fourfour

Still mourning

Oprah Winfrey's interview with Bobbi Kristina Brown, broadcast last night on OWN's Oprah's Next Chapter, was the antithesis of O's 2009, revealing sit-down with Brown's mother, Whitney Houston. Bobbi Kris's was conducted while standing, perhaps to feel more casual. The ultimate effect was one of discomfort, though, with a jittery Bobbi Kristina playing with her hair throughout the interview. Perhaps this was one subject where Winfrey's magic -- relaxing her interviewee better than truth serum and a magic lasso combined -- just wasn't going to happen. Broadcast exactly a month after Houston's death, Brown was still shaken, and who could blame her?

You can't push a kid in mourning, and one can only imagine the extent of the behind-the-scenes demands put on Winfrey in exchange for Bobbi Kristina's participation. Almost everything, it seemed, was off limits. Topics like Bobbi Kris's back-to-back hospitilizations (on the days of and after her mother's death), her supposed suicidal tendencies, her documented drug use and the reportedly imminent rehab stint weren't broached. Instead, we learned that Bobbi Kristina still hears her mother's voice and considers light flickerings in her house the work of her mother's ghost. She stated an agenda speaking publicly for the first since her mother's death: to let the world know what an amazing spirit her mother was. This didn't exactly accomplish that or much of anything (at least not Bobbi Kris's segment). I don't think it was "too soon" to try to talk to Bobbi Kristina, as some people have charged (as if such a concept exists in our day and age!), but I do think that she's not together enough to have any perspective. That's fine. Save it for the memoir, girl.

Bobbi Kristina revealed an interest in singing and acting, as we already knew. "I gotta carry on her legacy," is how she explained it. Where talent and career path are concerned, that is astronomical ambition. But in a way, Bobbi Kris is already carrying out her mother's legacy. She's struggling publicly, like her mother, and also like her mother, she has a legion of strangers behind her and rooting for her. I don't know what's in store for Bobbi Kristina's celebrity, but if she turns out happy and safe and lives a long, full life, she will have succeeded. Here's hoping.

Bobbi Kristina said she couldn't yet listen to her mother's music. That's in contrast to how the rest of the nation (and many parts of the world, I presume) mourned Whitney Houston's death. Post February 11, her sales skyrocketed, "I Will Always Love You" reentered the Top 5 on the Hot 100 and for a few weeks, the woman's voice was once again inescapable. When I interviewed TLC's Chilli a few years ago, I asked her if it was comforting to her and T-Boz that the rest of the world was grieving along with them over the death of their friend and bandmate Left Eye, as so many people were touched by the work they did with her. She told me that on the contrary, it made things more difficult becuase there was no option to grieve privately. Wherever they went, they were reminded of their loss and implicitly asked to discuss it by seemingly well-meaning people. For someone who found herself in an atypical existence through no pursuit of her own, things have to be even stranger and more complicated for Bobbi Kristina. Just getting through that Winfrey interview and saying the little that she did while remaining standing the entire time seems like an accomplishment.

The stuff with Whitney's brother, Gary, and his wife, Pat (also her manager and best friend) wasn't much more enlightening. Who knows if Pat was telling the truth when she said that at what would turn out ot be the end of her life, Whitney's drug days were over, as far as she knew, and that she was on an upswing. Pat seemed sincere, and certainly at other points in the interview, her candor was apparent (especially regarding her concerns over Whitney's involvement with Ray J as well as her confirmation that Whitney and Stacy Francis indeed had words at Kelly Price's Grammy party). But she also could have been attempting to spruce up Whitney's legacy by presenting a rosy picture. Maybe at this point, no one can the truth, or at least the whole truth.

I remain thirsty for it, though. It's very strange to be so moved by the death of someone I didn't know. I had a dream on Friday night that I was watching a just-taped interview with Whitney. She was happy and laughing and sharp and acting irreverent, like the rock star that she was. I felt such relief and I didn't know why. I then realized that my brain was contradicting the reality of the past month. The disappointment was worth the momentary flash of joyful deceit (in this case, the ride really was worth the fall). Whitney left behind so many of those moments, too. They're terrific places of refuge.

