While the rest of the world was busy debating how much worse 13-year-old Rebecca Black’s song “Friday” was than the current situation in Japan or Libya, Cord Jefferson from new media magazine Good was putting things in perspective. “Calling ‘Friday’ disastrous is akin to The New York Review of Books tearing apart The Berenstain Bears,” wrote Cord, “Sure, it doesn’t meet your standards. It’s not for you.”
Then again, a lot of pop songs don’t really have the most thought-provoking lyrics. Leaving aside the fact that Rebecca didn’t write “Friday” (though maybe it would have been better if she had), most of our Top 40 songs are catchy because of – not despite – their repetitiveness. Cord gives the example of Katy Perry’s songs, but honestly compared to some of the crap out there, “Teenage Dream” is friggin’ “Finnegans Wake.” Below, five pop hits with the most stupid lyrics imaginable, and why they are worse for our culture than “Friday.”
1.Ke$ha: “Blah Blah Blah”
Sample lyrics: Blah blah blah/ Think you’ll be getting this/ Nah nah nah/ Not in the back of my/ Car-ar-ar/ If you keep talking that/ Blah blah blah blah blah
Why it’s worse than “Friday”: One time I went to an art show and there was a painting for sale that was basically just white canvas spray-painted with the words “Blah blah blah.” It was the laziest piece of crap I’ve ever seen. I don’t care if it’s trying to make some commentary on our “Who gives a shit” generation. You’re the artist, you should give a shit. Try harder.
2. Lady Gaga: “Boys, Boys, Boys”
Sample lyrics: Boys, boys, boys/ We like boys in cars/ Boys, boys, boys/ Buy us drinks in bars/ Boys, boys, boys/ With hairspray and denim / Boys, boys, boys / We love them/ We love them
Why it’s worse than “Friday”: Because Gaga writes her own songs (this one was based on Motley Crue’s “Girls, Girls, Girls”), and if she spent half as much time thinking of lyrics as she did thinking about dressing up like a drag queen from Mars that has started to hatch, we might get more “Bad Romances” and less “Telephones.”
3. Justin Bieber: ” Baby”
Sample lyrics: Baby, baby, baby ohh/ Like baby, baby, baby noo/ Like baby, baby, baby ohh/ I thought you’d always be mine
Why it’s worse than “Friday”: Because when Rebecca sings about days of the week, she gets universally criticized. When Bieber sings the word “Baby” approximately 100 times, he gets nominated for a Grammy. At least “Friday” could be used in elementary schools as a learning tool.
4. Baha Men: “Who Let the Dogs Out?”
Sample lyrics: Seriously? No. You go ahead and Google it if you can’t remember.
Why it’s worse than “Friday”: Hey, say what you want about Rebecca Black’s song, but at least it has a cohesive narrative structure. This is just some crap about dogs but also about girls having a bone (like a boner?), yet for some reason it was a Billboard hit and hotly contested by both the Mets and Seattle Mariners as being “their song.” (Which was “a little like scientists arguing over who discovered a deadly virus,” according to ESPN.com.)
5. The Black Eyed Peas: Every song in their catalogue
Sample lyrics: “What you gon’ do with all that junk? All that junk inside that trunk?/I’ma get, get, get, get, you drunk, Get you love drunk off my hump.”
“No, no, no, no, don’t phunk with my heart”
“Imma be, Imma be – Imma imma Imma be/ Imma be, Imma be – Imma imma Imma be/ Imma be, Imma be – Imma imma Imma be/ Imma be be be be Imma imma be/ Imma be be be be Imma imma be/ Imma be be be be Imma imma be”
(I could go on, but I’ll spare you.)
Why it’s worse than “Friday”: I have yet to hear a Black Eyed Peas song that features a chorus of real words that weren’t made up during one of Fergie’s meth binges.
With her armload of Grammys, three nominations for tonight’s Brit Awards and a stack of platinum albums, England’s Adele reigns over pop music at home and abroad. “Someone Like You,” the closing track of her 17-million-selling album “21,” is arguably the past year’s signature song, widely hailed – as is all her music – for its “authenticity.” But beyond its piano-and-voice starkness, it sounds like, well … 1992.
