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One Moment in Time: A Whitney Houston Career Retrospective

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Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 02/11/2012 at 11:38 PM News

The Popdust Files: eulogies, RIP, whitney houston

It’s hard for a lot of us—especially those of us who grew up with her after things had already started to get a little weird—to understand just how successful Whitney Houston was, in every conceivable way, at her early peak. Sports and pop culture writer Bill Simmons once summed it up thusly: “Young Whitney was like LeBron [James] crossed with Tiger [Woods]. Actually, you can’t even compare her to anything. Let’s say you rated a young female singer from 1 to 50 in five categories: likability, attractiveness, singing voice, pedigree and stage presence. Young Whitney was a 50 in all of them.” By age 25, she’d had seven #1 hits and released two albums that went on to sell over 20 million copies combined in the US—and she hadn’t even had her biggest success yet. She seemed destined to go down as one of the immortals, one of the greatest, most beloved pop performers in the history of recorded music.

Whitney might not quite have gotten to that level—despite almost unparalleled successful for her first ten years, personal issues (many stemming from drugs and/or her marriage to fellow pop star Bobby Brown) derailed her career shortly thereafter, and despite a couple successful comebacks, she spent most of the 21st century in relative ignominy. But few could deny that the greatness of her peak still ranks her as one of the most important solo performers of the last 40 years of popular music, her musical catalogue providing us with countless pop classics and her voice—that soaring, supernaturally powerful voice, which defined all the greatest aspects of divadom for so many music listeners—touching the hearts and lives of millions and millions of fans, including such sworn Whit devotees as Beyoncé, Alicia Keys and Lady Gaga.

Whitney Houston was music royalty from birth, born to legendary gospel singer Cissy Houston, cousin to decade-spanning pop icon Dionne Warwick, and even the goddaughter to all-time Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin. With that kind of pedigree, Whitney started her professional career early, singing backup on Chaka Khan’s 1978 hit “I’m Every Woman” (later covered by Whitney herself) at the age of 15 and then later for artists like Jermaine Jackson and Lou Rawls. In the meantime, however, her beauty and general likability also resulted in her becoming an in-demand teen model, appearing in magazines like Glamour and Seventeen and even a Canada Dry commercial. However, she continued on with her music career, eventually making a powerful friend in A&R rep Gerry Griffith, who introduced Whitney to the man who would take her career to the next level: Arista head honcho Clive Davis.

Davis was stunned by Houston and signed her to a deal in 1983. Two years later, after the right material and producers were procured, her self-titled debut album was finally released. Incredibly, the album only debuted on #166 on the charts, but after lead single “You Give Good Love” started to climb the charts (peaking at #3), sales picked up. “Good Love” would quickly prove to be just the opening act: “Saving All My Love For You,” a sweetly-sung ballad with the subtly scandalous subject matter of declaring one’s love for a married family man, became Whitney’s first chart topper in October in 1985, and up-tempo third single “How Will I Know” absolutely blew the doors open for Whitney, following “Saving” to #1 and becoming an MTV smash with its impossibly colorful and effervescent video, making her the channel’s first female black megastar.

Inspirational ballad “Greatest Love of All” made it three straight for Whitney at #1, and the album was officially a runaway hit, getting nominated for four Grammys, spending 14 weeks on top of the albums chart (after taking 50 weeks to climb there) and eventually selling over 25 million copies worldwide, 13 stateside. It should have been an impossible act for Whitney to follow, but she quickly proved herself capable in early 1987 with sophomore album Whitney, led by the irrepressibly peppy and joyful single “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me),” probably her all-time greatest dance song and one of the best of the entire 1980s. “Dance” was Whitney’s biggest hit yet, topping the charts in 12 countries, and Whitney became the first album ever released by a female artist to debut on top of the Billboard album charts.

Whitney‘s fantastic success continued through follow-up singles “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” “So Emotional” and “Where Do Broken Hearts Go”—all #1s—and the album went on to spend 11 weeks at #1 and sell nine million copies in this country alone. By the end of the decade, Whitney’s popularity was rivaled only by such other single-name-recognizable artists as Prince, Michael and Madonna. Her success from this time period is credited with breaking the doors open from later black female artists like Janet Jackson, Paula Abdul and Mariah Carey to cross over in a similar manner, and has rarely been matched sense. However, third album I’m Your Baby Tonight failed to match the titanic success of her first two albums, spawning a pair of chart-toppers in the title track and “All the Man That I Need,” but only selling four million copies and producing few of her best-remembered songs. It wouldn’t have been unfair to predict that after five years of tremendous fame and fortune, that Whitney’s career was finally starting to slow.

Little could they have guessed that Whitney’s greatest success still awaited her. After confirming her stature as one of the country’s greatest divas with a performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Super Bowl XXV—ranked by many as the all-time greatest rendition of our National Anthem, and popular enough to become a top ten pop hit in its own right—she crossed over to acting with her film debut opposite Kevin Costner in 1992′s The Bodyguard. As successful as the movie was—and it made over $100 million in the US, despite some mediocre reviews—it was nothing compared to the movie’s soundtrack, which sold over 44 million copies worldwide, the most successful film soundtrack of all time. For the album, Whitney contributed six songs, including the one that would become her signature ballad: Her cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.”

