The chiming, soft-focus keyboards that open “Saving All My Love For You” suggest late-night romance, low lights and the chink of glasses. This is a bluff and a lie: “Saving” isn’t a song about romance, it’s a song about pain and anger, and how its singer copes with and channels those. On its – pretty obscure – original recording, by Marilyn McCoo, the arrangement is richer and McCoo sounds rueful but warm, almost good-humoured. She’s calculated the angles as much as her married lover has, and knows that what she has is the least worst option: it’s a compromised sort-of happiness, but it’ll have to do.
“It’ll have to do” is not a concept the Whitney version recognises. This “Saving” smarts with the unfairness of the situation, the shock of crushed expectations. The winsome sax-and-keys arrangements (so bland, to be honest, that their bluff goes too far and spoils the record) are a taunt for Whitney: this isn’t a slow dance, it’s a bad deal, and she’s on the end of it. Houston isn’t at her best on sweet songs – harshness and force have always been weapons available to her and on “Saving” they come out at just the right time: “To-NIGHT, Is the NIGHT. For feeling al-RIGHT.” – you can almost hear the cutlery slamming down on the table as she lays it, ready for him to walk in the door. In McCoo’s version, the man-and-mistress arrangement is stable. In Houston’s you feel something’s going to give, not tonight, no, but soon – and it won’t be pretty when it happens.
It’s a great performance, and an important single. Because of all the versions of pop we’ve seen in 1985 – good, bad, old-fashioned, cheap or ugly – this is one of the most enduring: the glamorous young soul diva with the colossal voice. It’s the kind of pop stardom which turned out much later to transfer best to reality TV, but the astonishing success of Whitney and her successors means we’ll see plenty of it before that. So it’s good that we’re meeting the style at close to its best. The schlocky arrangement of “Saving” hides a fine, moving song, and the scale of Whitney Houston’s performance shouldn’t obscure how much conflict and nuance she puts into it.
Score: 7
[Logged in users can award their own score]
This was the first single I ever ‘owned’, my parents buying me the 7″ because I’d expressed love for it in whatever way a 23 month-old child can. Sounds like post-Sade Valium music to me now, associated with early morning cab rides home with Magic 105.4 playing very, very quietly on the radio.
I can’t muster any enthusisam for this at all given the horrors to come from Ms Houston and her imitators. The best I can come up with is that she isn’t (perhaps wasn’t allowed to be) as self-indulgent on this as on later singles. Oh and she looked very fetching in the video.
I assumed, looking at the list of #1s in advance, that I wouldn’t like this any more than I did at the time – so I was surprised how much it grew on me (though I do like plenty of Whitney singles, it’s rarely her out-and-out ballads).
SwedenWatch: Didn’t chart in the top 20, nor did it appear on the Tracks chart.
So I was rather surprised when I recognised the song perfectly well. And it’s a strange sort of recognition, stripped of any traces of childhood nostalgia – it makes me think I’ve heard it in more recent years, but I can’t for the life of me figure out where or when (which is unusual for me). I don’t own any Whitney Houston records, and have never been a big fan, so that can’t be it. And I tend not to listen to the kind of radio stations that would play a song like this nowadays. The whole thing bothers me a little, as I usually take pride in my metacognitive ninja skillz.
Anyway, I agree more or less completely with Tom. I like how Houston sings in a fairly restrained manner, but occasionally almost growls out the lyrics – those “To-NIGHT is the NIGHT” bits are absolutely the best parts of the song. This style of delivery is infinitely more attractive than the full-on hurricane approach that I associate with Whitney (you know, THAT song).
I kind of enjoy the arrangement too. I assume it’s meant to sound sophisticated and grown-up, but it comes out as tinny and cheap (the electric piano and dry snares in particular). It produces a jarring effect that’s quite interesting, even if I don’t think it’s intentional in any way. I wonder if it’s even possible to create it intentionally.
That’s a really acute critique, Tom, and makes me want to hear it anew.