The song’s quiet/loud structure, its nakedly personal lyrics, and Adele’s aggressive, cathartic yawp in the chorus are all hallmarks of grunge-era rock. And authenticity, that elusive concept, is what Kurt Cobain was said to embody 20 years ago. As a resolutely working-class singer who penned songs about psychological pain and refused to conform to a stereotypical pop-star image, he was seen as a beacon of “realness” in an era of manufactured pop. The same could be said of Adele. If her success is any gauge, we’re entering a new era where displays of “authenticity” will be de rigueur. Let’s just hope it doesn’t do away with fun.
The early ‘90s fetishization of authenticity arose at a time when R&B-flavored dance confections by C&C Music Factory and Paula Abdul topped the charts, and even the über-sincere U2 embraced electronics and irony. Revelations that Milli Vanilli had lip-synced their way to a best new artist Grammy led to album-burning and an S.O.S. for artists who believed there was nothing better than the real thing. Enter Kurt Cobain.
Nirvana’s breakthrough single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” was an attempt to emulate the arty rock of the iconoclastic Pixies, but it was received as the raw sound of disaffected youth. Cobain bought into his own mythology: He professed to feel “a duty to warn the kids of false music that’s claiming to be underground,” citing the “corporate” Pearl Jam as a prime example. Authenticity, as Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor point out in their book “Faking It,” is “an absolute, a goal that can never be fully attained,” and Saint Kurt, the idealist, went “to tremendous lengths to ‘keep it real,’ to rebel against commercial expectations, and to expose his problems to the public.” At least Cobain had a sense of humor; after his suicide, however, his devotion to “rawness” became elevated to orthodoxy, adopted as dogma by a host of moaning miserabilists who delivered wave after wave of angst-soaked grunge and grunge-lite.
From Puddle of Mudd to Staind to Creed to Nickelback, the yarling grunge descendants replaced rock’s devil-may-care excitement with blazoned earnestness and sludge. In doing so, they forced a schism between rock and pop, two forms of music that, in terms of style, at least, had been creeping closer together over the course of the ‘80s. It took bands like the White Stripes, the Strokes and the Hives, in the early ‘00s, to bring self-awareness and fun back into rock music. Despite their own assertions of what Barker and Taylor would call “cultural” authenticity (or adherence to a well-defined tradition) in rock ‘n’ roll, they were self-consciously contrived: Theirs was authenticity at one remove, a stylistic decision.
In recent years, stylistic dogmatism has largely receded, and genres have intermingled freely; a rapper like Lil’ Wayne can sing through heavy Auto-Tune (a device beloved in pop and dance music) to produce a rock album (“Rebirth”). But high seriousness has once again started to creep in, as even former enfant terrible Eminem now delivers introspective lyrics with emo choruses, while the latest hip-hop superstar Drake shows us it’s best not to celebrate success without maudlin self-critique.
Cultural reasons for this broadcasting of inner turmoil might include the recession and Facebook-induced oversharing, but it may also be due to the cyclical nature of fashion and popular music, where each new trend reacts against the last; as flannel makes a catwalk comeback, it’s natural that “authenticity” should do so as well. Adele, clearly, is at the vanguard of such supposed bald, unmediated self-expression, and for her critics, this is integral to her appeal: She’s “a real person, with real music” (New York Examiner); a champion of “authenticity and old school talent in a sea of Auto-Tuned belly buttons” (Toronto Star); and “authentic because she is her own creation” (Daily Telegraph).
Her antithesis is widely held to be public whipping-girl Lana Del Rey, who (horrors!) has changed her name, gussied up her image, and dared to be somewhat theatrical; by implication, if she had sung her songs (which sound like anemic, monochrome versions of Adele’s glummest balladry anyway) as Lizzy Grant of Lake Placid, all would have been forgiven. And where one might expect dance-pop stars to challenge Adele’s pervasive earnestness, they’ve instead been joining her: Taio Cruz and Katy Perry, for instance, have delivered straight, po-faced covers of “Someone Like You.” Where authenticity has historically been the province of rock rather than pop, Adele’s crossover appeal extends its reach.
