I didn't intend for my first post to be an obituary, but the death of Whitney Houston moved me to write. She was one of the biggest superstars of my childhood. I was too young to appreciate her first few albums, but they were ubiquitous for years. When The Bodyguard soundtrack exploded in 1992, Whitney instantly became a living legend. Her voice could be alternately imploring, smooth, angelic, resonant, and downright arrogant. She was certainly a pop creation: completely commercial, with a demure image carefully honed by Clive Davis and her management, but devastatingly talented and unforgettable all the same. Whitney's singing transcended so many of her mediocre pop ballads -- and some great ones, too -- until all that mattered was that celestial voice. In my mind, pop music has never known a voice so great, and might never again.
If you've been following Houston in the past fifteen years, all you might remember is the sad decline, the drug use, her often frayed and haggard appearance. The soft-spoken and graceful twenty-something Whitney became a drug addict. Her voice showed signs of strain. By 2009, with the release of
I Look To You, her voice was obviously damaged, and she constantly sounded out of breath.
Whitney was unfortunate to spin out of control during the reality TV boom. The genre, and the cultural mindset that reproduces it, demands that we laugh at the humiliation and degradation of other people. And laugh we did. We laughed at Whitney's drug addiction, her bizarre Diane Sawyer interview ("crack is wack"), her manic behavior on Bobby's reality show
Being Bobby Brown. Of course, not everyone found it funny. But we are all implicated in a media environment that cannibalizes the famous and exploits their darkest moments to sell ad space. We share responsibility for the way our culture trivializes addiction. This may sound like a warmed-over, naive argument, an issue people only care about when famous people destroy themselves. But now more than ever, our mainstream media and social networks cultivate an environment of callousness and cruelty that seems to know no limit.
I can't understand people who make jokes about Whitney's cause of death or claim that she did it to herself. I suppose these people imagine themselves more clever and more jaded than the rest of us. I do understand, though, people's frustration when the deaths of celebrities upstage almost every other story. A celebrity's demise does not matter more than the tens of thousands dead from African famine or the brutality in Syria. At the same time, the fact that other people are suffering does not nullify the sadness we feel about Houston (or Amy Winehouse or Michael Jackson). These are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to care deeply about the poor and the persecuted while feeling sadness at the death of a superstar. Surely, something about Houston resonated with millions of people. Based on my Facebook news feed -- an unscientific sample, I know -- Whitney's music and persona sparked deep, unexplainable feelings in many of us. Perhaps we share nostalgia for a time long since past, or a voice we'll never hear again. Or maybe her music came to define a specific moment in a person's life. Maybe we just mourn for Whitney's wasted talent, because we once knew her greatness and watched it all disappear.
