RIP Whitney

Sorry she died, but I have an affinity for singers, not belters. And I'm not gonna buy into the bullshit tributes that begin with, "She opened the door for blah blah blah." R & B was healthy and flourishing long before she came around. Unfortunately the biggest side effect of her death is, again, playing to death one of the worst songs ever written, I Will Always Love You.

To be fair, Bobby Brown's hairdo at the time was incomparable, giving him a triangular slanted skull which skateboarders, to this day, dream of rolling on.

I beg to differ about "I Will Always Love You" - it's not a bad song, Whitney just gave it a bad performance. I used to agree with you, but then I heard it sung by its writer (Dolly Parton) and I got it.

I checked out the original version of that song too and stand by my conviction. It's Dolly's worst song as well.

check out alex chiltons version. its on youtube. i dont know how to link it on here.

J.D. Considine said it very well in the Rolling Stone Record Guide:

"Whitney Houston has one of the most powerful and polished voices in popular music, an instrument equally capable of balladic intimacy, gospel exuberance and soulful expression, and she uses it to sell some of the blandest pap on the planet. Imagine if Andrew Wyeth had abandoned oil painting on the assumption that there was more money to be had drawing Garfield cartoons, and you'll have a sense of the waste in Houston's career."

cause of death- oversinging.
too soon for such a bad song but i immediately said this when i heard of her death

She was wonderful and had an amazing voice a long time ago...but a disturbing lack of good material does hamper her career.

It's a bit like finding out that Individually-Wrapped-Sliced-Cheese-Product has been discontinued.

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She outlived Billie Holiday. There is no justice.

There's not even a snowflake's chance in hell that Ms. Bobby Brown is going to get much love from me, so I'm not shocked that the news of her death has generated a rather MOR reaction on this forum.

MOR Divas die every day, I suppose.

"As ye sow, so shall ye reap" I suppose.

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I was a teenaged record store geek in 1985 and (thanks to the cover image) I can distinctly recall the day that her debut album arrived. It didn't initially show up by the box load, but it eventually did. It moved a lot of units. It was on Arista. That was all I needed to know.

The fact that it got far more than its fair share of in-store play did nothing to endear its glossy presence to any of us. After having heard it a few million times, the only musical memory of it that I've opted not to suppress is "Saving All My Love For You."

She had other songs. "How Will I Know?" and "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" are also both indelibly etched in my mind. If you lived through the 80s and worked in a shopping mall record store or turned on MTV, you probably suffer from the same thing.

Whatever happened to Narada Michael Walden® anyway? Was he an actual human being … or an early record-producing computer program?

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Fun wiki factoid: In 2003, the album was ranked number 254 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

I doubt that I'll live to see the day that Rolling Stone will finally be able to release a "500 Greatest Rolling Stone Lists of All Time " list, but that day will inevitably arrive before the sun goes out.

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That cover shot will always be the best thing about that whole album. Say what you like about her lame-assed choice of material … Whitney Houston was crushingly beautiful.

I wish more black women would go with that look. It's very striking. I wish Houston had stayed with it longer than (seemingly) that afternoon.

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Additional Not-Too-Fun-But-Appropriately-Morbid Wiki Factoid: Gary Gross, the photographer who snapped that fetching image of the young Ms. Houston died in November of 2010. He's apparently far more famous for his parentally condoned, borderline-kiddie-porn nudie pics of Brook Shields.

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If the late Ms. Houston gave birth to anything, it'd have to be American Idol and it's screaming legion of aspiring divas. Think about that as an artistic legacy and try not to shudder.

If that weren't bad enough, I see they've listed her soft drink commercials in her filmography on wikipedia.

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Dept. of Did Andrew Wyeth Love Lasagna:

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Imagine if Andrew Wyeth had abandoned oil painting on the assumption that there was more money to be had drawing Garfield cartoons…

Umm. Didn't Wyeth work primarily in watercolors? If that strikes you as nitpicking, we need to talk about which is your favorite Jimmy Page tuba solo.

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Someone needs to interview Steve Kilbey and get his thoughts about his former label-mate. Did they hang out? Irrespective of who was tripping ... what was she like on acid?

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When one is trying to describe a person's vocal gifts as nearly limitless, one often says something like "They could sing the phone book and make it sound incredible."

I guess all this time she might as well have been singing the phone book.


