Stylin’ in Jocks & Nerds, new UK fashion and culture mag

Did I mention that I heart the ultra-stylish Jocks&Nerds, a new UK quarterly covering fashion, culture, and history edited by Marcus Agerman Ross? The photographs are amazing, and Londoners, it’s free…! 

I’m very honored to have a full-page profile in the second issue; the photo is by the legendary and uber-talented Janette Beckman (my hero). 

A WHITNEY HOUSTON PRIMER

PART ONE OF FOUR: THE VOICE

Let me begin by stating what may be obvious but still needs to be said, and repeated often: Whitney Houston — who died seven days ago in the bathtub of her suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, just hours before she was to appear at the pre-Grammy bash of mentor Clive Davis — had the supereminent female singing voice of her generation.

It’s certainly possible to identify musical divas before Whitney and after Whitney who could sing louder, longer, or higher, with different kinds of creativity, dexterity or flexibility. Similar voices to hers do exist. But when the Newark-born 21-year-old released her 1984 Arista Records self-titled debut, I don’t recall ever hearing anyone having an impeccably exquisite larynx exactly like hers. There was nothing generic about Whitney Houston’s singing.

In pop, as in some opera, loudness has always substituted for emotion (the louder you get, the more it’s supposed to convey deep feeling) — and Whitney Houston never strayed far from that conceit, even if she upended its flawed logic on a frequent basis. Her most formidable recorded performances have been, in retrospect, textbook studies in scale and volume. A Newark-New-Hope-Baptist-Church-reared, highly-anointed mezzo-soprano, Whitney had a knack for massaging her way into the start of a track with a pillowy, intimate hush. That ability to sound downy and introspective (just listen to the Mervyn Warren co-produced lullaby “Who Would Imagine a King” from the 1996 The Preacher’s Wife Original Soundtrack as an example of Whitney’s profound Quiet Fire) found its roots in both family tradition and the church: “My singing came from singing gospel music,” Whitney told the press at the outset of her career. “Gospel music can be very loud and very screaming. But my mother, being my teacher, always told me you don’t have to scream to sing. From singing with my mother, from learning from her, I understand phrasing. The lyric has to be heard.”

Pianissimo and articulation matter. But those introductory quiet moments were inevitably a set-up for what you’d been waiting for all along: for Whitney to get Krakatoa-loud. (Just re-listen to that modulated “And I” toward the homestretch of her signature 1992rendition of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”.) In 1984, one newspaper remarked: “her vocal quality suggests she has a ‘magic control knob; in her larynx: with no discernible physical effort, the voice make startling leaps in volume.” Indeed. Blessed with a pitch-perfect clarion-call belt voice, Whitney could fire bright top notes out of her lungs as if they were rockets shot out of a cannon to Mars. In the spirit of dynamic pop belters like Garland and Streisand and Franklin, Whitney loved to hold on to those full-bodied notes, too, letting them float in space, suspending and sustaining them, ever so legato, and sometimes just straight-up slurring the notes together: Whitney never met a vocal formant she didn’t like.

Beyond Whitney’s impressive top, she featured a basement low register (by default, as her singing declined into the 2000s, we heard this part of her range much more often) and a richly-textured mid-range: you could always instantly recognize the timbre of her voice, even just from a few passing notes. She also had a full selection of moods and emotions at her disposal: by turns Whitney could sound sensual and feline (check out “Oh Yes” from 1997’s My Love is your Love), tender and yearning (1984’s “You Give Good Love”), pensive and all-knowing (1995’s “Exhale (Shoop)”,) heartbroken and forlorn “(1984’s “Saving All My Love For You” or 1995’s “Why Does It Hurt So Bad”). She could sound haughty and aloof (1992’s “Queen of the Night”) or sassy and bossy (1992’s “I’m Every Woman” remake) — but never acidic or acerbic. There was a perpetual sunniness there, a final optimism – even if mingled with a sadness at the core. Whitney had no fear of melisma (what the kids call riffs), though her deployment seems relatively tempered and constrained, particularly compared to the hordes of young divas-in-training out there today who’ve since molded themselves on Whitney’s model. (At her best, Whitney generally tended to riff when the song or the moment demanded it, not necessarily to show off, which is part of the source of her vocal authenticity.) She had a full bag of gospel tracks, including squalls and grunts and growls; despite her pop leanings, Whitney had ample improvisational skill to hold her own even next to an astounding ‘baroque’ gospel vocalist like Kim Burrell. There was nothing stiff about Whitney’s rhythmic and muscular vocalizing.

