Moments in Time: A Tribute to Whitney Houston
Whitney Houston’s voice soared above all the rest
In one of the most touching homages paid to Whitney Houston since her passing away, Beyonce Knowles wrote: “So many of my life’s memories are attached to a Whitney Houston song. She is our queen and she opened doors and provided a blueprint for all of us.” And thousands of miles away, here in India, my friend Arijeet wrote on my Facebook wall: “First MJ, then Whitney. Slowly unplugging from the 1980s and our wonder years.”
She was America’s sweetheart. African Americans in particular and women musicians may well have claimed her as their own. But really, Whitney Houston belonged to us all. There was The Voice, the incredible range, the charisma, the innocent smile that travelled all the way up from her lips to the crinkled corners of her eyes … but beyond all that there was the impact she had on our lives.
Beyonce is right, I thought as I sat down to write this piece: “So many of my life’s memories are attached to a Whitney Houston song…” I was a confused, unhappy schoolgirl when ‘One Moment in Time’ was released. ‘I’ve laid the plans, now lay the chance, here in my hands,’ was a prayer and a message of hope. ‘My finest day (was) yet unknown,’ some years later when, during the tension-ridden recruitment season at my journalism institute, I remember suddenly stopping while walking down some steps with a bunch of classmates, and loudly belting out ‘I will always love you’ to soothe our taut nerves. Like Michael Jackson, Whitney was a constant companion during my student days as an urban Indian. But when the history books are written, MJ is likely to be remembered as a multi-facetted package: singer, dancer, stage performer, all-round entertainer. Whitney, on the other hand, let just her singing do the talking.
“God gave me a voice to sing with,” she once said, “and when you have that, what other gimmick is there?” But she didn’t merely sing a song. She seemed to feel it with every cell in her being, with such intensity that her searing rendition of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ could inexplicably stir feelings of patriotism towards America even among foreigners.
Church choirs in India, with their blend of hymns in English, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Punjabi and other languages, have little in common with the choirs in the West. Except the faith. But having spent many years of my childhood and adolescence as a chorister, I can tell you what any devotional singer of any religion might: that there’s a point beyond which you can’t fake it.
So I read, with fascination, Whitney’s description of singing in her church in Newark, New Jersey, as a little girl. She said she was so scared that she shut her eyes and sang. “When I opened my eyes, it was like the Holy Spirit had come to the church. People were just shouting and happy and praising God,” she recalled in an interview.
She carried that passion into all her music, singing even love ballads with the fervour you’d expect in a religious composition, as if she was drawing them from the very depths of her soul. It’s perhaps that force of feeling that transported her all the way to Indian cityscapes with her very first album, Whitney Houston (1985), captivating us here with its robust romantic melody ‘Saving all my love for you,’ the more tender ‘All at once’ and that anthem for dignity, ‘Greatest love of all.’ ‘No matter what they take from me / they can’t take away my dignity’ could have been as much about a black child growing up in Harlem as about a Dalit in India, or any woman anywhere in the world asserting her independence.
Some saw the universality of her style as the popification of her black church roots. It’s what gave her pan-American — and global — appeal, but it also drew flak from some African Americans, who felt she played down her origins to appeal to the white market. Well, white folk were not the only ones responding to her accessible-yet-rooted sound. Urban Indians from the 1980s all the way up to the turn of the century were humming ‘One moment in time,’ ‘I wanna dance with somebody,’ ‘Where do broken hearts go,’ ‘I will always love you,’ ‘I’m every woman’ and ‘I have nothing.’
As I write this, a memory floats into my mind, of my younger sister in the early 1990s, preparing for a prestigious inter-school singing contest. Why did she pick ‘One moment in time’?
“You know the way she would modulate, ‘Giiiiiive meeee’?” Rosanna replies, singing those words by way of explanation. “I enjoyed the challenge of getting that right. And of course those words meant something special.”
That’s the essence of why Whitney worked worldwide. She was not easy to emulate, but hers was not an unreachable sound either; you could be a kid in Newark or New Delhi, you would still feel the yearning in ‘Give me one moment in time / When I’m more than I thought I could be / When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away / And the answers are all up to me.’
It seemed, to those of us who were watching her, that Whitney must have had many such moments in time. The commitment to her words and the conviction in her voice suggested that she had her head on her shoulders and her soul still in that church of her childhood. But as the 1990s gave way to the 21st century, the clean girl of American pop metamorphosed into a self-confessed drug user and a not-infrequent public spectacle, a personification of everything that could go wrong with celebritydom.
Destiny’s golden girl was now Destiny’s distraught child. Reports of her bizarre behaviour, weakened voice and cancelled concerts filtered in even to India, a country where we’re not used to public meltdowns by A-listers. For us, Whitney had become more a happy memory of the 1980s and 1990s than a present-day star. Wasn’t that disloyalty, a reader asked me on Twitter the other day? The answer isn’t easy. Is it a fan’s duty to catch a falling star and buy tickets to mediocre shows? I think not.
But I suppose loyalty does mean playing down the follies, waiting to exhale at the posthumous release of her final film Sparkle, remembering the best of Whitney. Since her death, the Indian press has been filled with tributes celebrating arguably the greatest voice of all.
There she is on TV right now, telling a journalist: “I just want to be remembered for my music.”
The writer is on Twitter as @annavetticad
(This story appears in the 16 March, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
