Wow, an encounter between Serge Gainsbourg and Whitney Houston in which Whitney Houston comes off with more dignity. Who’da thunk it?
'Course Gainsbourg would only live about five more years, right? Maybe he was on the downslide.
When (I believe) Sam Goldwyn died, his funeral was packed with people, and Dorothy Parker famously remarked “Give the people what they want, and they will turn out for it.”
There’s no chance I will ever be asked to speak at the hypothetical double funeral you mention, but if I were, I would use C.S. Lewis’ line -
Regards,
Shodan
Once again, your beliefs are mistaken. It was Harry Cohn’s funeral, and I can’t remember who said, but I don’t think it was Parker. ETA: Red Skelton.
Oh geez, don’t tell me Pinocchio’s been goin’ down on her again. :smack:
My favorite moment so far was on CNN this morning: Cathy Crowley introduced the “Whitney Houston is still dead” update with the words “Didn’t she almost have it all.”
Of course she said it over the obligatory clip of “I Will Always Love You”, but at least she referenced a different song. Houston had a fine voice; I hated the way she wasted it on IWALY.
I don’t recall seeing the video of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” before. Damn, was she really that young once?
That’s too bad, because it is so derivative. The NY Post used the headline when Ike Turner died (“Ike Turner beats Tina Turner to death”).
The present tense of the thread title is presently making me tense.
Absolutely: and Dolly performed it better. I remember she closed her variety show every week with it. I cannot listen to the Whitney version.
However, some of Whitney’s songs were wonderful: I Wanna Dance With Somebody is one of my favorites.
Now the tributes begin. VH1 and HLN have now become All Whitney All The Time channels. And some poor person was up all night writing a tribute for tonight’s Grammy awards.
Stolen from the brilliant *NY Post *headline when Ike Turner died!
And it was so much more appropriate for Ike and Tina than for Whitney and Bobby. Whitney hot shots Bobby to death, maybe?
I’m waiting to hear if any media will play that when Dolly dies.
10 to 1 they don’t. I know people who believe Whitney wrote that song for the movie.
September 13th, 2001:
Slow news week, I guess.
A few years too late Whitney…
What a cautionary tale this is. Whitney Houston at one time was likely one of the richest people on planet Earth, had access to any form of substance abuse clinic or treatment, and she either didn’t take advantage of it, or it didn’t work for her. I’ve heard people reference drug addiction as a long slow suicide and this seems to be a perfect example. (Saying this with the expectation and assumption that drug use had something to do with this.)
I don’t understand the opprobrium directed at Bobby Brown. He’s no model citizen, and it’s popularly thought that Whitney was America’s Sweetheart before they got married, but I’ve always heard that Whitney had a wild side that her Clive Davis-Arista handlers fought hard to keep under wraps. As janky as he can be, I think he genuinely loved her and vice-versa… and unless he was administering heroin into her veins, I don’t think he’s at fault here.
I honestly haven’t watched the Whitney SSB since it aired back in the day… and I caught a snippet of it this morning. Holy shit, that was amazing. It’s in the pantheon of great SSB performances - Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, and Whitney. And they all died before their time. 
I still maintain that she was hamstrung as an artist by boring, dated production. I think her finest moments were her remake of “I’m Every Woman” and IWALY. But if you strip away the 80s cheese you can still be moved by her work - listen to the isolated vocal track from “How Will I Know.”
I’d listen to that on my iPod daily!
There’s a Motown release of MJ’s singles that has a ton of isolated vocals - and that’s how you can really appreciate the power of artists of this caliber. I hope they do the same for Whitney, because her voice as an instrument is undeniable.
You know, this is a great point. As I thought about it more, it’s not that I don’t like Whitney Houston, it’s that I don’t like her songs. There’s a difference. I do appreciate the vocal range and power that she had - but I hate all of her big popular songs because of the arrangement, as you said, the cheesy 80s production. And I don’t love slow ballads either.
I think if she had collaborated with a songwriter and producer who I liked, I’d appreciate her more. But I can’t get past the cheesiness and totally boring blandness, as I see it, of her songs. It’s like in American Psycho when Bateman plays Whitney Houston for the escorts at his house and gives them a dissertation on how great she is - that scene was there for a reason. To make him look crazy!
WOW. Just… wow. I really don’t have words. THAT is talent.
How sad. Whitney Houston was my wife’s favorite singer when I met her, so for her birthday, I gave her a copy of Whitney’s duel with Jermaine Jackson, “If You Say My Eyes Are Beautiful,” which I figured (correctly) she didn’t have, as it was released on one of his albums, not one of hers. This in the pre-iTunes, pre-Amazon, pre-Ebay days…I called a number of records stores, found the Jackson album on vinyl, found someone else who’d copy it to cassette for me. Heck of a song, way more obscure than it deserves to be.
Well, that’s my Whitney Houston memory. RIP, Whitney.
I suspected this is what you meant upthread. Clive Davis and the Arista brass were so desperate to cross Whitney over (in other words, out of the R&B genre and into the pop charts) they went to the lowest-common denominator pablum. Her second album is chock full of hits but they sound dated. Now, on her third album, L.A. Reid and Babyface produced some tracks, including “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” That’s how she should have been produced.
In fairness, though, the stuff we think about from a 2012 perspective as crazy was quite different back then. It’s hard to imagine artists like Donny Hathaway and Minnie Riperton, for example, as “Black” artists instead of undeniably talented artists, period, but in the 1970s and even 1980s, that’s how it went down. Michael Jackson, Prince, Lionel Ritchie, and Whitney herself had a lot to do with knocking down those barriers.
I wasn’t a very girlie teenager, but I always bought the Back-to-School issue of Seventeen. That’s where I first encountered Whitney, in the very early 80s, as a fresh faced teen model. I was so fascinated by her looks at the time (a more pretty Benetton [remember them?] model with natural hair), that I followed up and read her mini biography in the magazine. She said she aspired to be a singer.
Fast forward a couple of years and I, as someone who only listened to Christian rock, couldn’t have missed her sudden popularity. She was everywhere and her music was infinitely danceable and infectious. After I switched over at some point to ‘secular’ music, her song “I’m Your Baby Tonight” is particularly linked to a young man I remember fondly.
So, a couple of good memories of Whitney. I do still like IWALY and her rendition of the SSB. I felt bad for her troubles and addictions, always hoping she could get free of them. It’s terribly sad to lose someone with such great talent so young and to understand the pain that her loved ones have ahead of them. I pray she’s finally at peace and that her daughter will be okay. There’s talk on other sites (who knows if it’s accurate considering the wild speculation that comes out immediately following something of this magnitude) that she, too, has already had a stint in rehab. If so, one can only hope she doesn’t go down the same path and gets whatever she’s dealing with under control.
Let’s just wish that this doesn’t mean a relapse. Poor girl. Poor Whitney. May she rest in peace.
Ain’t cocaine’s fault (or Crack’s or whatever). Or Bobby Browns.
She did that shit to herself.
That said, super talented and a shameful waste of the last fifteen years or so.