Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: The case for Whitney Houston

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Thread started 10/15/13 8:00pm

HAPPYPERSON

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: The case for Whitney Houston

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: The case for Whitney Houston[img:$uid]http://www.lipstickalley.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=89889&stc=1&thumb=1&d=1381889453[/img:$uid]Tomorrow, the nominees will be announced for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Class of 2014. Whitney Houston’s name probably won’t be among them.It should be.In the 1980s, there were two singers whose talents were so colossal that popular music is still shaking from the impact of the records they made. Michael Jackson was inducted into the hall in a walk. Houston, who has been eligible for four years, has never even made the nominees list.Why is that? Jackson was a visionary songwriter, as well as an astonishing singer. That’s significant. If the hall were only big enough for one ’80s superstar, he would be the choice. The gap between Jackson and Houston, however, isn’t as wide as it’s often made out to be. Jackson’s hall case was airtight, but Houston deserves to be right there on his heels.You could call Houston influential, but that is like calling the Earth a rock. It’s technically true, but it’s a massive, misleading understatement. Popular singing since "Saving All My Love for You" has been one long chase of her shadow.Stars themselves concede this. Katy Perry pointedly closed her last tour with a version of "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)." Houston’s voice isn’t just echoing on Top 40 radio, either — rock singers from the internationally famous (Hayley Williams of Paramore) to the alternative and experimental (Amber Coffman of Dirty Projectors) nick her cadences, her inflections, her lightning-flash upper register, her sudden earthy growls, her carefully controlled melisma. Traces of her delivery show up all over the country stations, too — it’s impossible to imagine Carrie Underwood or Faith Hill without Houston’s example. The imaginative rock-soul hybrid artists of the past few years — The Weeknd, Janelle Monáe, Bruno Mars, Frank Ocean — all make their debt to Houston apparent.It is no great exaggeration to say that Houston taught a generation of entertainers how to sing.Houston’s musical education came in church. At New Hope Baptist in Newark, she learned from the masters: Not only her mother, Cissy, and her cousin Dionne Warwick, but also the ordinary parishioners in the choir, who chased transcendence through gospel music every Sunday morning. As a grown-up, Whitney fused the devotional fire of Cissy Houston’s singing with the tight, scrupulous narrative presentation characteristic of Warwick’s records. She reached for the stratosphere within the confines of the three-minute pop song. In so doing, she carried on several traditions at once, one of which was the thread of gospel-inspired popular music that the hall has always insisted it intended to honor.In the mid-1980s, music was in trouble. New recording and performing technologies had opened up possibilities for musicians and producers, many of which were rewarding. But exploration for its own sake often led to records that were technically brilliant, but felt sterile. More than anybody else, it was Houston who brought popular music back to church, and reminded everybody how far from its gospel moorings American song had drifted.At the time of her greatest fame, her hits were dismissed by many rock purists as anodyne pop, fit only for teen dances and summertime cruises. Those who demanded that Houston be the second coming of Aretha Franklin (and nothing but) were disappointed. Yet in concert, Houston opened these songs up, exposed their gospel roots, and demonstrated that her voice was an instrument too expressive for any genre to contain.It is telling that the years since their recording haven’t tarnished her hits. "I Wanna Dance," "So Emotional," "How Will I Know," "Didn’t We Almost Have It All" and others turned out to be far from ephemeral. These records are now as indelible as any from the Day-Glo decade. They still supply chills.It will be argued that Houston was insufficiently "rock" for enshrinement. Leaving aside the fact that the hall saw fit to induct Madonna, whose records were farther from the roots of American music than Houston’s ever were, this depends on your definition of rock. If you believe that rock is music made by a man with a guitar, a battery of blues licks and a distortion pedal, then of course Houston doesn’t qualify. But the hall does not endorse this definition. In an effort to grapple with the complex and thorny tale of American popular music, it has chosen to include disco singers, doo-wop combos, offbeat singer-songwriters, rappers and deejays.The hall is supposed to stand as a reminder that rock is not epitomized by arena guitar bands: Part of its mission is a callback to a prior era of song built on the expressive relationship between the singer and the spirit she’s channeling. And if you believe the woman with the microphone is at least as important a part of the ongoing story of rock as the man with the guitar, then Houston walks in, because no woman of her era went harder with that microphone than she did. Just ask a singer — any singer, in any style.Houston had a difficult tightrope walk. In order to reach a mass audience, she had to de-emphasize the parts of her music that might have discomfited the majority of Americans. Like Jackson, she made major compromises, and we’re never going to know for sure how much those compromises cost her.In retrospect, she had almost as much to do with the desegregation of MTV and mainstream radio as Jackson did. She squeezed all the effulgence she could into the commercial song, and in so doing, set a standard that thousands of other singers have tried, and failed, to live up to.Contemporary music cannot be understood without engaging with Whitney Houston, and the closer you listen to her music, the clearer you can hear the past, too. If that’s not a Hall of Famer, I don’t know what is.http://www.nj.com/entertainment/music/index.ssf/2013/10/rock_and_roll_hall_of_fame_the_case_for_whitney_houston.html

mynameisnotsus an	If there's a Singers Hall of Fame or Vocalists Hall of Fame she absolutely belongs there. Rock n Roll? Not so much.
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scorp84	No case should have to be made IMO. She deserves it.
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mjscarousal	Whitney definitly deserves to be in it. Whitney is by far the best female POP vocalist of all time, key word POP lol. If Madonna, Donna Summer, etc can get in... why cant Whitney? I think she is more than deserving
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bashraka	Cinny said: While a super star and an amazing voice, her music and style did not reflect Rock N Roll at all. There are plenty of artists in the rock and roll hall of fame whose music and style does not reflect the Jan Wenner definition of "Rock N Roll". I'm not a Whitney Houston fan at all, but if Madonna and Donna Summers are enshrined, why not Houston? 3121 #1 THIS YEAR
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