Adele-worship has, however, been greeted with some suspicion in her native England, where she has been seen as the standard-bearer for an artistic “movement” dubbed the New Boring, with her erstwhile tour mate, soul singer Michael Kiwanuka, cited as an acolyte. Undeterred, fellow English singer/songwriter Ed Sheeran has affirmed, “If Adele’s seen as boring, then I’m happy to be boring as well,” and in the wake of Adele’s Grammy sweep, Jessie J, who once sang, “Why is everybody so serious?,” has vowed to pare down her live show in order to prove she’s “real,” as “The English … can sniff a fake very easily.”
But exactly how “authentic” is Adele anyway? She’s a big fan of the Spice Girls, devotees of Auto-Tune and miming who, she has claimed, “made me who I am.” Her musical style is highly derivative of American soul music, with a smattering of heartbroken country.And the “highly personal” songs on “21″ were written in collaboration with the likes of Ryan Tedder (Backstreet Boys, Sugababes), Fraser T. Smith (Britney Spears, Taio Cruz), Francis White (James Blunt, Take That), and Greg Wells (Mika, Katy Perry).
Not that there’s anything wrong with any of this. Rather, it’s the concept of authenticity itself that’s problematic, especially when it’s linked to “honesty” and “sincerity,” which are easy to assert but impossible to prove, and to a serious mode of “expressing oneself,” which admits of no irony – and therefore no humor. And Adele is capable of both: On “21,” the cheeky stomper “Rumor Has It,” for instance, opens with the lines “She ain’t real,” describing a love rival, but later suggests that the singer ain’t exactly what she seems: “You made my heart melt, yet I’m cold to the core.”
Authenticity is as much a pose as it is a state of being, but we’re conditioned to value it nonetheless. What if Adele, who has recently claimed she’s “never writing a breakup record again,” were to release her next new album under a pseudonym and fill it with peppy, Auto-Tuned dance numbers? Nevermind, we’d find someone like her.
At the age of 24, Chinese-born Yuja Wang is one of the most exciting concert pianists in the world. Onstage, she cuts an elegant, sometimes provocative figure. Backstage, she’s more like a teenager, noshing snacks and listening to Rihanna on her earphones. But there’s no doubt that Ms. Wang, now a resident of New York, has captivated audiences and critics, from Beijing to Berlin. Her “virtuosity is stunning,” says the New York Times. “An artist of dazzling genius,” raves the San Francisco Chronicle. She’s earned praise for her almost “superhuman keyboard technique,” as well as her sensitivity and fearlessness.
We caught up with the international sensation in Los Angeles, where she performed Prokofiev at the Disney Concert Hall. Afterward, in a Steinway showroom, Wang played for us and spoke with SOUND TRACKS reporter Alexis Bloom about her life as a musical nomad.
Written in 1858 after a trip to Russia, Johann Strauss’ “Tritsch Tratsch Polka” is a jaunty, high-spirited affair and Yuja Wang obviously delights in playing it. Watch her smile at the end. If you’d like to see her perform live, Yuja Wang will be playing this April at Avery Fisher Hall with the New York Philharmonic and in Atlanta with the symphony there. In June she returns to San Francisco, where conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has been one of her strongest supporters.
We knew she was an incredible talent, but watching up close as Yuja Wang performs is another matter. She plays so lightning fast it seems as if we’ve sped up the video. Her technique is dazzling and precise, but it’s equaled by her passion and sensitivity.
In this video, recorded at the Steinway showroom in West Hollywood, Yuja is playing bits of three different pieces by Gluck, Liszt and Scriabin. It’s wonderful to watch her change pace and mood and see the concentration and deep feeling in her expression. At the end, it’ almost as if she emerges from an intense dream, smiling, and telling us, “This piano’s nice.”
Born in Beijing in 1987, Yuja Wang began playing the piano at the age of 6. From a music conservatory in China to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, she never stopped, and now she roams the world, playing a demanding schedule of concerts across Europe, Asia and North America. She’s recorded three critically acclaimed albums for Deutsche Grammophon, her most recent is a Grammy nominee. “I’ve been doing this my whole life,” she tells SOUND TRACKS reporter Alexis Bloom. “I can’t really remember anything before the piano.”