(listens to it anew)
No, I still can’t respond to it positively. I hear the showboating display of technique and the Gold Blend saxophone and it makes me irritated, I’m afraid.
There are Whitney songs that I like though, and it won’t be long before we get to them…
Be interesting to have someone who knows the score explain how much of this is a Clive Davis record, and how much is Whitney. Not her first recordings, I believe – didn’t she sing on one song on one of those Golden Palominos records, or Material? Either way – one of those NY-avant-gardists-do-collaborative-pop albums
Lovely in the video and in retrospect a subtler song than I gave it credit for at the time : in Ireland they had been playing this off the album since the summer – I was sick to death of its saccharine arrangement and the smooth sub-Sade delivery by the time it hit the chart.
I give it a five now (it would have been 3 back then)
An 8 verging on a 9 from me. Her voice really is remarkable. I don’t listen to Whitney H. much or to her successor divas – it’s just not my thing – but I do listen to Streisand pretty regularly, and that’s who she reminds me of here. As with Streisand, W’s voice has *so* much color and dimensionality and is so effortless and apparently unconstrained that it doesn’t even register *as* singing…. Rather, it’s like she’s speaking tonally/dramatically to you. It’s an amazing gift.
The vid’s new to me. I recall W. arriving feted for her movie star/top model-level height and looks (just as Alicia Keys did this decade) but the vid. still surprised me. Its *very* effectively cinematic – that could *be* Sliding Doors or The Bodyguard, and in some ways it’s amazing that it isn’t. The walking out of the studio in slinky dress and heels as we hit the high notes is a ding-dong classic moment that I’m glad to have seen now (thanks youtube!). The inevitable W. walking off alone final shot is more Sweet Charity than My Name is Barbra, but it’s pretty convincing. Triumphant miserabilism: I’m having the one I sha’n’t have, and it’s driving me mad, and it’s written all over my face, so I’m saving all my love for you. Thank you and good night.
Further to my own query upthread, Whitney’s recording debut was singing the song Memories on Bill Laswell’s album Material & Friends. This may be the last time she appeared on an album with Fred Frith, Anton Fier, Archie Shepp and the like. How different history might have been had Clive Davis not intervened.
I like this a lot – and the video serves the song well. It’s a terrific performance from Whitney – it’s restrained in an almost masochistic sense. She’s willing to suffer in the relationship for whatever crumbs of affection she can gather. I’m not condoning that attitude but it seems prophetic in the light of her future problems.
I can see some connection with X factor but it avoids the over egged emoting of the majority of those performers. For me, she fits in more comfortably (on this song at least) with singers like Anita Baker and, later, Mary J Blige.
She is part of a trend in 80s pop for what could be described as the rise of the pop dynasty, with much being made at the time of her debut of her relation to Thelma Houston and Dionne Warwick to name but a few.
I remembered her from Material’s One Down, still a teenager, singing Hugh Hopper’s “Memories” at the other end of the Wyatt vocal spectrum (“I WANT you! I WANT you in ME!”) accompanied by Archie Shepp’s browbeating tenor, so knew she was capable of more. But she was never going to win Grammies and conquer the world in Laswellland, so settling for Tom Scott’s tenor and an expensive, exploration-free production three years later was the inevitable key step.
“Saving All My Love For You” was co-written by Gerry Goffin, and though sung by a 22-year-old, it sounds like a grown-up Shirelle whom nobody loved tomorrow. The cocktail bar, the open freezer door, are immediately summoned by the arrangement’s surface seduction, but the story is an old one, of a hopelessly lost case snatching her “few stolen moments” with the married (presumably older, and inclined towards multiple polygamic tendencies – “Though I try to resist being last on your list”) father who is the only person she can think of loving.
