뉴욕 타임즈의 존 카라맨시아 기자는 토요일 숨진 휘트니 휴스턴을 살아서는 누구도 따라할 수 없는 음악을 했지만, 그 음악은 줄 수 없는 타이틀을 가졌다고 했습니다.
고통의 여왕, Queen of pain 입니다.
1980년 대 중반 결점 없는 목소리로 소울 음악과 가스펠을 메인스트림 음악으로 만든 휘트니 휴스턴이 지난 토요일 그래미 시상식이 열릴 건물에서 아주 가까운 베버리 힐튼 호텔 베스 룸에서 숨진 채 발견됐습니다.
당시 호텔 방에는 스타일리스트와 미용사, 바디가드 두 명도 있었습니다.
목욕탕에 들어간 휴스턴이 한 시간이 지나도 나오지 않았을 때 미용사가 물에 빠진 휴스턴을 발견했습니다.
응급조치를 했지만 이미 늦었습니다.
경찰은 불법적인 약은 호텔 방에 없었다고 밝혔지만 처방한 진정제는 이었던 것으로 알려졌습니다.
성가대에서 노래를 했고 나이트 클럽에서 노래하는 휘트니 휴스턴을 보고 스타로 만든 아리스타 레코드 창업자인 클리브 데이비스 씨가 글래미 시상식 전 파티를 열기 몇 시간 전에 휘트니 휴스턴은 숨졌습니다.
목소리가 너무 깨끗하고 강하고 분명해서 다른 가수들이 힙합으로 몰려갈 때도 휴스턴은 발라드를 했습니다.
“I Will Always Love You,” 등의 발라드와 1991년 수퍼볼 에서 부른 “Star-Spangled Banner,”는 대표적인 그의 음악입니다.
David Corio
Whitney Houston in 1988
마이클 잭슨이나 마돈나, 머라이어 케리와 함께 얘기되는 휘트니 휴스턴이 그들보다 영향력이 덜했던 것처럼 보이는 이유를 뉴욕 타임즈 기자는 휴스턴을 흉내 낼 가수들이 없었기 때문이었다고 말합니다.
휘트니 휴스턴의 음악은 어디서든 많이 떠도는 음율이 아니라 마치 박물관 작품과 같았고, 다른 가수들이 더 자극적이고 저돌적인 노래를 할 때도 휘트니 휴스턴은 발라드를 지켰습니다.
그러던 휘트니 휴스턴이 1992년 R& Bad Boy로 불리는 바비 브라운과 결혼하고 이혼하기까지 15년 동안은 변했습니다. 엄격하고 품위 있는 휴스턴과 사회가 용납하지 않는 행동을 하는 바비 브라운은 자주 싸웠고 함께 마약도 했습니다.
그때부터 휴스턴은 노래를 하면 목소리가 갈라졌고 다이언 소여와 인터뷰를 하다 마약 문제가 나오자 엉뚱한 답을 하고 성을 냈습니다. 알콜, 마약 재활원에도 여러 번 드나들었습니다. 오프라 윈프리와 고해성사 격의 인터뷰를 하고 새로워지려고 했지만 성공하지 못했습니다.
Ms. Houston performing with Stevie Wonder in 2003
뉴욕 타임즈 기자는 휘트니 휴스턴은 깨끗한 음성의 음악의 왕족이었을 때도 내면은 복잡했을 수 있다고 했습니다. 묘하게도 숨지기 전 인생은 음악이 주지 못했던 타이틀을 휴스턴에게 줬다고 했습니다. 아무도 부정할 수 없는 고통의 여왕, Queen of pain 타이틀입니다.
고통의 여왕이 재기하기 위해 찍던 영화가 곧 발표될 예정입니다.
휘트니 휴스턴이 두 명의 가수를 길러내는 역할입니다.
Whitney Houston died as a cautionary tale, but the most painful cautionary tales are about people who were heroes once.
That is how she arrived in the mid-1980s, a flawless vocalist singing impeccable songs and singlehandedly inserting gospel and classic soul theatrics into mainstream pop. She was a sunbeam — radiant, perspective altering, impossible to touch.
When her greatest years were behind her, she remained in the public eye as something thornier — a drug addict and a casualty of the tabloid and reality-television era, ill-equipped for ever-increasing levels of scrutiny. Ms. Houston’s fall attracted so much notice because she had so far to go, down from the clouds into the abyss.
The bottom finally came on Saturday, when Ms. Houston, 48, was found in her room at the Beverly Hilton, in Beverly Hills, Calif., a few hours before the annual pre-Grammy gala held at the hotel by Clive Davis, the Arista Records founder who discovered and helped mold her into one of the pre-eminent pop stars of the last 30 years.