So, Yuja Wang is already a veteran, a self-assured and immensely accomplished virtuoso. But she’s also a young woman who travels the world, mostly alone, living in hotels and backstage dressing rooms. Is she ever lonely? “Not really,” she tells us. She’s “more alive” on the road, especially in concerts, plus “I have my BlackBerry, laptop and kindle. I’m all set.”
As you’ll see in her interview, Yuja is a warm, engaging personality with a quick laugh and a candid comment. She can be shy one moment, outspoken the next. When she’s warming up to play Rachmaninoff or Prokofiev, she likes to hear the raw wildness of Rihanna. And she’s made something of a reputation for herself in the classical world as a fashionista, not afraid to wear eye-catching outfits, including that orange dress that set off a wave of commentary last year when she appeared at the Hollywood Bowl. “I’m just being myself,” she says.
As the New York Times critic wrote after Yuja’s Carnegie Hall debut last October, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it. What matters is that Ms. Wang has got it as a pianist.”
In seventh grade I owned the cassette tape of “Whitney,” the second album by Whitney Houston, which was true of pretty much every 12-year-old female in America. I played the hell out of that tape. I used to spend afternoons in my bedroom, lip-syncing those songs to my bedroom wall, because that’s the kind of kid I was. Always longing for an imaginary audience. I did not want to be a writer back then, or the president of the United States. I wanted to be a pop star. And in 1987, there wasn’t any pop star more elegant or talented than Whitney Houston. Daughter of a gospel singer, niece of an R&B legend, smashingly beautiful — she was practically anointed by the gods for greatness.
The song I loved the most on that tape was “Didn’t We Almost Have It All.” Fourth song, first side. I would perform the song to the wall, then rewind it and perform it again. Play, rewind, repeat. I can still hear the squiggle of the tape in my head as I pressed on the jam-box button just long enough to find the song’s opening once more. This is a lost art in the age of the iPod, but back then, knowing how many seconds to rewind a cassette was a sign you truly understood its rhythms. You had literally learned the music backward and forward.
“This again?” my brother would ask as the tinkling synthesizers kicked in. My brother was a metalhead, who loved the righteous anger of AC/DC and Judas Priest and did not give a rip for the likes of Whitney Houston.
He did not get a choice in the matter. Here is how the song begins:
Remember when we held on the rain, the nights we almost lost it?
Once again, we can take the night into tomorrow
Living on feelings, touching you I feel it all again
It’s a bit mundane, frankly. It’s a fill-in-the-blank tale of a broken relationship. Funny how every love story sounds the same but feels so different when you’re inside it. That’s the poignancy of love stories, I guess. You’re never alone. Then again: You’re never unique.
But this song is all about the chorus. It is a song constructed almost entirely of its irresistible chorus — half a dozen times in less than five minutes — and the chorus launches a mere 45 seconds in. No foreplay, no footsie under the table, no lingering glances and sighs. This song grabs you by the collar and sticks its tongue down your throat.
It’s a really fantastic chorus, by the way. It’s OK to sing along:
Didn’t we almost have it all, when love was all we had worth giving?
The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend. Loving you makes life worth living.
At 12 years old, I had never been in love. I had never even kissed anyone. And so it’s peculiar that I experienced this song so powerfully. The agony. The crashing emotion. The ka-pow of it all. Why did I feel it so intensely? What was it teaching me? I wonder if all these songs of woe and regret didn’t warp my sense of romance. I wanted to grow up and fall in love, but more to the point: I wanted to grow up and lose that love, because that’s when the real drama began. I understood, even then, the delicious pain of being brokenhearted.
The chorus returns, a little different this time:
Didn’t we almost have it all, the nights we held on till the morning?
You know we’ll never love that way again. Didn’t we almost have it all?
This song climaxes so quickly. Not even a minute into it, and we’re already basking in Whitney’s vibrato, the glorious burst of sustained sound that would become her signature. The woman could push a note like nobody else, squeeze it and feel it up till the listener wanted to cry for mercy. But when you peak this early, it’s hard to know where to go next. The excitement is unsustainable, and for the next three minutes the song will throw out its back trying to one-up itself — a series of elevated key changes, strings atop swell. The song wants you to know the singer is bleeding.