Always love

Because my adoration for Whitney Houston is well documented, people have been offering their condolences to me, which is a little weird (it's not like I knew her better than anyone!) but entirely nice. I'm OK! Sad, for sure, but it's easy to find tangents of perfection, beauty and hilarity to distract yourself with when reminsicing about Whitney Houston. Here was someone so gorgeous, her warts were attractive.

To think of anyone's life as a cautionary tale is condescending (true acceptance includes flaws) and selective. Unless you are model-pretty with the best voice on the planet and have been rewarded for both with international celebrity, Whitney's complicated story doesn't apply to you. The best we could ever do was admire it from afar, the worst we could do is reduce it to a one-sentence moral. What can you learn from Whitney's addiction that Nancy Regan didn't teach you almost 30 years ago?

I was really looking forward to watching Whitney turn into a crazy old lady. The fun she already was predicted the fun she would have been! I was also looking forward to her comeback, which for the last decade, flirted with the horizon. Selfishly, I feel cheated out of some great chapters, but the early ones are rich enough to provide a lot of solace.

I've been pondering the thematic line in Whitney's "Didn't We Almost Have It All": "The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend." It seems like it should apply here, and it almost does. Jon Caramanica said it really well (with eerie prophecy) days before those pictures of Whitney looking disheveled outside of Kelly Price's party surfaced: "To be Whitney now, you had to be Whitney then." A life is over, and Whitney wore it so publicly that we now know exactly what we are missing. Nothing is "worth" someone's death, but I feel so fortunate to have shared some of Whitney's life.

I wrote a more formal tribute for work. During my research scramble, I rewatched a lot of her 2009 interview with Oprah Winfrey, which was just so wonderful and comprehensive that it's about as close to a memoir as we got from Whitney. The part of the interview that affected me the most during my review was the discussion on the death of Michael Jackson, which affected Whitney so greatly that she teared up during her recollection. Watching this in light of her death, I felt a weird unity with this distant star and so much farther away.

 

The diva chain

 

Not to incite a stan war or anything (HAHA, I WOULD LOVE THAT), but the practice of female singers being asked to comment on their peers (or taking it upon themselves to do so) is endlessly fascinating. (Is it sexist to play women off of each other? It it bitchy for women to take the bait? Is it sexist to think that they're bitchy?) So here are a bunch of clips of divas talking about divas. I gave myself an organizational rule when assembling this: The person speaking in each clip must have been talked about in the preceding clip.

Bobby and Whitney, doing it themselves

 

As a followup to yesterday's Whitney Houston pride post, here's some vintage raw interview footage of Bobby and Whitney on one of his birthdays. As far as I know, this footage has never before been shown in its entirety. As far as the content goes, they are so flippant and aggressive! Not to mention passionate about black history! It's easy to look at this stuff and think, "Path to destruction," if in fact you feel these people are now destroyed, but I love how spontaneous and devil-may-care-about-media-training they are. They didn't need anyone but themselves to make an interview work. How many celebrities can you say that about today?

Your pride is NOT her pride

 

My favorite Whitney is defensive Whitney (Nippy has bite!), and so I love this clip from her 1999 MTV All Access special that someone truly wonderful recently put in my hands. In it, John Norris asks her about her performance at New York's pride festivities in 1999 and, in light of the longstanding rumors about Whitney's own sexuality, she immediately differentiates her pride (for being a mother and a wife and a daughter and a sister and a lover and a friend) from gay pride. OK! We get it! You are everything in the world aside from gay, Whitney!

Her tone is otherwise of reciprocal appreciation. The footage of her freaking out on house remixes of "It's Not Right But It's Okay" and "Heartbreak Hotel" in front of a throng of rapturous gays is hilarious. The best supporting performance award goes to her non-supporting belt.

