Forget, for a moment, Whitney Houston's stratospheric stardom as she became one of the best-selling female artists of all time and the winner of countless awards. Forget, also, her spectacular and painful public fall as she appeared a wreck in public and participated in her husband Bobby Brown's reality TV show -- a program that helped to desecrate our memories of her.
Instead, hold on to the voice and image of a rare, soulful singer whose talent was transporting. In her prime, Houston delivered in a range that reminds me of those days when it is simultaneously sunny and raining. You have light above and below, the storm -- beauty and grief gorgeously transmitted.
When I first read the news on a friend's Facebook page Saturday that she had died, I said, out loud, "no." Then I checked for myself and started getting a headache.
She is my cohort -- 48 is too young to die.
I suppose some part of her soul was in mine. Her songs accompanied important moments in my life, including my own dawning romance. Since she first released her eponymous album in 1985, a recording I wore out, she, Anita Baker and Marvin Gaye were at the heart of every mixtape this amorous young man made in college. "You Give Good Love" and "Saving All My Love for You" are songs I carry in my heart. I have associations with them, and other numbers by Houston, that go beyond consciousness.
If you just read the lyrics to the songs that Houston sang, you find sap and clichés. When she applied her voice to those notes, we heard the words as original and true. She sang from a place of honesty and purity, a place of dreams. That was so at least in her early years.
Houston was not just a singer. She was an ideal of beauty and propriety. She was the kind of woman a young man aspired to marry.
So, it was more than a letdown to see her on the stereotypical self-destructive path. She married Brown, a sloppy, bleary-eyed bad boy. She then agreed to let cameras record their dysfunctional marriage. I only saw a snippet of it once on holiday in Florida. That was enough. She looked like a crack addict with a retinue. Her language was jagged, her spirit ragged.