For the moment, though, it pulls back. Whitney’s voice grows subdued. We get more of the back story, which, naturally, is like every back story we’ve ever heard.
The way you used to touch me felt so fine
Kept our hearts together, down the line
A moment in the soul can last forever, comfort and keep us
Help me bring the feeling back again.
I can understand why people hate Whitney Houston. I mean, these lyrics are dreck. It’s cooler to love the big, dirty riffs of Van Halen, the gritty excess of Guns N Roses. But I still find the stadium ballads of the mid-1980s strangely moving. The REO Speedwagon, the Air Supply, the Chicago, the Bryan Adams. The cheesy, lighter-held-aloft songs. They are not clever. They are not sly. They have the temerity to be earnest and unblinking, nothing but a desperate plea to be loved. Like a boyfriend who dims the lights and scatters rose petals in the bathtub. Please, baby, come back to me.
Or, as Whitney Houston sings it:
Didn’t we almost have it all? When love was all we had worth giving?
The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend. Loving you makes life worth living
I finally did fall in love in my sophomore year. He was sweet like my father, charming like my older brother. I still adore him. We drove around in his Chevy Nova listening to David Bowie and Elvis Costello. I began to understand that Whitney Houston was bad and not to be encouraged. We made fun of “I Will Always Love You,” the No. 1 song that would not go away in 1992, the year we graduated. We wanted to stab that song with knives; we wanted to punish it somehow. We were not the only ones turning on Whitney. That was the year Nirvana hit. Culture was edging away from the light and toward the dark, and there was Whitney in the video for “I Will Always Love You,” singing her heart out in the middle of an empty winter landscape as Kevin Costner walked away.
My boyfriend and I broke up at the end of high school, and I secretly bought the cassingle to “I Will Always Love You.” I listened to it in my bedroom, over and over. Nothing could touch the pure emotion of that song. I listened to “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” too, and it was exactly the comfort I wanted, like pulling an old teddy bear off the shelf and cradling it in your arms as you cried.
Didn’t we almost have it all? The nights we held on to the morning?
You know you’ll never love that way again. Didn’t we almost have it all?
“Didn’t We Almost Have It All” is a good breakup song because it grows temperamental. It’s not just a lament. It’s a bit of a tantrum. It’s all so unfair, Whitney is telling us. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. We had it all, and then we did not. How could that possibly happen?
And I like this part, the growl in Whitney’s voice, like she is stomping her foot.
Didn’t we have the best of times, when love was young and new?
Couldn’t we reach inside to find the world of me and you?
We’ll never lose it again. Cause once you know what love is, you’ll never let it end.
After college, I stopped paying attention to Whitney Houston. I guess a lot of people did. There was a reality show, and crack, and debasement that defied easy explanation. It was easy to shove it off on Bobby Brown — the controlling spouse, the bad influence — but she was the one who stayed with him. The reality show made her seem coarse and a little bit mean. When she told Diane Sawyer that “crack is wack,” it was like she was participating in her own satire. This was unanticipated. Crack addicts were not supposed to look like Whitney Houston.
The thing is, I’ve met other crack addicts since then, and they don’t look the part either. That might be the one characteristic they have in common, other than an addiction to smoking crack. I never did drugs; I was a boozehound, a pure-bred lush. But I understand that you have to keep pushing to get the same feeling. You level out, and so you need more. You level out again, and you need more again. Play, rewind, repeat. It’s not just the crack or the booze that destroys people. It’s the always needing more.
I once heard drug addiction described as nostalgia. Chasing the perfection and the abandon of that first time.
Didn’t we almost have it all? The nights we held on to the morning.
You know you’ll never love that way again.
I was reading a book about Marilyn Monroe when I heard that Whitney Houston had died at the age of 48. Monroe’s is the ur-diva downfall, and these tragedies have elements in common: Drugs, a questionable taste in men, the inability to live up to a public persona, success like a rocketship. And they had beauty, of course. Uncommon, breathtaking beauty.
Earlier that afternoon, I had been taking a walk with a friend. I am 37, she is a little older, perhaps 39. We were talking about how hard it is for gorgeous women to age, because they get too accustomed to the oxygen of male desire. One of the good things about never being the best-looking woman in the room is that you never have to stop being the best-looking woman in the room. It is a dangerous game to base your meaning and self-worth on other people’s admiration, because it will inevitably recede, and I don’t think anyone would understand that better than Whitney Houston. It must be agonizing to hold the world’s attention in your palm, and then to feel it slowly drain away.