She does so out of an under-specified cancer of despair: “It’s not very easy, living all alone…/But each time I try [to find a man of my own] I just break down and cry/’Cos I’d rather be home feeling blue.” She reserves all her love (if love it be, and not exhausted desperation) for someone who is fundamentally unlovable, but he’ll do, and maybe he does remind her of her dad; I note that on her second album she does actually cover “I Know Him So Well” as a duet with her mother Cissy, turning the song into a lament for an unseen father.
So it is an old song for a young woman to be singing, written by two men old enough to be her father; and perhaps this is the record’s central problem. One expects a certain initial rawness, a violent expulsion/excoriation of two decades of pent-up, suppressed feelings – think of the history whose blood 22-year-old Aretha forces into the grooves of “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Loved You)” – but Whitney seems to have taken (or made to take) the shortcut to moneyspinning maturity. The song itself is beautifully constructed and lives and breathes as a melody, as Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy demonstrated when they covered the tune for 1986’s Avant Pop, cleverly blurring the lines between sophistication and seediness which the song walks by eventually turning it (via Steve Turré’s purposely exaggerated trombone slides) into a burlesque striptease accompaniment. And Whitney’s vocal is faultless, finding the precise tiny gap to inhabit between devotion and fear, keeping her feelings under control before suddenly leaping out to scream “no other MAN” or “that’s just an old fantaSY.” Given her subsequent history, however, one wonders whether she would have benefited from having her fun to begin with; Carly Simon’s “I’ll never learn to be me, all alone, by myself” seems painfully pertinent.
I don’t hear pain and anger; of all things, this song sounds positively celebratory to me. I hear JOY. I can’t imagine Whitney singing this song with anything but a smile on her face. For me, the true insight of this song, and her performance, is that unrequited love can be just as fun as the real thing. “I’d rather be home feeling blue” than get a real relationship; that’s a frank and kind of disturbing line. She sounds utterly, unsettlingly content with her own dissatisfaction, in some weird paradoxical kind of way.
I’m kind of amazed how Whitney Houston seems to have disappeared from the public discourse; I barely ever hear her songs on the radio, even though old staples from Michael and Janet and Madonna I can hear pretty regularly. I’ve long though of Whitney’s career as defined by “I Will Always Love You,” vulgar displays of power in service of utterly bland material, but “Saving All My Love for You” puts the lie to that. This is the only song I think I would give Whitney the label of “soul singer” rather than Celine Dion-type “adult pop” singer.
I actually only heard this for the first time recently: my introduction to Houston will be covered as and when. I have a soft spot for most songs sung as “the other woman” – what really leaps out about “Saving All My Love For You” is how little of the focus is on the object. We learn little about him, other than that he’s cheating on his family – none of the characteristics which draw Houston to him. But we learn a hell of a lot about her, and we realise that she’s drawn to being the Other Woman because of her own character, not his. The way she conveys her own emotional fucked-upness – and the fear behind it – in the second verse is incredible.
Re: #5: the dismissal of “technique”, in particular when it’s framed as “technique vs. emotion”, is maybe my biggest bugbear ever. Showboating and melisma are specific vocal techniques used to convey specific, overwhelming emotions; it’s no surprise that the foremost exponents of them come from gospel or opera backgrounds, which place comparable emphasis on pushing the singer’s voice to the limits of what it can do. The history of showboating vocals is so much more nuanced, complex and meaningful than to be just reduced or dismissed as “just technique”.
I guess here is as good a place as any to mention poor, kooky Whitney’s hot mess appearance on X Factor last weekend? The wardrobe malfunction, the amazing vibing out towards the end where she just nodded along and seemed to forget that she was meant to be performing, the forgetting that she had an album out and total cluelessness as to the release date, the way she tried to stop dissing all the finalists but couldn’t stop herself, the constant looking on the floor, presumably for her crack…still so much better than Cheryl though.
#13 great point about the song being about her, not him, yes!
The X-Factor thing was, er, yeah. Though actually until the last minute or so we were saying, oh good for her, she’s doing way better than we’d thought. Treating “Million Dollar Bill” as a stomper wasn’t great either but the show doesn’t really lend itself to “warm”.
