22 March 2022 14:07
Between 1989 and 1990 Whitney Houston (1963-2012) is one of the most famous pop stars in the world. She was born for that: her mother Cissy is not only an acclaimed gospel performer but has worked as a backing vocalist and arranger with everyone from Otis Redding to Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield and Jimi Hendrix, and has also had some success as an artist. disk. Dionne Warwick, perhaps the greatest African American singer to understand how white pop works, was her cousin and Aretha Franklin to her was a kind of step-aunt, “auntie Ree”.
Whitney started very young, expertly guided by her mother who not only taught her to sing like a consummate gospel interpreter (“with the heart, with the head and with the belly”, she said), but also educated her to be flawless: her hair straightened or neatly gathered, the light make-up that emphasizes her naturally fair skin and elegant, slightly démodé, prom queen dresses. And then there is obviously religion: the church is the pivot around which her social and artistic life revolves.
Teenage Whitney Houston embodied the integration aspirations of the 1950s-1960s African American bourgeoisie, and like all child prodigies she is seen by her family as a future source of livelihood. Her mother, however, is too shrewd to throw her into her fray too soon: she prefers to hide it, raise it patiently and make her debut already perfect. And the plan works. Thanks to her teachings and the guidance of Clive Davis, a big shot in the US discography, the man who discovered Janis Joplin and had Bruce Springsteen sign his first contract, Whitney Houston at just twenty years old is ready to take it all: she has a sensual and virginal beauty at the same time, a sense of style that goes beyond fashion and a memorable voice.
Nothing for granted
Today, tainted by three decades of shoddy copycats and talent shows, we tend to take Whitney Houston for granted, but in the mid-1980s there is nothing for granted in the voice that ties the fullness and athleticism of gospel singing to a control. absolute and the phrasing of a great pop performer. Her ability to move naturally from the middle register to a crystalline falsetto is still astounding: the voice of Whitney Houston from her first two albums (Whitney Houston of 1985 and Whitney 1987) is a wonderful tool, but it is that obsession with control that reveals the first cracks. Houston is trained to control her voice, to tame her afro hair, to smooth the edges of her Newark accent and her character. Behind the dazzling smile and that string of unprecedented successes concentrated between 1985 and 1989 there seems to be nothing but a titanic effort to hide first and foremost from itself.
To the public, especially the African American, things soon start to go wrong: Whitney Houston is considered an Oreo, black outside and white inside, like the famous biscuits. They begin to call her “Whitey” Houston and there are more and more insistent rumors about her sexuality. Whitney does indeed have a secret love life: Robyn Crawford, her childhood friend and confidant of her, had also been her first love. By mutual agreement, the two girls would have decided to end their relationship as early as 1980 because a gay scandal would have meant the end of Whitney’s promising career. Robyn, however, is always present in her life, as creative director, until 2000. Whitney, at 14, had also begun to do coke with her brothers and lived these secrets as a profound shame and a mortal sin that neither her church and neither the industry in which he worked would ever forgive her. Behind Whitney Houston’s perfection and perceived “whiteness” is a whole castle of shame and repression that will lead her to never ask for help and to see her career so carefully crafted slowly crumble until the moment of her tragic death, in the bathtub of a Los Angeles hotel on February 11, 2012.
This struggle against herself and her image that accompanied Whitney Houston throughout her career is described in the book Didn’t we almost have it all – In defense of Whitney Houston by African American critic Gerrick Kennedy, who writes: “Women in pop music are supposed to have a certain look. But black women have a double burden of expectations to carry: they must have a certain look and a certain sound in order to be passed on pop radio, that is, white. The skin should not be too dark, the body should not be too abundant and the hair should not be too curly. And this as far as the aspect is concerned: in music they have to constantly make the tug of war between their ambition and an idea of authenticity that they are required to embody ”. Whitney Houston, Kennedy concludes, in the second half of the 1980s she flew too close to the sun: she could never be white (or black) enough, straight enough, well-bred or thin enough. She was always asking for something more and that’s what, in the end, she crushed her.
In the late eighties Whitney Houston is still on top of the world but on April 13, 1989, during the Soul Train music awards, an award dedicated exclusively to the African American record industry, when the candidates for “best rnb and urban contemporary single” are announced and the name of Whitney Houston is mentioned, the room begins to roar and whistle. The other candidates are Anita Baker (who wins), Karyn White and Vanessa Williams. All three are soul singers who flirt with pop (Baker in particular enjoys wide mainstream success, even in Europe), but they are recognized as authentic, a belonging that Whitney is denied. Among the artists who perform during the event there is also Sheena Easton, Scottish, very white and famous for collaborations with Prince, but the boos are only for “Whitey” Houston. For her it is a very hard blow and that evening of hers will change the course of her life for two reasons: on that occasion she meets her future husband, the rnb singer Bobby Brown (her album of the year for her Don’t be cruel) and will understand that music for her literally has to change.