As big as she was beforehand, “I Will Always Love You” still marked a new level for Whitney Houston. The song spent 14 weeks at #1—then an all-time record—and sold nearly five million physical copies, more than any other single besides Elton John’s Princess Diana tribute “Candle in the Wind 1997.” Unsurprisingly, it also won Record of the Year at the 1994 Grammys, while Bodyguard won Album of the Year, Whitney’s first win in either category. Listening to it today, it remains an incredibly powerful song and performance—you could accuse it of being over-dramatic at points, but Whitney’s first verse (sung entirely a capella) is absolutely spine-tingling, and the song’s climactic key change is one of the all-time great moments of release in pop music. The song endures as a timeless love ballad, and set a new standard for soundtrack singles for the entirety of the ’90s.

“I Will Always Love You” was a peak that few artists could hope to replicate, and Whitney took the next few years off from recording to tour the globe, even performing at a state dinner at the White House in 1994. It was also during this period that Whitney tied the knot with longtime boyfriend Bobby Brown, a fellow musical crossover success story first with boy band New Edition and then with his own monstrously popular solo career. Brown and Houston made for something of an odd match in the public’s eye, as Whitney primarily had cultivated a good girl image throughout her career, while Bobby was notoriously volatile and provocative, with rumored drug problems and very real legal problems that would persist throughout the ’90s. Nonetheless, the couple were wed in 1992, and Houston gave birth to her first and only child, daughter Bobbi Kirstina, in ’93.

Throughout the rest of the ’90s, Whitney would focus mostly on her acting career, starring in such hit movies as Waiting to Exhale and The Preacher’s Wife, as well as the smash ABC TV movie production of Cinderella. Throughout this time, most music Whitney recorded was for these movies’ soundtracks, and she had hits with songs like “Exhale (Shoop, Shoop)” (off Waiting) and “I Believe in You and Me” (off Preacher’s). She would only release one actual studio album during this period, 1998′s My Love is Your Love, which while not on Bodyguard‘s level of success, still sold four million copies and had a pair of crossover hits in “Heartbreak Hotel” and “It’s Not Right, But It’s OK.” Whitney ended the millennium as the official top-selling R&B female artist of the century, with over 50 million albums sold in the US over the course of her then-15-year career.

Unfortunately, it was around this time that Whitney’s personal life, at least from a public relations standpoint, began to crumble. She became notorious for showing up late to interviews and canceling personal appearances, most notably bowing out of performing at long-time professional mentor Clive Davis’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and began to spur rumors of drug use due to her increasingly shrinking frame. In 2002, Whitney had her infamous “Crack is Wack” interview with Diane Sawyer, in which an erratic and likely intoxicated Houston proclaimed that “crack is cheap..I make too much money to ever smoke crack.” Despite her increasing unreliability, Arista signed Whitney to a $100 million / six album record deal in ’02, which the label would quickly want out on, especially after that year’s Just Whitney failed to generate a hit single.

Things would only get odder for Whitney and Bobby. The duo made a much-publicized pilgrimage to Israel in 2003, with Houston memorably claiming the home country as “My land!,” then refusing to shake the hand of prime minister Ariel Sharon. The duo would later star in Bravo’s perplexing 2004 reality series Being Bobby Brown, which generally made both of them seem like crazy people and furthered public sentiment that Whitney had gone completely off the reservation. The couple were divorced two years later, with a relative commenting to People that the two “fought like cats and dogs. They would fight about what to eat for dinner, about who wasn’t cleaning out the dishwasher. Stupid things. But they were always yelling.” After a legal battle with Brown, Houston was awarded full custody of their daughter, with no spousal support.

Whitney would only release one more studio album, 2009′s I Look to You, featuring the fine throwback disco jam “Million Dollar Bill.” The album was a modest success, though the accompanying world tour was met with some negative reviews and featured a couple canceled performances due to illness. In May 2011, Whitney checked into rehab as an out-patient for alcohol and drug problems, and most recently, she starred in an upcoming remake of the ’70s movie Sparkle, about a fictional musical family, starring Houston as the family matriarch. She died today at the age of just 48, with causes still unknown, though TMZ reports that hotel staff at the Beverly Hilton where Houston’s body was found said that Houston had been “partying heavily” the night before.

Ultimately, the question of whether Whitney Houston would have ever been able to manage another full-fledged comeback is one we’ll never know the answer to. But as much damage as the last decade-plus may have done to her career and public legacy, there’s no doubt that the prevailing memory of Whitney years down the line will be one of her at her late-’80s and early-’90s peak, where she was one of the most popular and beloved solo recording artists of any race or gender that the world had seen, and one of the greatest divas we’re likely to be graced with in any of our lifetimes. (In his pseudo-scientific evaluation of the last 25 years of divadom, Jay Caspain Kang gave Whitney the begruding edge over Aretha at #1, saying “Within her context, there was never a singing star who shone as brightly as Whitney Houston.”) We will remember both the music and the woman—and all the good and bad that came with both—with the utmost fondness.