Didn’t we almost have it all?
After I learned about Whitney Houston’s death, I went searching for this song on YouTube. It is such a corny song, I know, but it made my heart pound nonetheless. I love it completely, without reason, the way you feel about a high school sweetheart, the way you feel about a drug, the way you feel about a song you loved when you were dumb and splendid and 12 years old.
I listen to songs over and over again. I have always been like this. I asked my mother, who is a therapist, why I did this, and she said maybe I was trying to unlock a song’s mystery, to master it in some way.
And I do notice different things every time I hear this song. I notice a quiver in the voice, a breath, a pause. I notice how the song ends by asking the same question twice, different each time. First it is defiant. Then it is sad and vulnerable.
Didn’t we almost have it all? the song asks. And I don’t know the answer to this question. So I press repeat, and listen to it once more.
On Thursday night, Whitney Houston appeared at the Kelly Price & Friends Unplugged: For The Love of R&B pre-Grammys event. Amateur YouTube footage of the singer’s performance hinted at hysteria: Audience members screamed her name and flashbulbs exploded as she crooned the Christian hymn “Jesus Loves Me” in a sultry lower register as a duet with Price. The version of the song was gentle and tempered, although Houston’s beatific looks and animated gestures imbued it with quiet jubilance.
The performance feels sickeningly eerie on the heels of Houston’s death Saturday at 48. Both the song and her duet partner were links to the singer’s decorated past: Price featured on her Grammy-nominated 1999 single “Heartbreak Hotel” and a studio version of “Jesus Loves Me” appeared on the soundtrack of “The Bodyguard,” the 1992 album which made Houston a megastar. What’s more, she looked healthy and sounded strong; there were no warning signs that the brief appearance would be her last. (Though the photos of her returning to the Beverly Hills Hotel on Friday night tell a different story.) Houston, whose reputation was marred by a turbulent marriage to R&B star Bobby Brown (and a disastrous reality show about their lives together) and well-publicized struggles with addiction, finally seemed well enough to reboot her singing career.
Despite erratic public behavior and increasingly unsteady live performances, Houston always had fans who rooted for her recovery, who wanted her to recapture her powerhouse voice and magnetic personality. Born into music royalty — her mom was the gospel icon Cissy Houston, her cousin Dionne Warwick and her godmother soul great Aretha Franklin — the New Jersey native cut her teeth singing gospel in church, modeling and acting. By the time she earned a record deal, Whitney (like Madonna, Prince and Michael, one name was enough to identify her) was an enviable combination of glamorous and casual. On 1985’s “Whitney Houston” and 1987’s “Whitney,” her spin on contemporaneous soft rock, R&B, soul and gospel was mature but not stuffy or beholden to formality; on early hit singles, she struck a balance between playful longing (“How Will I Know,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” “So Emotional”) and serious balladry (“Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” “Saving All My Love For You”). To little girls growing up in the ‘80s, Whitney Houston and Madonna were the artists you emulated and sang along to (loudly); they were the powerful, confident women you heard on the radio all the time, the pair you strove to be like.
However, Houston was also more than likely the artist your mom (if not grandmother) liked, which helped her ease gracefully into an adult career. That period arguably started with her dual starring acting role/soundtrack appearances on 1992’s “The Bodyguard,” a movie in which Kevin Costner played her protector. If her ‘80s tunes made her a household name, her interpretation of the Dolly Parton-penned “I Will Always Love You” sent her into the stratosphere. To this day, Houston’s soft-rock re-do of the country hit endures as an awe-inspiring performance: octave-dancing vocal prowess, nuanced emotional longing and the kind of subtlety hard to find in today’s mainstream music, in the form of her dramatic pause near the end of the song before she launches into the climactic, “And I…will always love youuuuu… .”