In agreement with the omnipresent and omnipotent Clive Davis, Whitney Houston puts her hand to the material for her third album, I’m your baby tonight, with a different spirit: we need a more aggressive, more funk, more black sound. Davis, however, is the man of compromise: he does not want a revolution, alongside young and trendy authors and producers like Babyface and LA Reid he expects Whitney to continue to collaborate with the architects of her success: Narada Michael Walden and Michael Masser. Plus, to reconnect Whitney to her soul roots, he sets up very well-targeted collaborations with Stevie Wonder and Luther Vandross. The new team of Whitney Houston is therefore a triumph of compromise: classic ballads and a little dull, but arranged with taste and precision, and new jack swing pieces, the black genre par excellence of those years, which mixed pop melody with slaps of electro funk and touches of house.
Here, Whitney Houston has enormous credit as an interpreter: with the new material her voice also changes, becoming softer and more adult. In I’m your baby tonight Houston uses its middle register a lot more, both in dance pieces and ballads, and when it jumps to the higher notes, to its famous soprano register, it makes it look even more spectacular. Whitney Houston’s vocal performance on this album is truly remarkable: if in the previous records she was too set here, as a true diva, she learns to crack the notes, to dirty the voice to let go at the moment. The gospel gives her the confidence, while remaining in an absolutely pop context, to do something that she would never have dared to do before: improvise. In I’m your baby tonight Whitney finds her awareness and finally takes the path that “auntie Ree”, Aretha Franklin, had also opened for her when she left the church to devote herself to secular music.
The dance pieces of I’m your baby tonight are the ones that appear more dated today: above all the singles like the one that gives the title to the album and the enthralling one My name is not Susan. Anymore it would have been a great single and portends that crunchy vocal rnb that would become Destiny’s Child’s signature a few years later. All the man that I need is an adult and sensual ballad who finally transforms Whitney Houston into a sexual creature. It’s a song that, right from the title, “All the Man I Need,” is a celebration of heterosexuality and monogamy. Remarkable that it is sung by a young woman who hides her bisexuality from the world and even more remarkable is that with the text changed (All the woman that I need) rich Luther Vandross in 1994, also a hidden gay. More than a hymn to heterosexuality and monogamy, All the man that I need risks going down in history as a hymn to repression. The most notable piece on the album is We didn’t know, the duet with Stevie Wonder. The piece, written and produced by Wonder, is the cornerstone on which Whitney Houston’s new “black” direction rests, anchors her firmly in the African American tradition as she projects herself into the pop of the future. About this piece James Hunter in Rolling Stone wrote: “Wonder, who invented that keyboard-based pop that the new generation finds so natural and contemporary, completely understands Whitney Houston. She knows what she likes about the expressiveness of ballads, the passion of rock and the technological rhythm of dance and, as she did with her own music, she puts all this at her service ”.
I’m your baby tonight is a passage album for Whitney Houston: it opens up new musical horizons for her and prepares her for the second phase of her career, that of the immense success of The bodyguard and his most beautiful and successful album, My love is your love. It is an album that today we don’t listen to much anymore but that paved the way for artists like Mariah Carey and Mary J Blige, who in diametrically opposed ways, in the nineties, learned to combine a pop sensibility with the more edgy and modern sounds of rnb and hip hop.
Whitney Houston’s relationship with the public, despite the great successes, has always remained ambivalent and problematic. Although she grew up as an artist she was never put in a position to face her ghosts and to shape her pain. The lower she fell, from 2000 onwards, the more the media mocked her; when Whitney Houston died she was universally considered a wreck, a joke, a junkie who, to earn two pounds, submitted to humiliating reality shows such as the terrible Being Bobby Brown. In a 1991 interview with Ebony magazine, Whitney Houston had it all tragically clear: “Imagine this: you wake up every morning under a magnifying glass. They constantly scan you for something; someone somewhere in the world talks about you badly or well every five seconds. As my friend Michael Jackson says: ‘You want our blood but you don’t want to see our pain’ ”.
Whitney Houston
I’m your baby tonight
Arista / Bmg, 1990