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It's sick how fast time passes. All of this 80s stuff feels like it happened yesterday.


Michael Jackson.
Whitney Houston.

Who'll be the next Lame-80s-Pop-Star to go?

Duran Duran
Richard Marx
Corey Hart! Are you officially on the clock?

> Someone needs to interview Steve Kilbey and get his thoughts about his former label-mate.
> Did they hang out? Irrespective of who was tripping ... what was she like on acid?

Good question. After all, the last time I saw The Church, Kilbey told the crowd about sharing rehab time with Joe Walsh.

> Didn't Wyeth work primarily in watercolors?

According to Wikipedia, yes. (Not nitpicking, IMO; it was just a quote from a music critic.)

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> Didn't Wyeth work primarily in watercolors?

According to Wikipedia, yes. (Not nitpicking, IMO; it was just a quote from a music critic.)

My bad. I'll be sure to attribute the quote to the original source next time. Does anyone happen to have J.D. Considine's e-mail address? The odds are probably very good that he's had his little error pointed out to him on more than a few occasions ... but I'll happily add another to the tally.

Nobody messes with Andrew Wyeth and gets away with it unscathed.

I mean it.

"Mr. Consadine, does that look like oil paint to you? Please. Don't quit your day job."

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You know, after I posted that Whitney Houston thing above, I realized that I'd made a mistake and forgotten to mention one other of her earlier efforts that was still actually on my radar.

Because who could forget ...

... that the children are our future?

Gotta tip my hat to my fellow KRCC DJ Jacob, for playing Material's "Memories" as tribute to the deceased singer on his Sunday show.

When "Saving All My Love for You" first came out back in 85 or whenever it was, I had briefly wondered if Houston was the American version of Sade - someone who would take soul & R&B back to their classic sound rather than the drum machines & synthesizers that dominated at the time. Subsequent songs after that one disabused me of that notion pretty quickly.

Sadly, in the end Houston was an incredibly gifted person but whose ultimate contribution to culture is that the generation she was the primary influence for labors under the misapprehension that "singing" and "ululation" were synonyms. When Christina Aguilera forgot the words to the National Anthem at last year's Super Bowl because she was too busy showing off the fact that she could turn every single syllable into a Tarzan yell, she was merely finishing a version of the song that Houston had begun at the same event 20 years earlier.

The most encouraging thing about the success of Adele is that she's a belter who doesn't seem to think that also requires being a muezzin. Hopefully her official coronation at the Grammys as the reigning Diva of pop music on the same weekend as Houston's sad demise will not end up being merely coincidental, but signals some kind of sea change, where aspiring singers will once again understand that you can sing out and really belt it, baby, but you don't have to turn every word you sing into scales practice.

Oooh, "muezzin". Killer scrabble word

I read a re-cap of the Grammy's in the paper today (from the AP) that touched on how Whitney's death was mentioned during the telecast. The writer's description of Whitney as "one of music's most important artists" made me gag.

One of my earliest memories of Whitney was when "The Greatest Love of All" was ubiquitous on the radio. I was probably 12-13 at the time. My mom had a real problem with the lyrics...the song started out about children being the future, and ended up with the singer going on about nobody taking away her dignity. I remember hearing that George Benson actually wrote the song and mentioned this to my mom, who in response, made a great point that I've always remembered: It doesn't matter who wrote it--if you're singing the words, it's because you agree with them.

My best Whitney-Bobby Brown memory was back in '93 or so when I lived in Miami. I think Whitney was playing a show in town the next night when Bobby showed up at the P-Funk concert I was attending. He got on stage and sang "(Not Just) Knee Deep" w/ the guys.

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Oooh, "muezzin". Killer scrabble word

Fire Up Those Blanks, Children!

(((Only one "Z" in a game of Scrabble)))

I keep thinking that someone should do an update of Detention's "Dead Rock'n'Rollers" ("...they were outta controllers!"). Of course, Whitney's appearance in the song might be stretching the definition of "rock'n'roll" more than a tad...

DEPT. OF TWO DAYS OUT OF IT: So during a meeting today, someone mentioned that Whitney Houston had died and this younger co-worker apparently hadn't heard the news. She freaked a bit and said she was going to have to look it up on the Internet before she'd believe it.

We've never lied to her before. I don't get it.

In a weird way I kinda respect that coworker.