So Whitney Houston dies and suddenly everyone gives a shit about the foghorn-voiced cokehead who gifted us with the only vocal performance more oppressive than Celine Dion's Titanic theme. How sadly predictable; how pathetically mawkish. Why does everyone rush to recall their Edenic first impression of a once-formidable talent once that person has crashed, burned, and kicked the bucket? Is it the public's way of absolving their own guilt for having used the fallen celebrity as a feeble punchline for the final decade-plus of their life? Despite the fact that some of us had problems - both aesthetic and political - with the woman from the very start?Please. I really like some of Michael Jackson's records and I still didn't give a shit when he died, for reasons I'll let Kat Williams elaborate upon. Oh, and dig the bonus swipe at the cadaver du jour.
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5 comments:
What's Mary J Blige have to do with it?
Also this is worth reading
1) Did you bother watching the video clip, or just read the link title?
2) The Jackson article is interesting, but ultimately doesn't say much beyond remarking - as innumerable others have - that discussions of Jacko tended towards the hyperbolic & cartoonish. And he provides no real support of Jackson by basing much of his essay on a nearly 20-year-old interview from a time before Jackson went over the edge into the abyss, a time when we could all still remember how good Thriller was.
I watched the part of the documentary, but I wish they elaborated on why they felt she wasn't a part of the African American community.
That's actually almost impossible to answer(at least succinctly), because the question of why Whitney Houston wasn't a hit on black radio for most of her career is basically a specific articulation of the question: what was black American cultural identity in the last twenty years of the 20th century?
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