Like a singing daredevil, Whitney also had a fondness for jumping musical intervals, moving suddenly from her high-powered belt voice into gilded, heady falsetto – at intervals so jarring she sometimes sounded like a wolf crying in the wilderness (“ah-woo!”). Whitney’s honeyed falsetto, rich in vibrato with a cooing quality reminiscent of that of Deniece Williams, is part of her trademark sound and part of her claim to association with opera diva aesthetics. It’s the “you” in the phrase “for YOU” toward the tail-end of “Saving All My Love for You” – a suspended note on which many, too many, amateur singers fall abysmally flat – and it’s one of those penultimate stratospheric “you’s” in the final moments of “I Will Always Love You.” That practice of making dexterous interval leaps from belt to falsetto have long been de rigeur in gospel (think Thelma Jackson of The Clara Ward Singers) as well as in R&B: Patti LaBelle has practically made a business out of it (her rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” comes to mind), and Whitney’s unsung journeywoman mother Cissy Houston was not exactly a slouch either in the falsetto department (think of her supernaturally beautiful ambient trill floating in the background of the verses on Aretha Franklin’s 1968 classic “Ain’t No Way,” sounding like a lost, lonely runaway theremin).

To an even-greater degree than her cousin Dionne Warwick before her, Whitney Houston was a vocal amalgam, a living embodiment of mashed-up genres, styles and influences, all somehow synthesized into a seamless whole. She could convincingly sing fiery gospel, or gritty rhythm & blues, or silky pop: alongside fellow 1980s superstars like Prince, Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, and The Pointer Sisters, her performances helped establish a pop soul emulsion that still serves 28 years later as the basic building block for platinum-selling entertainers like Usher, Rihanna and Chris Brown. Yet even though Whitney could easily oscillate between gospel and pop, I’ve always thought of her as squarely, and definitively, a rhythm & blues singer who simply, marvelously, superimposed her craft onto pop material – even at the end, she was as existentially committed and rooted to R&B as, say, Springsteen was to rock. I suppose I would be shocked if evidence turned up that Whitney was secretly longing to record a country album or an avant-garde electronic project (not withstanding her one-off pre-major label session with Bill Laswell’s Material): R&B, or a close variation thereof, always felt like the right home for her voice.

Within the context of soul, one of Whitney’s most profound skills was her ability to interpret a lyric. I like to think that she and friend/ colleague Luther Vandross, now both gone from this sphere, were as much gifted r&b vocalists as they were gifted vocal arrangers: they were both, to differing degrees, savvy conceptualists who architecturally arranged and manicured vocals, in the same way that sculptors chisel away at marble until their rendering is complete. Whitney’s bold, eccentric A cappella vocal intro to “I Will Always Love You” is jus one example of her daring and sometimes off-kilter choices: how many Top 40 pop songs of late can you name that would even dare to spend the first 45 seconds showcasing just the voice and no instruments, as the singer takes her measured time to deliberately cultivate a rapturous mood? A voice that knows its own aptitude, perhaps. Like her mother and godmother Aretha before her, Whitney was a profound song essayist, capable of zeroing in on the interior drama and emotional center of a lyric, getting deeply inside the song to spill its guts. Though I respect earlier versions of “I Will Always Love You” by Dolly Parton (the original writer) and Linda Ronstadt to differing degrees, I can say I haven’t yet heard it sung by anyone with more technical control or intensely passionate feeling than Whitney Houston.

Some testy critics still have little patience for the overall genteelness of Houston’s pop soul approach. (I’ll discuss the crossover implications of those claims in a later section). But if they find her too contained, what exactly do they make of her ability to get aggressive (I love how her repeated question “don’t you wanna dance, say you wanna dance?” at the end of ebullient 1987 “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” morphs into to a gospel-shouted command around 4:40 seconds; or listen her forceful drive throughout pulse-pounding “So Emotional;” or better yet, her Gatlin Gun patter on 1991’s “I’m Your Baby Tonight” or head-snappin’ sass anthem “My Name is Not Susan”)? Re-visited twenty years later, these dance songs sound even more impeccably sung than when they were released, and the vocals manage to come at you with a throttled intensity rarely heard on commercial radio these days.

