Whitney
When I was eight, my mother gave me The Bodyguard soundtrack on CASSETTE TAPE. If I remember correctly, it came in an EASTER BASKET. Do you miss the 90s yet? Because I do.
Apparently I had been romping around the house singing I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU at the top of my lungs and on the playground at school, so I suppose my mom wanted me to expand my repertoire to QUEEN OF THE NIGHT, I’M EVERY WOMAN, and my personal favorite, RUN TO YOU. To say that this album had an influence on me is a vast understatement. It confirmed my love of singing and my earliest knowledge of FEMINISM. “I’m Every Woman / It’s all in me / Anything you want done baby/ I do it naturally.”
(Also: Houston was 29 when she made The Bodyguard. To me she always seemed about 45, or even, ageless - like a goddess. Like Cleopatra.)
This past Saturday I was in a foul mood - I had been working all afternoon researching a book project and I’d finished feeling as if I had wasted my time. I should have spent the afternoon practicing my arias. As my boyfriend and I walked to get something for dinner, I overheard someone in bar yell, “Whitney Houston is dead!” The news made me so sad. In many ways her death was not a surprise. Whitney had ruined her voice over the years (drugs, Bobby Brown, etc) - when I had heard her sing a few years ago I was shocked at how much she had diminished, both in strength and warmth.
A few nights ago, Dateline showed a segment from Houston’s interview with Barbara Walters in 1993. In it, Walters asks Houston if she always wanted to be a singer - and Houston responds that she never had a choice, she was just born a singer, that her voice was a gift from God. These sort of things are an incredible responsibility - if we let them fall by the wayside we can lose faith in ourselves.
Thank you, Whitney, for that reminder, and thank you mostly for your gorgeous pipes. RIP.
