Whitney Houston: Retrospective of a diva
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“I am completely devastated by the loss of the greatest voice of all time! R.I.P. Whitney Houston. I will always love you!” – Producer/X Factor judge L.A. Reid
On her death, L.A. Reid was not the only Tweeting celebrity to invoke I Will Always Love You, the Dolly Parton-penned song that became Whitney Houston’s biggest hit.
Real Housewives of Atlanta’s Niecy Nash used it too, with four exclamation points – which meant by extension that she was four times as grief-stricken (Nash is typical of the kind of “celebrity” that is first off the gun whenever a legend dies, two Kardashians being at the front of the pack posting Tweets early Sunday morning).
But what struck me most about Reid’s under-140-character tribute was the idea that we didn’t just lose a person, we lost a voice. In fact, many Twitter users, famous and not, expressed more or less the same sentiment.
Two thoughts: (a) Alas, we lost that voice years ago. Chalk it up to Bobby Brown, the effects of years of various burnt substances on the throat or the disease that is addiction, but Houston had not, since the ‘90s, been able to hit any of the crazy notes that replay in our mind’s ear. A sad postscript is the brief stage appearance (watchable on YouTube) she made at the pre-Grammy concert the night before she died, trying to sing Yes, Jesus Loves Me. Sadly, the woman whose influence is all over shows like American Idol and The Voice would have been ushered out the door at audition for not holding a melody.
And (b), Reid’s comment brings to mind the anecdote usually attributed to the author Graham Greene after being told that a second-rate movie adaptation had “destroyed your book.”
“No it didn’t,” he is said to have replied. “There it is, still on the shelf.”
That is the truth about Whitney Houston. Look at any of the articles about her, and the image is circa the ‘80s, of the apple-cheeked ex-gospel choirgirl with the ridiculously royal musical bloodlines (mom Cissy Houston, cousin Dionne Warwick, godmother Aretha Franklin), and the sense of fun (I Want To Dance With Somebody) and the arrangement-adventure (who else would make five syllables out of the word “I” in I Will Always Love You?).
Rare is the shot of the gaunt, tragic shadow-of-Whitney who occasionally appeared in public to the shock of witnesses.
Whether someone should have helped her over all those recent years, or could have, is now irrelevant. The unguarded, drugged-out, foul-mouthed Whitney Houston we saw - on the reality show Being Bobby Brown and the weird “crack is whack” interviews she’d occasionally give to the Oprahs and Diane Sawyers - was a ghost of the person we thought we knew secondhand via Grammy speeches and roles in movies like The Bodyguard, Waiting To Exhale and The Preacher’s Wife.
We’ve seen that ghost before – sometimes against the wishes of the subject, as with the Meryl Streep movie The Iron Lady, which spends much of its time with Margaret Thatcher under the spell of senile dementia, a state the actual ex-PM has gone to pains to keep hidden from public view.
That ghost could be named Elvis or Michael Jackson or Judy Garland. Whether the ghost gets to squeeze into the post-mortem picture of pop cultural memory seems to be something of a fluke. At the time of his death, the plus-sized “Vegas Elvis” was vivid in the public mind. But the years have tended to airbrush that image away in favour of the immortal, young, pelvis-swinging truckdriver from Tupelo. Similarly, no one remembers that “other,” less-Adonis-like Jim Morrison. (The troubled, fish-netted, pill-popping Garland, on the other hand, has survived as a gay iconic stage image that supersedes the work of Mickey Rooney’s onscreen gal-pal.)
I suspect that, whoever that was playing the role of Whitney Houston the last 10 or 15 years, will also soon be forgotten. Whitney was born as a star shortly after the birth of music video. That powerful image-making mojo will keep her most magic moments alive for decades.
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