Back when Frank Zappa died, I committed a faux pas. Before meds eliminated my awful impulse control (almost), I was very much a brain-to-mouth kind of guy. I never much liked Frank Zappa … was taken by early Mothers, but not much else, thought his sneer-down-his-nose attitude towards rock and roll was hypocritical, and never quite understood why, when even a Peter Pan like me eventually got too old for fart jokes, Zappa was still making them and calling them art because the musical background was in 7/8 time.
I said as much on an email list I was involved in, within a day of Zappa’s passing. I got a new asshole ripped by a Zappa fan who thought my comments were of the wrong-time-wrong-place variety. And he was right. I’ve tried to be kinder to the objects of fans’ affection ever since, particular when someone died. This usually follows the “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” method.
I never much cared for Whitney Houston’s music. I assume this is mostly generational. No doubt she had the pipes, and her huge fan base shows how she could connect with an audience, but in my mind, she’s just the first in a line of singers the result of which is American Idol, another thing I don’t care for where the reasons are mostly generational. I don’t know if I can explain this … I preferred Stax/Volt to Motown when I was growing up (still do, FWIW), and within Motown, I preferred Martha Reeves to Diana Ross. I never “got” the Supremes; Ross seemed like an ice queen compared to her peers, the perfect Motown artist, with a voice that worked well with the great Motown bands, songwriters, and arrangers, but which lacked personality compared to a Marvin Gaye or Martha and the Vandellas. Whitney’s version of R&B/soul struck me as a watered-down version of Diana Ross Motown. She had a superior voice, to be sure, but I didn’t care for the recordings, and mostly ignored her except 1) she was massively popular and thus impossible to ignore, and 2) my daughter loved her.
The type of singing that favors demonstrative super-technique over a more measured soulfulness, i.e. the kind of singing I associate, rightly or wrongly, with American Idol, marks a line in the sand for Old Man Steven, who pines for the days when Aretha’s vocals-from-the-church didn’t sound so manufactured.
On the other hand, there’s something I wrote a year ago that is perhaps relevant once again:
If now, in my dotage, I am less interested in a beautiful voice, well, sometimes I’m wrong. I’m reminded of Dylan’s liner notes for Joan Baez in Concert, Vol. 2 … Dylan wrote memorably about kinds of beauty. He talked about how when he was young he would accept beauty “only ‘f it was ugly.” He then related a story of Baez telling him about parts of her own childhood that were sometimes ugly, and as she spoke, he realized the sounds her voice produced, beautiful as they were, might be based in something he'd recognize … “Yuh oughta listen t’ her voice.”
Still, there must be a reason why, of all the divas to come along in Whitney’s wake, only Pink has really grabbed ahold of me. And Pink, more than others like Christina Aquilera, is influenced not just by Whitney but also by blues-rock singers like Janis Joplin. (Plus, all those cigarettes give Pink’s voice an appealing rasp, even when she’s singing in full diva mode.) Ultimately, it’s an entire genre of music (Whitney and Beyond, or, American Idols) that passed me by long ago. My opinion of Whitney is about as relevant right now as my opinion of Frank Zappa was back in the day.
The truth is, I wanted Dolly Parton to sing “I Will Always Love You” at the Grammys. It’s easy to forget that Dolly, a great singer in her own right, made the original version of that song she wrote into something quite different than the showstopper it became when Whitney got ahold of it.
On Whitney’s passing, Parton said, “Mine is only one of the millions of hearts broken over the death of Whitney Houston. I will always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, 'Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.'”
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