Whitney's Back!

For those of you too young to remember, Whitney Houston is the greatest eighties female R&B female vocalist whose name isn't Anita Baker. She sold millions of records back in the Reagan years, and she had the most astonishing voice most people had ever heard, and as long as she got the right material for it, she was entertaining.

When she didn't, though, she could produce something really annoying (the less said about her cover of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You," the better). More often than not, she got middling material that was neither entertaining nor annoying. It just . . . was. Houston's biggest flaw as an artist (as opposed to being a performer) was that she was more into showing off her voice than saying anything with it. (That's why Anita Baker gets my vote between the two.) Some of the blame for this went to Clive Davis, the legendary Arista Records founder who discovered her and signed her to his label, who watered down her sound and her proficiency for gospel singing and had her records aimed at a mainstream audience.

Alas, Houston didn't merely almost have it all - she had too much of it. Her downward spiral into drug addiction and her disastrous marriage to Bobby Brown ruined her career, but having finally rid herself of Brown - the welcome first step in her twelve-step program to recovery - she's been working her way back up to the charts and she's released her new album I Look to You, which critics say is her finest work in ages. I've heard one track from the record, "Million Dollar Bill," and it's an astonishing revelation. It shows you what she can do with her voice when she does have something to say.

Ironically, Clive Davis, the man accused of keeping her from saying anything back in the eighties, is engineering her comeback today. It's really great to see Davis having taken such a personal interest in Houston when the rest of the world was ready to write her off . . . and did just that.

I really hope Houston makes it back to the top. (Whitney, from one New Jerseyan to another - you go, girl!) I just hope she doesn't employ her trademark melismatic phrasing too much. Melisma only sounds great when it's really dirty.

Which is why I love Roger Chapman. :-D