Happy Pride, whatever it is that you're proud of.

fourfour = 5

I started fourfour on May 31, 2005, and I figure that the fifth anniversary of this blog is an occasion that calls for a look back. Surveying 1,116 posts that have appeared on a single blog over the course of five years is setting yourself up for looking at a whole lot of nothing, but regardless of how foolhardy my time investment has been, clearly this space has mattered to me. I'm grateful that in the rare cases that I feel like I have something that should really get out there, it almost always does. I'm grateful that I can make some money (a modest freelance wage, really) saying exactly what I think needs to be said on my terms. I'm grateful for the work/interview/interpersonal opportunities my work here has presented to me. I'm grateful that people seem to care about what I have to say, for however temporarily (I've heard, "I used to read your blog..." enough times to make me feel like I'm being oversensitive by finding those words offensive). I've always said that I like to have something to show for my time (I'm very material in that respect) and so the most I'll concede after looking at five year's worth of work is that it's been a whole lot of something.

Let it never be said that I don't know how to throw myself a party. The verdict on this blog's best offerings is probably none of my business -- I wouldn't even know how to call that if I had to. However, for the sake of retrospect, I can share with you what the most satisfying posts of the past five years were from the perspective of the person who created them and received feedback on them. My Top 20 is below.

Whatchu smokin' 'bout, Whitney?

I know that taking someone's words out of context, chopping them up and rearranging them is kind of cheating (virtually anyone saying anything can sound funny with such treatment), but fuck it -- sometimes you just gotta entertain yourself. And so I did:

Granted, if the video source weren't LOL-full in the first place, I wouldn't have been so inspired. This really just consolidates her weirdness. I didn't put the "onion soup" or non-scary costumes or put the jazz hands in her mouth! Also, she seems to be having a great time, so I guess I'll be pounding B-12 this weekend at whatever rager I inevitably find myself at.

I think this might be the first video I've seen where the many YouTube captions that get it wrong...

 

...are about as coherent as the ones that (mostly) get it right...

 

Her grooves are great

Before I say anything about Whitney's epic two-day interview on Oprah, let me get this out of my system:

 

Oh boy, is this woman amazing. Enthralled for the full two hours Oprah rightly devoted to Whitney, a lot of things came to mind, but nothing more forcefully than these two words: consummate entertainer. Her story of drug addiction, co-dependency, getting sick of fame to the point where she really thought that part of her life was over, playing her status as an icon down so as not to emasculate her husband, doing Being Bobby Brown just for his sake (but thinking it was an accurate portrayal of their dysfunction) and on and on and on -- it was all so compelling, and the way she told it only made it more fascinating. I didn't think for one second that Whitney was anything but entirely honest -- at this point, what does she have to lose, anyway? This was the specific counterpart to her vague (but good) "comeback" album I Look to You, and I'm seriously in awe of Oprah's skills. I guess you don't get to be Oprah by accident.

The only thing I was a little bit disappointed by was that Whitney dodged the question of whether she lost her voice -- she was always confident it was there, but she made no reference to the fact that it's no longer near the condition it once was. Oh well, her performance of "I Didn't Know My Own Strength" at least restored some faith in her ability to perform live after her disastrous showing on Good Morning America. I guess she has her good days and her bad days (and indeed, in the first part of the interview, taped just the day before Central Park, her speaking voice was thin and raspy). After all, she's only human -- that seems to be her primary message these days, anyway.

Oh, and fuck Wendy Williams for taking Whitney to task for "not owning" her addiction, whatever the fuck that means. Whitney did not appear on Oprah to discuss the addition gene, but the circumstances that surrounded her drug problem (and they had everything to do with Bobby), and she certainly didn't go on Oprah so that Wendy Williams could tearfully address America and prove that she's the better recovering addict. I loved Wendy up till this. It could be a deal-breaker for me. I think ultimately she's just salty that she didn't get the exclusive, and she's trying to force her way into Whitney's spotlight. What a pig. I think we all know the appropriate response. Ahem.

Anyway, I'm not going to recap the interview or anything, just rip shit from context for maximum hilarity, because this woman is really something else. First up is a soundboard of my favorite quotes from the interview:

And then below, some gifs. They are sooo necessary...

"Everybody loves the island groove"

I cannot stop watching and laughing at this clip of Whitney talking about working with Akon. First of all, her hardened countenance reminds me of Jerri Blank's. Second of all, the way she's selling this is just so weird. ("I started togetintohim I started listentohisstuff and.........he's appealing.") I'm not saying she's hilarious here in a druggy or post-druggy way, I just think that she's like nothing I've seen before. She's hip and with it, but I don't quite know what "it" is. And that's why I love her (and I can't wait for the TWO-FUCKING-PART Oprah interview!).

