us, “The Greatest Love of All,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” and so forth.