Ms. Houston was R&B’s great modernizer, slowly but surely reconciling the ambition and praise of the church with the movements and needs of the body and the glow of the mainstream. Her voice was clean and strong, with barely any grit, well suited to the songs of love and aspiration that were the breakthrough hits from her first two albums, “Whitney Houston” and “Whitney,” the post-quiet-storm ballads “You Give Good Love” and “Saving All My Love for You”; and the naïve, bopping, flush-of-love dance tracks “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and “So Emotional.” Only a few of her 1980s hits — “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” and “Where Do Broken Hearts Go” chief among them — explored love’s dark side.
Hers was a voice of triumph and achievement, and it made for any number of stunning, time-stopping vocal performances: her version of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” from the soundtrack to “The Bodyguard,” which topped the Billboard singles chart for 14 weeks; her dazzling “Star-Spangled Banner,” sung before the 1991 Super Bowl; and huge, authoritative songs like “Greatest Love of All” and “One Moment in Time,” which sounded as if they could have been national anthems too.
Ms. Houston’s signature was to let her Brobdingnagian voice soar unfettered. From a lesser vocalist that would have been a gimmick, but from her it was par for the course, just a freakishly gifted athlete leapfrogging everyone around her.
She was, alongside Michael Jackson and Madonna, one of the crucial figures to hybridize pop in the 1980s, though her strategy was far less radical than that of her peers. Jackson and Madonna were by turns lascivious and brutish and, crucially, willing to let their production speak more loudly than their voices, an option Ms. Houston never went for.
Also, she was less prolific than either of them, achieving most of her renown on the strength of her first three solo albums and one soundtrack, released from 1985 to 1992. If she was less influential than they were in the years since, it was only because her gift was so rare, so impossible to mimic. Jackson and Madonna built worldviews around their voices; Ms. Houston’s voice was the worldview. She was someone more to be admired, like a museum piece, than to be emulated.
She also had a stiff backbone, barely conceding to the changing times. She didn’t much bother with hip-hop, even as it usurped soul music’s place at the core of black pop and as everyone around her adapted: singers like Mariah Carey, one of her few vocal equals, who became a willing hip-hop co-conspirator; or Mary J. Blige, who had it in her DNA from the start of her career.
Instead, Ms. Houston’s 1998 comeback album “My Love Is Your Love” — late-period Houston was forever in a comeback; this was just the first — was modern only in incremental ways. Ms. Houston’s real progress on this album was mood: for the first time, she was testy, aggrieved, lashing out. “Heartbreak Hotel” and “It’s Not Right but It’s Okay” saw her access a viciousness that had been all but absent to that point, whether because of Mr. Davis’s polishing influence, or because of the polite side of the gospel sound she inherited.
Maybe its emergence had something to do with the volatility of her personal life. In 1992 she married the R&B bad boy and former New Edition front man Bobby Brown, and later, after they divorced, she painted the marriage as a chaotic one. It certainly read as a study in opposites, both in demeanor and ideas about R&B: Ms. Houston austere and regal, Mr. Brown louche and sweaty.
They lasted 15 years as a married couple, a period that coincided with declines in the quality and frequency of Ms. Houston’s music. But she remained a star, even as the meaning of that role changed. Her meltdowns garnered as much attention as her hits once did. This was the period in which Whitney Houston, the voice, was eclipsed by Whitney Houston, the sound bite.
There was her memorable and rambunctious acknowledgment of Mr. Brown from the stage of the 2000 Grammy Awards as “the original king of R&B.” The reality show “Being Bobby Brown,” which was on Bravo for one tumultuous season in 2005, showed the two sharing a love that was affectionate, tough, complex and sometimes outright ugly. It also spawned a catch phrase for Ms. Houston, “hell to the no,” an emphatic and disjointed way of expressing displeasure.
It made her an easy punch line. That show was the public’s longest sustained exposure to Ms. Houston in almost a decade, and the changes in her were striking. She looked not just lean but gaunt, and she was both a robust and erratic presence. It was the sort of reality that rarely makes it to reality television.
TV had been unkind to her before. Asked about her drug habit by Diane Sawyer in a 2002 interview, she was evasive, uncomfortably intense and sloppy: “I want to see the receipts,” she said impertinently. By the time she sat with Oprah Winfrey in 2009, her divorce from Mr. Brown complete, she was more forthcoming and self-aware, but still not quite steady. (In the mid-2000s Ms. Houston went to rehab at least twice, and she was in rehab again as recently as last year.)
Coming from someone who was once pure music royalty, these flashes of public instability were true jolts, completely at odds with her early vivacity. Maybe, beneath that old sheen, she was always so messy. But strangely her troubled later life finally gave her a title that her music never could: Whitney Houston, queen of pain, another throne no one could deny her.