Even beyond mere intensity, I remain inspired by Whitney’s performance authority: just this week, in an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN, soul legend Valerie Simpson recently praised Whitney as “a flat-footed singer.” To be flat-footed is the equivalent of what some church folks refer to as being a “stone singer:” if you’re bestowed with that label, you’re likely someone who can really “throw down,” put your “foot in it,” that is to say, deliver a soul-stirring and galvanizing musical performance. Whitney’s authority on stage – when on it, she would inevitably “own” it - and in the studio seems to be indivisible from her aesthetic maturity: even on her major label Arista debut, she sounds remarkably mature, way beyond her chronological age of 21. There’s an audible heft to her sound to which today’s inwardly-focused, careerist young R&B singers have little access. To thrilling effect, Whitney managed to develop over the course of her career into an effective live performer with impressive stage command. In re-watching some of her performances this week, I’m really struck by her willingness to give it her all, even in compromised situations. At her best, Whitney Houston was a diva because she embodied a lethal and much sought-after combination of fierceness and flawlessness, boldly commanding a stage in her ability to bring the audience into rapt attention merely through the projection of her voice and an open spirit. Young pop aspirants should realize that you have to work hard to become and embody and claim and own fierceness; you don’t just throw fierceness on like a fashionable scarf around your neck.

Whitney also had her share of idiosyncratic stage gestures – her diva ‘shtick’. (No diva should be without ‘shtick.’) One of my favorite Whitney moves used to happen in some of her live performances during those ascending orchestral chords going into the final choruses of The Greatest Love of All, in which Whitney would face the audience and essentially orchestrate the band from behind by flailing each of her arms in succession on each measure, like some sort of conductor gone mad. Another favorite: when she would become (or pretend to become) so worked up in the spirit of the song, that the fingers on one of her hands (usually the non-microphone hand) would begin twitching, as if to signal the presence of magic running throughout her body. The effect was that she had become so caught up that she could no longer control her digital extremities, even as it was a sign to her audience that she was really getting ready to really cook. (Pop soul singer Brandy would pay homage to her idol Whitney by copying this finger-twitching gesture in some of her live performances.)

In keeping with great gospel and soul singers, Whitney managed to perform a kind of aesthetic hard labor, a bearing down and expulsion of energy, that was internal to the performance (it didn’t come from choreography or lighting trickery). Though she was marketed early on as purely a “natural,” her performances didn’t seem to come easy. Admittedly less strenuous in her workouts than Mick Jagger or Tina Turner, she nonetheless worked extraordinarily hard in on stage, sometimes sweating from head to toe in plain view. Unafraid to, er, glisten in public, Whitney clearly possessed some overactive sweat glands (I recently heard on CNN songwriter Darryl Simmons reminisce that Whitney would always walk out of a recording session booth with sweat formed on her upper lip). Some surmised that substance abuse might have been the cause of this profuse outpouring; but whatever the case, I always felt that at her best, bubbling under the surface of her pop performances was a joyful fury, rooted in the intense exertion that is part and parcel of gospel heat. I loved those award-show performances where Whitney would shake her shoulders in excitement, grab the end of her gown, pace from one side of the stage to the other, hoping to get worked up and get the audience worked up too, as if trying to start a fire, at least create a spark. (Watch her 2000 Arista Records tribute performance medley if you can find it online). You get the sense in watching those old clips that Whitney absolutely loved to sing and share the transference of spirit, of energy with the audience. In the same tradition of the genius soulful performers who gave and give their all in the service of hard labor for us — James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross and so on — Whitney appeared to be a supremely hard-working and generous spirit. Though I never had the chance to meet her, I suspect that her generosity and work ethic translated off-stage as well.

Part Two is Coming….

(February 18 2012)

Sam Sparro @ Dominion, 10.3.2011

Last night’s Sam Sparro show(case) at cozy Dominion nightclub in lower Manhattan was a revelation. Sam remains pop music’s best-kept secret: a super-savvy songwriter-producer-vocalist with a penchant for nerve-tingling electro-disco/house, blissful alt rock, soaring pop melodies, and chord progressions. His high-intensity band rocked the house. But no/thing was more on display than Sam’s own exuberant personality, equal parts Kid Creole, (early) Elton, Sylvester, Marc Almond, Andy Bell, Liza, you name it: that, in tandem with his chiseled looks, signaling an altogether new male pop star template. The ear-candy new tunes from Sam’s forthcoming Return to Paradise album, which I’d had the pleasure of hearing in early formative stages last winter in Los Angeles, are without exception instantly accessible, beautifully textured, and fabulously eccentric. Not many are making music this deliriously good into 2012.  The Nomi Ruiz DJ set opener: pretty astounding as well.