Also this has given me something to look forward to: the day someone says, "His grooves are great," in reference to me will be the day I know I've truly made it.

The revenge of the voice

Whitney's been through some shit, but don't expect details on her much-hyped "comeback" album, I Look to You. The disc is peppered with references to pain, hopelessness and regret, but that's about as specific as it gets. I suppose that's what happens when you don't write your own confessional -- your hired hands are left to be as generic as possible so as not to step on their boss's toes or piss her off. (That's especially true when one said hand is Diane Warren, who seems to have never experienced an emotion beyond inspiration, and I'm not even sure that's an emotion in the first place.) The difference between a gossip monger and a pop songwriter has never seemed so slight: they both make up the stories, it's just the latter does it with blandness.

Far more revealing than any of the words that Whitney says on the album, are what she uses to say them with. That voice, that one-time awe-inspiring natural resource now sounds polluted and in perpetual need of a throat-clearing. Although it is abstract, it is a much more harrowing portrait of this woman's story. At some point between 2002 (she sounds infinitely better on the infinitely less remarkable Just Whitney) and now, the woman that we knew -- Whitney, The Voice -- broke. While it had already been deteriorating with age and Newports (and whatever else), the magnitude of this change is striking. It is evident in every grunt, in every croak, in every yelp that previously would have been a run. I defended her damaged pipes when I gushed about "Million Dollar Bill" last month, saying they sounded real and "lived in." I didn't realize that they'd overstay their welcome over the course of an entire album.

Whenever a veteran act attempts to fold into pop's current status quo, he or she is accused of trying too hard. Whitney's no exception -- it's just that here, all the trying isn't an outward expression of prolonged youth or hipness. No, it's located interally, as she just tries to crank out something passable from the larynx. Otherwise, she's surrounded by something rather amazing: a group of songs that manage to be age-appropriate without sounding stuffy. Even if it's just barely, she's carrying the highest ratio of catchy melodies since...The Bodyguard? Whitney? The dance tracks are chic and don't pound you over the head with their faddishness, and the mid-tempos like the Akon collaboration "Like I Never Left" exude a sweetness that helps offset the brutality of her voice. The schmaltz here isn't exactly my taste, but it's always been part of Whitney's repertoire and so the weepy, would-be inspiring ballads even sound appropriate.

Taken as a whole, I Look to You is something of an endurance test, but almost all of the songs work on an individual basis. I can't imagine an outfit more fitting for Whitney, who's maybe the definitive singles artist of her time. She's released just two full-length studio albums each decade she's been in the business (if you don't count 2003's Christmas album One Wish), and a lot of her chart domination via a string of soundtracks and one-offs. I'm not saying I Look to You sounds full of hits, but I also wouldn't be anything but delighted if anything here was allowed to truly stand outside its somewhat oppressive constraints.

At the same time, besides "Million Dollar Bill," and maybe the determined "Call You Tonight," there's nothing here that screams classic. It's mostly just solidly competent. That's more than most were probably expecting, but it doesn't quite translate into the event I Look to You is being marketed as. If Whitney released an album with material of this caliber every few years, it would be a different story. As is, it's sort of destined to underwhelm. Add in the disingenuousness of an album based on a story that isn't really told (Whitney's fall and resurrection), and you're left with a conceptual failure that works despite itself. Seriously, the only thing we really learn about Whitney here is that she's a huge fan of shout-outs (they pop up in the heavily synthesized "Nothin' But Love," again in "For the Lovers," which is for the lovers, in "Worth It," which is also for the lovers, and her remake of "A Song for You," which is for you, of course).

There's even a pointed lack of romance on the album -- it's either crumbling or on hold ("Call You Tonight") or too fantastical to be taken seriously ("Million Dollar Bill"). Her lips are moving, but mum's the word. It's funny because in the much passed-around video of her Central Park performance for Good Morning America, she apologizes for her extreme hoarseness by blaming it on her Oprah appearance, which taped the day before. It's as though she's saying, "See? You make me talk about shit and I can't do my job." If only her pipes were as strong as they used to be, everything would be so much easier to sweep under the rug.