Today is Whitney Houston’s funeral, so I thought I’d devote my Saturday rant+reads to her. To the right, a little sign I made in Whitney’s honor, based on an interview quote of hers. (h/t to paperdoll for introducing me to the church sign generator.)
Here’s a little list of names that I’d like to run by you…
Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Janet Jackson, MC Hammer, Paula Abdul’s “Shut Up and Dance ,” and the Wayne’s World soundtrack (just for Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody alone).
What do they have in common you ask? Well in this self-centered little corner of the universe, all of the above were a wee Wonk’s very first music purchases with her very own pocket money. (Oh, yes I did just use the third person with my pseudonym. I really couldn’t give less of a frig about obeying those kind of blogger Do’s and Don’ts.)
Anyhow, these artists–along with a complimentary audio cassette that came with my Dad’s ’86 Oldsmobile–made up the bulk of my earliest music collection. (That Oldsmobile freebie was a damn good compilation, too, btw. Everything from Fur Elise to Cyndi Lauper.)
I’m clearly a child of the eighties. And, I still have the tapes I bought of Whitney, Michael, Madge, and Janet to prove it. Also the Oldsmobile tape… though it is nearly entirely defunct (B-side and A-side) from so much overplay on my ridiculously pink walkman back in the day.
Point of all that nostalgia being, I literally grew up with Whitney et al.
Madonna’s still kicking it, and Janet’s doing her thing, too. But, what the hell happened to the other half of my childhood?
When I was entering junior high, the Bodyguard came out…and of course I bought the soundtrack and crooned “I Will Always Love You” in front of the mirror, bathroom singer-style. But, the other song I remember singing almost as much?
Whitney’s cover of Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman.”
That was the Aretha Franklin “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”/”Natural Woman” anthem of my preadolescence–not to mention the choir girl way of singing Meredith Brook’s “I’m a bitch, I’m a lover, I’m a child, I’m a mother…” as well as a lot easier for a twelve year old to grasp than a Tori Amos album (goddess love Tori–I do! but her lyrics are up there in the clouds…)
Whitney’s “I’m Every Woman” was also just a smidge before I would be a freshman in high school and the Riot grrrl bands, Liz Phair’s Exile Out of Guyville, etc. would explode in the mainstream.
I’m Every Woman was the song a little girly-Wonk-in-the-making *needed* to hear and sing right at that moment in time. And, yes, it’s all about the girl being like I Dream of Jeannie in a bottle, making her master’s wishes come true. That’s not really the part I listened to when Whitney sang it though… Here’s what I heard her sing/emphasize–the refrain that played through my mind:
I’m every woman,
It’s all in me.
Those lyrics were a burst of girl power. A woman-of-color girl power!
I was a shy nerdy Indian girl who went through the worst of bullying during those junior high years. But, whenever I turned on my walkman at home and started belting out “I’m every woman, it’s all in me…,” I felt a little stronger.
I’ve also seen the human costs of anxiety, depression, and addiction, up close and personal. Every nook and cranny of my immediate and extended family has been affected by one and/or the other. Chances are at least a nook or cranny somewhere in yours has been affected, too.
Mental health care is a right.
Mental health equity is not just about money or access, as we’ve seen, even the uber-wealthy are hardly immune.
Mental health equity is about breaking down the stigma so that people who are self-destructing can get help without having to feel like it’s a personal failing. The mind isn’t outside of the body. Mental health problems are not personal human failings anymore than pneumonia is.
Whitney’s personal successes and personal struggles are all of ours. Her premature death is our premature death. We as a society need to check ourselves before we wreck ourselves and all our national treasures along with.
Okay I’m gonna get off my soapbox, and leave you with a few musical+political links and snippets to chew on…
“I prefer to stay on the sidelines. I genuinely believe an artist [is] supposed to be the canary in the coal mine, and you’re better off with a certain distance from the seat of power.”
Springsteen said he still supports Obama but expressed disappointment in his handling of the job market and home foreclosures and disapproved of the attention Obama paid to corporations rather than the middle class.
“I would like to have seen more activism in job creation sooner than it came. I would like to have seen people helped out, seen some of these [home] foreclosures stopped somehow,” Springsteen said.
Springsteen said Obama was “more friendly to corporations than I thought he would be, [and] there’s not as many middle-class or working-class voices heard in the administration as I thought there would be.”
But Springsteen did send a little praise Obama’s way, saying, “He kept GM alive, which was incredibly important to Detroit and Michigan, and he got the health care law passed, although I wish there had been a public option and didn’t leave the citizens victims of the insurance companies. He killed Osama bin Laden, which was extremely important. He brought some sanity to the top level of government.”
Obama was joined by the soul singer at a Democratic fundraiser on Thursday, a month after the president launched into a brief, impromptu version of Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” at New York’s Apollo Theater.
Obama thanked Green, prompting a member of the audience to shout, “Give us a verse!” The president declined to sing this time, telling about 70 campaign donors that he “took a chance at the Apollo and I’m not going to take a chance again.”
“After re-election I might go on tour with the good reverend — be his opening act,” Obama said.
But he warned, “I don’t want to lose any further votes because of my singing voice.”
During his performance, Cornell also performed Bob Marley’s Redemption Song: a couple of numbers from his ex-band Audioslave, Ground Zero and Wide Awake; John Lennon’s Imagine; and Nick Lowe’s (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding.
