This is by way of a redress for this
previous post that, though cruel in its tone, made a valid enough point to include - that Whitney could have been a better artist if she had curtailed her excessive vocal styling. But I think there is a deeper understanding to be gained from a sympathetic examination of her singing voice. In this clip (which has been doing the rounds since her death earlier this year, but which I have only just found) we hear the isolated vocal track from her enormously successful record from 1985, 'How Will I Know' (the third single release from her debut album). Ostensibly a song about anxiety over the requital of affection from a potential suitor, the excess of emotion signalled - tremulous fear, near frenzy - suggests an existential predicament that no lover could ever hope to resolve. Which might seem normal for popular musical approaches, and certainly those that draw on the tradition that emerged in the mid 1960s from the Blues and more pertinently for this argument, Spiritual and Gospel music (which addresses issues of salvation and redemption of a cosmic nature - Soul music has always been about marrying the depth of religious longing to the concerns of secular courtship and partnering, and so capturing the deeper emotional currents that a consumerist culture fails to satisfy with its ephemeral rewards - including relationships). But here Whitney's voice signifies something even more. Born into a middle-class family of great singers:
Cissy Houston her mother,
Dionne Warwick and
Dee Dee Warwick her cousins, meant she was always going to be expected to succeed with talents that were evident from an early age (expressed in the traditional way at church gatherings). And, crucially, was going to be expected to embody the virtues of the good home and values it instills - a positive role model for the sons and daughters of black Americans now claiming their rightful place in the world after a long Civil Rights struggle. Which on the surface she did at first - a kind of good girl to her contemporary, Madonna's, bad girl artistic persona (with also ramifications of substance over style - paradoxically Whitney, who was often accused of the opposite, once represented the triumph of actual talent over showmanship vis-a-vis Madonna, who could never really sing and got where she got by any means necessary). But signs of despair (engendered by such conformity?) were always present in Whitney's songs, and in the way she interpreted a lyric - like a secret voice calling out from behind a sonic mask of gloopy mush. It's there in another early hit '
I Wanna Dance With Somebody', with its undertone of lostness in a world of youthful fun (where is the love?) and its startling in the above track stripped of its musical accompaniment, which overlays the lyric with a
breezy rhythm and uplifting synthesiser, as was the mode of the day. A tonal mannerism manifesting from the heart of a singularised instance of a general spiritual malaise. She told us more than many of us cared to hear.