Houston would never top “The Bodyguard” and its monstrous success. (Besides “I Will Always Love You,” the soundtrack spawned the torchy hit “I Have Nothing” and a disco-soul remake of Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman.”) And although she continued to evolve into a graceful R&B singer and rack up winning singles — throughout the 1990s, hits came from the soundtracks of “Waiting To Exhale,” “The Preacher’s Wife” and “The Prince Of Egypt” and her 1998 solo album, “My Love Is Your Love” — her problems with drugs and a chaotic marriage soon took a toll on her public persona. Rumors of substance abuse swirled around her — something not helped when marijuana was found in her and Brown’s luggage in 2000 — and in a 2002 interview with Diane Sawyer, a defensive Houston uttered these infamous sentences: “Crack is cheap; I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let’s get that straight, okay? We don’t do crack, we don’t do that. Crack is wack.” The latter catchphrase caused an uproar and did irreparable damage to her reputation.
But Houston persevered — and eventually came clean about her private turmoil. In a 2009 Oprah Winfrey interview, a calmer Houston — her voice noticeably raspier and lower — was open about abusing cocaine and marijuana, and admitted the post-”Bodyguard” era was tough: “By ’The Preacher’s Wife,’ [doing drugs] was an everyday thing. … I would do my work, but after I did my work, for a whole year or two, it was everyday.” Her marriage to Brown was troubled, she told Oprah, including a time when he spit in her face in front of their daughter, Bobbi. The couple divorced in 2007.
In recent years, Houston’s fortunes ebbed and flowed. 2009’s “I Look to You” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and the song “Million Dollar Bill” also hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play charts, but lukewarm-to-critical reception marred her 2010 world tour and she entered outpatient rehab as recently as May 2011. Still, in her recent public appearances she seemed upbeat and healthy; it seemed plausible she could follow in the footsteps of Tina Turner, who rejuvenated her career after extricating herself from an abusive domestic situation.
But with her premature death, it’s hard not to compare Houston to Michael Jackson, another ‘80s megastar who died young, crippled by addiction and the burdens of fame. Like the King Of Pop, Houston was a pioneer, one who broke open racial barriers so that other soul/R&B artists could have a shot at mainstream success. “The Bodyguard” was Houston’s “Thriller,” the career albatross from which she could never escape. And just as MJ reinvented the concept of the male pop star, Houston did the same for women. She was vulnerable and girlish, but never let those qualities undermine her talent, something fellow huge-voiced diva Mariah Carey took to heart. And Houston exuded confidence in every aspect of her career — of course because of her voice, but also because of her expressive interpretations. She could have bludgeoned listeners over the head with just the sheer power of her voice — but instead, Houston approached her songs like an actress inhabiting a character, squeezing emotion from every lyric with sincerity, grace and elegance.
Singer Whitney Houston is shown during the Whitney Houston "I Look To You" CD Listening Party held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Thursday July 23, 2009 in Beverly Hills, California.
Before the tragic tabloid headlines, the “crack is wack” denials and the tumultuous marriage to Bobby Brown, pop/soul diva Whitney Houston towered over the music world in the mid-1980s and early ’90s.
Houston died Saturday in Beverly Hills, on the eve of the Grammy Awards. She was 48.
She sold 200 million records worldwide, won six Grammys, two Emmys and nearly two dozen American Music Awards. Hits like “How Will I Know,” “Saving All My Love For You” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” ruled the pop charts — and made her one of the few singers who could be identified by one name.
With royal music roots — the daughter of gospel sensation Cissy Houston, the cousin of Dionne Warwick and the god-daughter of Aretha Franklin — she seemed destined to become a pop queen. But drugs and erratic behavior helped tear her career down.
“The biggest devil is me. I’m either my best friend or my worst enemy,” Houston told Diane Sawyer in a 2002 interview, with Brown by her side.
Let’s remember her at her peak, with some of her biggest hits:
Move Like a Woman 
Birth Control Made Me 
For Whitney: "Sleep little darlin' do not cry..." 
The latest lies in the war on choice 
There is no ethical smartphone 
Is a Greek debt default still inevitable? 
Birth control: The right’s still winning 
How Viola Davis took Meryl Streep’s Oscar 
Bathrooms: the new transgender battleground 
Our nation of moaners 
A very pornographic Rick Santorum 
The death of chick lit 
The futile search for meaning in “Linsanity” 