Cheryl’s appearance worked fine if you took it as a tribute to the “Go West” era Pet Shop Boys.
Re 13: I don’t entirely agree that audible technique equals emotion but, yes, it surely does here. Whitney is pretty restrained, not wholly sure of her situation. I don’t hear fear, just guilt-tripping (“last in your list” is surely there to get a response of “hell no, baby, you’re number one!”), until the final choruses where she is belting it out to win her man, prove that she’s better than the rest of his harem. It works a treat, perfectly reflecting the storyline – unlike a later Whitney entry, in which I can’t hear gospel or opera in her performance, just a broken volume button.
Re 11: Girl group grown up, one of my favourite semi-genres. Was this Gerry Goffin’s first number one? For someone so clearly drug damaged (anyone heard his solo album? God, I love the man, but it’s entirely painful) he certainly turned it around in the mid 80s. More popular entries to follow, I think.
What is the keyboard that makes that sickly sound on the intro? I’d like to buy one just to ceremonially smash it. Maybe they’ll burn a stack of them in Lewes in a couple of weeks.
As for the video, her fella appears to work in a studio at the top of Parkway in Camden! Or am I going nuts? When the single came out I didn’t know the area so I’d have missed it.
Oh, and the thing that annoys me most about the Cheryl single is it’s such a thinly disguised rewrite of Kelis’s gorgeous Lil Star which I only discovered this year and has been one of my most played on Spotify.
Tom has found a lot in this song which I’d never noticed. I always thought the narrator seemed to be singing in a good mood, mind you it took me over a decade even to work out it was an adultery song so I probably would have missed the implicit content.
I suppose Whitneys vocals are so dreamy she could be singing the weekend football results and it would sound fine and this does. I would place it second only to ” Into the Groove ” amongst the ’85 chart-toppers (no small compliment).
I wouldn’t blame Ms Houston for the garishness of her imitators. I would say she has often squandered her gifts on syrupy crap like
” The Greatest Love Of All ” and ” One Moment In Time “.
Also her confidence turned to a certain imperiousness after a few hits.
Listen to ” Saving All My Love.. ” back to back with ” I Will Always Love You ” and you can hear the difference between an open-hearted joy in singing and over-bearing self-satisfaction.
The two takes on the same song struck me last night on something else I was listening to. I was surfing YouTube aimlessly and I happened across the Nirvana MTV unplugged performance of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”. Kurt’s take on the song was of the jealous boyfriend interrogating his wayward girlfriend. He lays all his insecurities bare in his strained vocal.
Then I clicked on the link to Leadbelly’s recording, and a different point of view, that of the accusatory father. Mr Belly’s vocal comes from a position of authority, that of a protective father appalled at his rebellious daughter’s behaviour.
Funny how this alternative take crops up again. Whitney’s youth and impatience suggests she’s dissatisfied with the situation, but she’ll put up with it for now like Tom says. Maybe the object of her desire is as well endowed as Madonna’s paramour in “Like a Virgin” (if Mr Tarantino is to be believed). I can’t imagine a young woman settling for crumbs off the table, like the mature McCoo does.
Clive Davis took a gamble chosing this song for Whitney, but it’s the strength of her vocal that endures.
An 8 for me.
I’m not sure if it was mentioned at the time, but the song structure of SAMLFY bears a strong resemblance to Crystal Gayle’s Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue. Just started humming one, realised it was the other. Blimey.
#13 I’ll take your word for it that “showboating” has a neutral technical meaning in music but I suspect Billy meant it in the everyday sense of someone displaying their mastery of a technique when it’s not really required as when a goalkeeper makes a diving save instead of just shifting his feet. Not that I think Whitney’s guilty on this one but certainly so on later hits.
quoth wichita :
“but the song structure of SAMLFY bears a strong resemblance to Crystal Gayle’s Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue”
hmm, you’re not wrong there, bud.
