My Thoughts on Whitney Houston

I might be jeopardizing some aspects of my personal life with this ballooning obsession. I identified the origin on my Tumblr—that my earliest memory is of singing “The Greatest Love of All” with the garden hose as mic in the back yard. When I was young, I would get Whitney albums for my birthdays and holidays—my brother gave me “Whitney” for my twelfth birthday; it was wrapped up in the Sunday comics on our "You Are Special Today" birthday plate when I woke up in the morning. And I used to feel a sense of personal accomplishment when her songs would climb up the list on "American Top 40" and when she was included in People’s "50 Most Beautiful People" issue. I was never old enough to see her R-rated movies, but that didn’t stop me from reading all the reviews and blurbs on the ads and tallying up the positive press they received.

I stopped paying attention when I saw her on Oprah with Mariah Carey to promote their duet—this must have been ten or twelve years ago—because she was acting like a crazy person and not at all living up to my adolescent expectations. I hadn’t really kept tabs since then. But then all this hubbub over her “comeback” consumed me.

There’s a lot of great stuff on YouTube, much of which I’d never seen. What I find especially touching about the Whitney I remember from my youth is that she's not really that great of a performer. I mean, she can’t dance, not at all. And she’s not particularly good at radiating that special-something to the audience (Love? Gratitude? Graciousness?) that Diana Ross or Dionne Warwick can. In fact, there’s a weird claustrophobic thing happening when she performs live, the feeling that she might be trapped inside herself, some kind of slave to her “gift,” with the thumbprint of a handler smoothing out the edges (one can only hypothesize about this sort of thing in retrospect, obviously). And, let’s be honest, her songs are really not so great. That voice, though: I think it would keep me from dying if someone were to play it just as I was about to keel over.

But there’s a lot of really terrifying stuff on YouTube, too. I think she recorded a pro-life song (though she sings it beautifully). The way her face changed is really upsetting for me to see. And the saddest part of the Diane Sawyer interview—which I hadn’t seen when it originally aired—was Whitney saying that singing wasn’t fun anymore. Ouch. And then those clips from Being Bobby Brown. I shielded my eyes, squinting though my fingers in horror. Who was this person? It made me feel so sorry for her, and for her husband, and for her daughter. I mean, imagine having to deal with more than a handful of people—people you don’t know, people who aren’t friends and family—who have opinions of you, millions of them. Who love the person you used to be the way that I used to love Whitney before I had the sense to question celebrity. That’s a lot of pressure! Well, this isn’t such an uncommon story.

So I got the new album and it made me sad. I watched the GMA performances and they made me sad. I watched this Amazon interview thing, and, yup, it made me sad. “I Look to You” makes sense only if you are Whitney Houston and only if you’ve made a “comeback album.” It doesn’t have legs of its own. And it requires a terrific leap of faith: You have to really want it for her, yes, but more than that, you have to want her to want it.

It’s hard to tell if she wants it or not. I mean, what I want for Whitney Houston (yes, this is ridiculous) is what I want for everyone: for her to be herself and to be happy. If that means not singing anymore, so be it. I tried to find the answer by looking for the “real Whitney”—the one who lives somewhere between the American princess darling and the crazyface crackhead—until I realized that she’s not there for me to find. This is the paradox of being famous and the paradox of being a “fan”—that it’s all a tease. As penance for my willingness to indulge (via this blog post) and to have expectations of her (via my youth), I think that what’s best for Whitney might also be the best thing for me: to leave her alone.