But it was with his finale that Cornell truly floored the audience, belting out the Dolly Parton-penned song that Houston turned into a classic when she sang it in the 1992 film The Bodyguard.
Voters of America, President Obama has made you a mix.
The president shared a Spotify playlist on his Facebook page Thursday: 29 tunes that he’ll be pumping on the campaign trail between now and Nov. 6. There are songs from artists you’d expect (Bruce Springsteen), artists you wouldn’t (Ricky Martin) and artists that are actually from Canada (Arcade Fire.)
And while candidates have been playing music on the stump since the days when doing so required a brass band, this feels different. We’re being invited into a courtship ritual as old as cassette technology. This is a collection of songs designed to make the recipient fall in love with the sender.
Only, Obama has a vast and varied electorate to woo — and that means his playlist does a lot of herky-jerky genre jumping. The results are not all swoon-worthy. Florence + the Machine’s melodramatic pop bristles up against country duo Montgomery Gentry. The beatific falsetto of Curtis Mayfield reminds us how awful Ray LaMontagne is. And for some reason, there’s an Electric Light Orchestra song. In speeches, the president has cited the plight of American farmers and factory workers. Now he feels the pain of America’s wedding DJs.
And so does his staff. On Spotify, the mix is subtitled like so: “The official 2012 playlist includes picks by the campaign staff — including a few of President Obama’s favorites.” A spokesperson for the Obama campaign clarified in an e-mail that the president didn’t choose the songs; they were suggested by staff members and volunteers.
As the obituaries roll in and the tributes pour out about Whitney Houston’s ability to hit those celebrated and “magical” high notes, surely the most overlooked of her many achievements as an artist is that she is perhaps the first black female artist to take the technical virtuosity of her skills culled in the church and successfully transpose them onto Arista-industry driven, market-tested Top 40 pop arrangements. Whereas even the Supremes worked their way up through a Motor City black-owned business that willed them to global stardom against the odds, and whereas a whole slew of “niche” artists (Natalie Cole on the R&B charts, Donna Summer on the Giorgio Moroder Euro-disco circuit) made the leap to the center, it was Whitney who emerged at the very center of ’80s pop and then subtly and yet fundamentally changed its landscape forever. She made the aesthetics of black female vocalizing once and for all not only mainstream (as Aretha Franklin had done in the late ’60s by way of her uncompromising Muscle Shoals soul) but also accessible to the masses, across age groups (the very young and the old who maybe didn’t groove to “Bad Girls” at Studio 54; the teens and 20-somethings who saw a Seventeen magazine model girlfriend in the singer), and across racial groups, by delivering the good news of the gospel melisma in shiny pop music deemed “universal” rather than “distinctly African-American.”
[…]
Drawn as some may be to the tales told by gossip folk coming out in droves, the more compelling story of Whitney Houston resides in a voice that raises above the din of US magazine and E! network chatter and holds for us the history of post–civil rights era womanhood as it defiantly, regally and audaciously weaves its way through a world of both legislated racial equality and lingering systemic discrimination. Even in that most iconic of moments, the 1991 Superbowl “Star-Spangled Banner” performance, the woman with the imposing three-octave range would complicate the fraught symbolic meaning of that patriotic ritual by virtue of her sheer vocal power.
When I volunteered to live-blog the awards shows this year, I could never have imagined I would be writing this round-up in memoriam of Whitney Houston for Grammy night. Via Spin Magazine, Whitney Houston’s Four-Decade History at the Grammy Awards:
Click to go to Spin Mag... Whitney Houston at her first Grammy Awards in 1986. (Photo: Ron Galella Collection/Getty Images)
On February 25, 1986, a 22-year-old Whitney Houston made her first appearance at the Grammy Awards. She’d picked up three nominations for her debut album, 1985’s Whitney Houston, and “Saving All My Love for You” beat tracks by Madonna, Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, and Linda Ronstadt to win Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. She took the stage that night in a ruffled red dress with a wall of hair sprayed to attention atop her head, and blew the doors off the Shrine Auditorium as her mother, Cissy Houston, cheered her on. One of our generation’s hugest voices made a stunning debut at Music’s Biggest Night.
It wasn’t scandalous by tabloid standards, but it was a rebellious act for the young women at the Mount Saint Dominic Academy, a small all-girls Catholic high school in New Jersey. Whitney Houston, class of 1981, sometimes wore mismatched socks and rolled up her sleeves.
The mischievous gospel singer would then push the maroon-colored dress code just a bit further. She would “roll up her little skirt, just a little bit above the knees, and wouldn’t care if she got a detention,” said Dr. Maria Pane, who lives in Lutherville and sat next to Houston in high school home room.
A day after the 48-year-old Houston’s unexpected death on Saturday in Beverly Hills, Calif., left the music world in mourning, Pane fondly recalled her old school days in Caldwell, N.J., and the unpretentious Houston, whom she described as an “ordinary high school girl, just like all of us.”
1979: Whitney juggled singing with her studies at a Catholic girls school in New Jersey Getty 1979: Whitney spent her teen years accompanying mum Cissy on nightclub tours, occasionally joining her on stage Getty
Secondly–before I turn this over to the comment section for some Grammy live-blogging/OPEN thread–I’d like to leave you with Whitney’s Grammy debut in 1986…
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