Ultimately, and the end of the day, when all is said and done, etc, it’s a sludgy slow tune and they need to be pretty special to get pass marks from me ( WH herself had a MUCH better tune – if a wee bit bombastic – in a few years time, IMHO ).
You can save your production values, who wrote it, how old she was, what EXACTLY is she feeling, etc. Sorry, it’s just NOT IMPORTANT. Was it a good choon? Erm, no not really.
I’m shallow, what can one do?
NEXT!
must take my tablet now…………
The Blue Note-wannabe cover of the single is probably pushing it! Does anyone know which exact album cover, if any, the image harks back to?
I know what you mean, Swan, but this did feel like a major new singer, with a pretty astonishing voice, was in our midst. You can see why they went all Billie Holiday (I’m guessing) with the sleeve. Move Closer could’ve done with something similar instead of the digital jumper.
I dunno swan, it’s not a total rip-off with classic Blue Note graphics – that font’s all wrong. One baulks at using the word homage ( either that or I can just hear Americans pronounce it ) but I think it’s a decent enough cover and it certainly hasn’t aged.
( and we have a shot of the actual cover with the poor 7″ snuggling inside. )
punctum will know better than me, but i don’t think there WERE any singers on blue note* — certainly not as name-and-photo-on-sleeve stars… possibly as guest appearances on individual tracks, but that’s not what that sleeve signifies
billie holiday recorded for verve, columbia and decca (yes of course i looked that up): this is a good index of the kinds of sleeves she got at the time
*actually a very quick glance at r.d.cook’s book on same tells me there was a sassy soul singer called marlena shaw had a blue note alb in the mid-70s, which is not really to the point but disproves my absolute claim
OK, this song. You remember the video for “Careless Whisper,” right? That little scene where George Michael’s girlfriend walks into the room and The Other Woman gives her a cute little smirk?
“Saving All My Love For You” is “Careless Whisper” sung from The Other Woman’s POV.
@22 Wichita. I agree that the cover works well as an announcement that a *voice* had arrived (see my note at #8 – I’m one of the biggest fans of the record here!). The jazz label reference ‘pushes it’ in my view only in that SAMLFY is a little simple melodically and lyrically for classic songbook status. The underlying song is good, but not in the same song-writing league as, say, the Gershwins’ ‘But not for me’ or Berlin’s ‘Happy Days’, i.e., the stuff that Barbra S. let loose on in the mid-’60s and blew people away with (see here if you don’t know that stuff, or if you just want to revisit, it’s awesome!).
Her first #1 in the States as well. This was the one that inspired a whole bunch of girls to pick up a mic and sing their hearts out, long before the Idol shows. A good song to boot. Although I love the single before it as well, “You Give Good Love”. But this was the standard. A solid 8.
Like a lot of people here I went back to this expecting far more vocal gymnastics but it turned out to be more subtle than I remembered which must mean that our frame of reference for “histrionic” has changed in the past 20-odd years. Instead it’s rather classy bedroom soul, like Anita Baker with pop chops.
I think someone above mentioned Alicia Keys and I can see the connection, both were seen as “the complete package” — beautiful girls with cross-racial appeal who could sing up a storm. Though Alicia writes her own stuff and seems more in control than poor Whitney.
I don’t see much ‘Blue Note’ in that cover at all. The photo maybe with it’s blue duotone and the classic jazz microphone pose but the typography is so far away from that I can’t imagine there was any intent there. If there was they made a right pig’s ear of it.
Not sure about any comparisons between WH and Alicia Keys. As far as I am aware AC writes her own stuff while WH was shaped by svengali Clive Davis and sung other peoples’ songs.
Having Deonne Warwick as an auntie isn’t going to hurt either………
If you’ll notice I said they are both pretty girls with great voices, though Alicia writes her own stuff. Clive Davis produced Keys’ first album too. They’re more alike than they are different.
