Early in her career her songs were called You Give Good Love, I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) and The Greatest Love Of All.
The demands of love corresponded to the extravagant use of her singing talent, which was of a beguiling naturalness and was perhaps driven too spectacularly through the octaves instead of glowing calmly in ballads.
First Family Of Gospel
On August 9, 1963, Whitney was born in Newark, New Jersey to Cissy Houston; Dionne Warwick was her cousin, Aretha Franklin was her godmother. So this was the First Family of Gospel – Whitney singing in her mother’s performances, then with Chaka Khan in 1979, later with the group Material; at the same time she worked as a model. In 1983 she was signed to record mogul Clive Davis.
In 1984 the single “Hold Me” was released as a trial balloon, a duet with the great Teddy Pendergrass. Houston’s debut album came at a time when the music industry was thinking in terms of going platinum and selling millions. “Whitney Houston” was produced in 1985 in a correspondingly streamlined form for the mainstream market and met expectations: 13 million copies sold in the USA was a kind of natural phenomenon back then.
It’s safe to say the consultants got it right with Whitney (1987) and the moderately modernized I’m Your Baby Tonight (1990). In between was the hit “One Moment In Time,” the song for the Seoul Olympics in 1988. In 1991, Whitney sang the national anthem at the final of the Super Bowl and was definitively America’s Golden Girl.
The following year, she even triumphed with a ridiculed performance in the film The Bodyguard, a smack starring Kevin Costner, to which she lent surprisingly bittersweet moments, laying her diva between conceited bitch and vulnerable doe—an accolade she arguably did, too succeeded all too well in life.
From the soundtrack of the hugely successful film comes the song “I Will Always Love You”, the favorite song of a generation of young (and not quite young) women and the pinnacle of Houstonian vocal artistry. Even the solid dancefloor song “I’m Every Woman” seemed banal.
Perhaps it was marrying good-for-nothing Bobby Brown that turned Whitney’s life upside down. “I’m the devil myself,” she once said – but the devil made the liquor and probably also cocaine and crack. Years later, private films were traded from the bedroom, a domestic worker I felt indecently harassed by Houston. Such accusations are common – but only where they fall on fertile ground.
Whitney Houston’s film career was ill-fated with “Waiting To Exhale” (1995) and “The Preacher’s Wife” (1995), while “Wife’s” brilliant gospel soundtrack was widely ignored. It was not until 1998 that an album was released with “My Love Is Your Love”. The slow decline can not only be seen in the sales figures, but above all in the reports in the gossip press and on television.
Since 1993, Whitney was the mother of one child, daughter Bobbi Kristina, who died in 2015 in a manner almost similar to her mother’s. Again and again you saw photos of the deranged singer who had been beaten by her husband and was very emaciated. In 2006, Houston auditioned for confessor Oprah Winfrey and broke up with Bobby Brown.
Disastrous tour
Although the album “I Look To You” had died down in 2009, Whitney Houston embarked on a tour that ended in disaster. Snippets of her failing voice were soon circulating on the Internet, and the singer was booed and laughed at at the concert in Berlin. The audience watched the tragedy in amazement, the press was helpless when it was dismantled on the open stage.
Whitney never recovered. The night before the Grammy Awards, she was reportedly going to attend a party hosted by Clive Davis in Los Angeles. She was found dead in a room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Saturday afternoon.
But Whitney Houston, once one of the most gifted singers of her time, had left the world long before that. She had almost everything.
The Whitney Houston obituary is an article from the RS archives
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