That Stupid Club

The fond­est mem­ory I have had of Whit­ney Hous­ton is not her famous hits, her scan­dalous news dur­ing her fall from grace… and espe­cially not ‘The Body­guard’ movie with Kevin Costner.

It hap­pens to be this inter­est­ing chap­ter about her in Bret Eas­ton Ellis’s amaz­ing novel, “Amer­i­can Psy­cho” which is copied below.  Thought it would be an good way to pay homage to the late singer.

RIP (1963 — 2012)

Whit­ney Hous­ton burst onto the music scene in 1985 with her self-titled LP which had four num­ber one hit sin­gles on it, includ­ing “The Great­est Love of All,” “You Give Good Love” and “Sav­ing All My Love for You,” plus it won a Grammy Award for best pop vocal per­for­mance by a female and two Amer­i­can Music Awards, one for best rhythm and blues sin­gle and another for best rhythm and blues video. She was also cited as best new artist of the year by Bill­board and by Rolling Stone mag­a­zine. With all this hype one might expect the album to be an anti­cli­mac­tic, lack­lus­ter affair, but the sur­prise is that Whit­ney Hous­ton (Arista) is one of the warmest, most com­plex and alto­gether sat­is­fy­ing rhythm and blues records of the decade and Whit­ney her­self has a voice that defies belief. From the ele­gant, beau­ti­ful photo of her on the cover of the album (in a gown by Gio­vanne De Maura) and its fairly sexy coun­ter­part on the back (in a bathing suit by Norma Kaman) one knows that this isn’t going to be a blandly pro­fes­sional affair; the record is smooth but intense and Whitney’s voice leaps across so many bound­aries and is so ver­sa­tile (though she’s mainly a jazz singer) that it’s hard to take in the album on a first lis­ten­ing. But you won’t want to. You’ll want to savor it over many.

It opens with “You Give Good Love” and “Think­ing About You,” both pro­duced and arranged by Kashif, and they emanate warm, lush jazz arrange­ments but with a con­tem­po­rary syn­the­sized beat and though they’re both really good songs, the album doesn’t get kick­ing until “Some­one for Me” which was pro­duced by Jer­maine Jack­son, where Whit­ney sings long­ingly against a jazz-disco back­ground and the dif­fer­ence between her long­ing and the spright­li­ness of the song is very mov­ing. The bal­lad “Sav­ing All My Love for You” is the sex­i­est, most roman­tic song on the record. It also has a killer sax­o­phone solo by Tom Scott and one can hear the influ­ences of six­ties girl-group pop in it (it was cowrit­ten by Gerry Gof­fin) but the six­ties girl groups were never this emo­tional or sexy (or as well pro­duced) as this song is. “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do” is a glo­ri­ous duet with Jer­maine Jack­son (who also pro­duced it) and just one exam­ple of how sophis­ti­cated lyri­cally this album is. The last thing it suf­fers from is a paucity of decent lyrics which is what usu­ally hap­pens when a singer doesn’t write her own mate­r­ial and has to have her pro­ducer choose it. But Whit­ney and com­pany have picked well here.

The dance sin­gle “How Will I Know” (my vote for best dance song of the 1980s) is a joy­ous ode to a girl’s ner­vous­ness about whether another guy is inter­ested in her. It’s got a great key­board riff and it’s the only track on the album pro­duced by wun­derkind pro­ducer Narada Michael Walden. My own per­sonal favorite bal­lad (aside from ‘The Great­est Love of All”—her crown­ing achieve­ment) is “All at Once” which is about how a young woman real­izes all at once her lover is fad­ing away from her and it’s accom­pa­nied by a gor­geous string arrange­ment. Even though noth­ing on the album sounds like filler, the only track that might come close is “Take Good Care of My Heart,” another duet with Jer­maine Jack­son. The prob­lem is that it strays from the album’s jazz roots and seems too influ­enced by 1980s dance music.

But Whitney’s tal­ent is restored with the over­whelm­ing “The Great­est Love of All,” one of the best, most pow­er­ful songs ever writ­ten about self-preservation and dig­nity. From the first line (Michael Masser and Linda Creed are cred­ited as the writ­ers) to the last, it’s a state-of-the-art bal­lad about believ­ing in your­self. It’s a pow­er­ful state­ment and one that Whit­ney sings with a grandeur that approaches the sub­lime. Its uni­ver­sal mes­sage crosses all bound­aries and instills one with the hope that it’s not too late for us to bet­ter our­selves, to act kinder. Since it’s impos­si­ble in the world we live in to empathize with oth­ers, we can always empathize with our­selves. It’s an impor­tant mes­sage, cru­cial really, and it’s beau­ti­fully stated on this album.

