A Confession About Whitney Houston, 1963-2012

I haven't always had the nicest things to say about Whitney Houston.

In the late '90s, as I reached my late teen years, my taste in music had not yet quite expanded.  I was a devotee mainly of modern and classic rock: my library was filled with Alice in Chains, Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Tool, and whatever new flash-in-the-pan groups there were. (Yes, there was a time when Creed didn't automatically suck, and Nickelback was an interesting new band out of Canada.)

Though I still got my new stuff primarily from the radio at that point, I was still one who scoffed at Top 40-ness.  The mainstream of hip-hop, R&B, and pop that the majority of my high school compatriots listened to was execrable to me.  I was growing up in the time of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, the Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync, and any other corporate-pop teenybopper that middle-aged men in suits were shoving into the faces of unassuming young people.  I was one of the only ones listening to actually good music, and everyone else was listening to dull, pre-packaged shit. (All that stuff still is shit, but since my high school years I've learned to differentiate good shit from bad shit.)

And then in 1999, two kids shot up their high school in Colorado, and the ticking time bomb exploded.  Parents around the country erupted in an all-out war on the music that the killers supposedly listened to.  This was my music too, and I resented essentially being punished for something someone else did.  I listened to this music, and I turned out fine.  Just how is rock music to blame for some dumb person's actions?

This led to a general antipathy toward all "safe" music.  Anything "lite" I viewed as an attack.  It was a tactic.  It was middle America saying to me, "You're unable to think for yourself!  Here, listen to this treacle so you don't hurt anyone!"

Whitney Houston fell under the umbrella of "safe" music.

This is not to say that she made bad music, like Britney or Christina or the BSBs or 'N Sync.  I never really hated her music, but only the fact that she was downright wholesome and family-friendly.  She sang songs about love and acted in chick flicks.  She was the kind of singer of which my grandmother and aunts would say, "Oh, I like her." And so I had to disavow her.  This was war, after all.

And so I have to admit that I wore a visible smirk when it was revealed that she was a drug addict.  It wasn't merely schadenfreude.  Whitney missed gigs, cancelled shows, and faltered when she did show up.  She was allegedly dazed, and would mess up her songs.  This was the sort of stuff that was usually pinned on my people.  My music was supposedly made by a bunch of drug-addled ruffians.  And here was their wholesome, family-friendly singer, their Whitney Houston, who turned out to be not only an addict but a piping hot mess, steaming before our very eyes.  I found it very amusing indeed.  I had won this battle.

I was wrong.  For one thing, it said nothing for my own musical preferences that Ms. Houston was as big a train wreck as they were.  It's a weak debater who seeks merely to muddy the waters rather than prove himself right.  The argument that "Look, Whitney does it too" only shows that the hedonism of the drug culture invades Lite-FM as well, and is not limited to Layne Staley.  I had tried to use Whitney Houston to tell the buck-passing parents of the country that there was plenty bad influence to go around.  It was a bad argument; at worst it proved that I had already accepted that my musicians of choice were exactly what mainstream America claimed they were.

I was also wrong to lump her in with the rest of the "safe" music of the time.  For all her faults, Whitney Houston was an artist.  Her music wasn't great all of the time--I still maintain a general distaste for light R&B--but it was real.  Amid all the corporate concoctions we called pop music in the late '80s and '90s, she emerged as a human person who made music that was her own, not the creation of the music industry.  And she did on occasion record a song that just rocked ("How Will I Know" is a song I unabashedly love).

Time heals all wounds, and as the mainstream of America has generally softened its attitude toward rock music and its cultural partners (the music hasn't really changed, while the video games and movies have gotten much more violent), I softened too.  There's no more culture war; our side won.  As I began to open myself up to the "safe" shit of the day (I own a selected few BSB and 'N Sync songs), I gave Whitney another chance too.  And while still not really my taste, she was still pretty great in her heyday.  Her downfall is one of the great tragedies of the musical world.

I am very sorry to have ever looked at Whitney Houston as one enemy pawn dispensed with.  She was too good to have been reduced to that.