#19 – the reason I’m suspicious of the “they’re just displaying their technique” dismissive line is that I’ve seen it applied unthinkingly so often – to any melismatic display of chops – even where, for me (and presumably many other people), the showboating is crucial to the song. To take an un-bunnied example, Mariah Carey’s “Emotions” – her showboating runs and adventures in her whistle register are absolutely indicative of the giddy joy she feels. (And yes, she’s showing off too! The two are not mutually exclusive. And indeed, when you’ve got your man and he makes you thrilled and happy, showing off is a perfectly natural response.)
i’ve always seen the antimelisma line as just a blatant lovechild of rockism and corny indie fuxxors w/ some deepseated unease at the open expression of emotion uncloaked in irony lurking at the root of it. mariah (in her prime – let’s say thru butterfly) left me cold at least 50% of the time (though when it didn’t – ‘vision of love’, ‘i’ll be there’, ‘fantasy’ come to mind immediately – WOW) and her technique always seemed so much more strained than whitney’s, which even when unleashed (cf. ‘i have nothing’) seemed so relatively effortless while still powerful, esp in comparison to her imitators. anyhow disregarding whitney vs. mariah (and i’m all whitney though my preference is more just enjoying snappy bitch over giddy puppy)(stones > beatles also) or the pop vs. indie debate of ‘is it a good thing or a bad thing if the singer of a song actually knows how to sing?’, this song marks (arguably) the first definite appearance of the formula that would dominate (stateside at least) the number one spot for the rest of the century and lingers still – adult contemporary + r&b. r&b (esp of the buppie crossover quiet storm unto babyface type like this) suffers general critical neglect but nowhere near the level of adult contemporary which has been pretty much completely ignored (i’m not sure i can think of five crit pieces to really seriously deal w/ ac pro or con), despite having had a bigger place in the culture (in the us at least) over the past 25 years than for example rock music (nevermind indie rock music) – why is that?
Whitney doing SAMLFY in 1985 on Letterman is here, if anyone’s interested.
“DYNASTY styling!”
The sleeve looks like late-period Verve to me. Definitely a Billie Holiday/Sarah Vaughan vibe to it, although by the 80s surely classic soul was accruing the same patina of respectability: a ghost of some Dionne Warwick or Diana Ross image lingers on the edge of my memory too.
Anyway. Whitney was one of the first times I can remember when “I don’t like this” entered my vocabulary in regards to pop music. The formation of a (tentative, easily-swayed) taste, in other words … but this won’t be for some years yet and is surely bunny-embargoed. Here’s hoping for a splendid row when we reach it.
31/32: while the anti-melisma line has indeed been spouted by a lot of knuckleheaded rockists and whimpering schmindie-ists, it’s also been expressed, hopefully in a more nuanced way, by plenty of people steeped in the work of Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Aretha etc… It’s all very well saying it came from gospel, but few of the many, many church-raised singer pre-the mid 80s went in for that extremity of vocal mannerism (isn’t there actually a substantial jazz element to this?)
(Not to be Lex-baiting or anything, but the high-pitched noises on a lot of Mariah records remind me of nothing so much as the feedback on early Jesus And Mary Chain singles).
Oh, and I like Saving All My Love – probably Whitney’s best song before the first comeback.
Sinkah #24 – Sheila Jordan recorded just the one album for Blue Note in ’62 but what an album: Portrait Of Sheila. Barry Galbraith, Steve Swallow, Denzil Best – absolute magic.
#15 Lil Star reminds me of Suicide Is Painless as much as Cheryl! I think I’m pretty bad at spotting similar melodies, I get distracted by timbre too much.
#10: Whitney no relation to Thelma as far as I know.
#15: Gerry Goffin had six number ones in the U.S. prior to this, but none in the U.K. as far as I know. Impressively, “The Loco-Motion” hit number 2 twice with two different singers in the U.K.