Her sec­ond effort, Whit­ney (Arista, 1987), had four num­ber one sin­gles, “I Wanna Dance with Some­body,” “So Emo­tional,” “Didn’t We Almost Have It All?” and “Where Do Bro­ken Hearts Go?” and was mostly pro­duced by Narada Michael Walden and though it’s not as seri­ous an effort as Whit­ney Hous­ton it’s hardly a vic­tim of Sopho­more Slump. It starts off with the bouncy; dance­able “I Wanna Dance with Some­body (Who Loves Me)” which is in the same vein as the last album’s irre­press­ible “How Will I Know.” This is fol­lowed by the sen­su­ous “Just the Lonely Talk­ing Again” and it reflects the seri­ous jazz influ­ence that per­me­ated the first album and one can also sense a new­found artis­tic matu­rity in Whitney’s voice—she did all the vocal arrange­ments on this album—and this is all very evi­dent on “Love Will Save the Day” which is the most ambi­tious song Whitney’s yet per­formed. It was pro­duced by Jelly­bean Ben­itez and it pul­sates with an uptempo inten­sity and like most of the songs on this album it reflects a grownup’s aware­ness of the world we all live in. She sings and we believe it. This is quite a change from the softer, little-girl-lost image that was so appeal­ing on the first album.

She projects an even more adult image on the Michael Masser-produced “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” a song about meet­ing up with a long-lost lover and let­ting him know your feel­ings about the past affair, and it’s Whit­ney at her most poetic. And as on most of the bal­lads there’s a gor­geous string arrange­ment. “So Emo­tional” is in the same vein as “How Will I Know” and “I Wanna Dance with Some­body” but it’s even more rock-influenced and, like all the songs on Whit­ney, played by a ter­rific backup stu­dio band with Narada on drum machine, Wolter Afanasi­eff on the syn­the­sizer and synth bass, Cor­rado Rus­tici on synth gui­tar, and some­one listed as Bongo Bob on per­cus­sion pro­gram­ming and drum sam­pling. “Where You Are” is the only song on the album pro­duced by Kashif and it bears his indeli­ble imprint of professionalism—it has a smooth, gleam­ing sound and sheen to it with a funky sax solo by Vin­cent Henry. It sounded like a hit sin­gle to me (but then all the songs on the album do) and I won­dered why it wasn’t released as one.

“Love Is a Con­tact Sport” is the album’s real surprise—a big-sounding, bold, sexy num­ber that, in terms of pro­duc­tion, is the album’s cen­ter­piece, and it has great lyrics along with a good beat. It’s one of my favorites. On “You’re Still My Man” you can hear how clearly Whitney’s voice is like an instrument—a flaw­less, warm machine that almost over­pow­ers the sen­ti­ment of her music, but the lyrics and the melodies are too dis­tinc­tive, too strong to let any singer, even one of Whitney’s cal­iber, over­shadow them. “For the Love of You” shows off Narada’s bril­liant drum pro­gram­ming capa­bil­i­ties and its jazzy mod­ern feel harks back not only to pur­vey­ors of mod­ern jazz like Michael Jack­son and Sade but also to other artists, like Miles Davis, Paul But­ter­field and Bobby McFerrin.

“Where Do Bro­ken Hearts Go” is the album’s most pow­er­ful emo­tional state­ment of inno­cence lost and try­ing to regain the safety of child­hood. Her voice is as lovely and con­trolled as it ever has been and it leads up to “I Know Him So Well,” the most mov­ing moment on the record because it’s first and fore­most a duet with her mother, Cissy. It’s a bal­lad about… who?—a lover shared? a long-lost father?—with a com­bi­na­tion of long­ing, regret, deter­mi­na­tion and beauty that ends the album on a grace­ful, per­fect note. We can expect new things from Whit­ney (she made a stun­ning gift to the 1988 Olympics with the bal­lad “One Moment in Time”) but even if we didn’t, she would remain the most excit­ing and orig­i­nal black jazz voice of her generation.