Initially I only heard this song out of the far corner of one of my ears, and never gave it any thought until reading Tom’s write-up just now, but I’m very impressed. She mostly lets the lyrics take care of themselves, and this works very well for them and the performance. The frustration doesn’t lose any power for not being especially underlined (though Tom is right about how “To-NIGHT, Is the NIGHT. For feeling al-RIGHT” works in context).
#32 I prefer Stones to Beatles too but I absolutely love Emotions– and MTV Unplugged-era Mariah (completely bunny-free, unfortunately). Mariah’s leaping atop a thousand skies and a thousand clouds and kicking everyone and everything else off of them, and hurrah for her. I hear it as total excitement and emotion, though not in service to the emotions and not nailed-down particularly to the emotions of the words, which are there and deliver their emotions very powerfully, being strong words, but are only a small part of the story.
Hit and run as have a tone to do today
per mark @36, not so much jazz-toned as metal-toned? This was the era of Eddie Van H and Steve Vai and Joey Satriani, guitatarists with college-trained chops so far beyond punk, indie or alt-rock chops that they essentially lived in difft universes of affect and value — I dare say, even if Whitney cares little for axe heroes, that any critical distaste for this level of technique had evolved in the long war on hair metal
if i had to express a generalised preference, i prefer soul and R&B post whitney-mariah (exceptions = wonder and JB); i don’t dislike aretha and al et al but i never play them except for research purposes — i think “in service to the song” is the issue; i like that there are performers — in this sometimes quite stratified area of the industry (as in “davis was moulding houston”), where producers and song-writers are very present and dominant, who make a kick of fvcking with the protocols — it renders the structure visible and makes this rendering part of the art (= mariah is my nu-pop mclaren)
Whitney is Cissy Houston’s daughter, I believe
a TON to do! brrrm brrrm *and off*
Haha it seems to me the cover has a great deal in common with early-period Sisters of Mercy, with additional use of the left/right align button.
Scarper! It’s the Gothfynder General!
This was far too boring and adult for my 16 year old ears.
That said, I rather liked the follow up, How Will I Know? (Though of course I never admitted it at the time.)
32 – absolutely agree, and the “open, irony-free display of emotion” is key, I think; and especially so when on such public, glitzy display.
Am going to c/p a pertinent thing that Tim F said on ILX (comparing Mariah Carey and Liz Fraser):
A lot of the argument for Fraser and against Carey seems ultimately to be rooted in a mistrust of emotional expressions that seem rooted in “universalist” mass culture. The attraction of Fraser is her idiosyncracy, her near-inimitability – this suggests a world of private, singular and perhaps inarticulable emotions. For some listeners I’m sure this would shore up their sense of individuality: “Fraser speaks to and for me because I am suspicious of “standard” emotional responses.”
Whereas Carey, who is nearly as singular, nonetheless belongs to a more popular and populist tradition, and is imitated by young singers everywhere. To really like Carey I think you first have to be open (consciously or otherwise) to the possibility of sharing some emotional responses in common with “everybody else”.
The point about young singers imitating the Careys and Houstons of this world is crucial – I’ve interviewed so many singers who grew up around them and Mariah in particular is a HUGE role model (even if a lot of these singers ended up finding their own voice and not sounding anything like her). The critical distrust of this (and mockery w/r/t X Factor wannabes influenced by her) is, I think, very rooted in its extreme girliness, too. Young girls hear a voice like Mariah and want to sing like her in the same way that they might want to be a princess or have a fairytale ending – and the male-dominated critical establishment is most dismissive of anything that codes teenage/tween girls.
Apart from fancying her like hell, I wasn’t hugely sold on this at the time – but I’ve just played it now and enjoyed it. I wonder if I’m in my -ahem- mid-30s now?
This has that ultra-smooth, belongs-in-an-episode-of-Moonlighting jazzy style. There’s a place for it all.
I must say I am VERY DISAPPOINTED in the wrong-headed Focus Group reviews of “My Love Is Your Love” in Related Articles here…so much wrong with them all.
Re 46: much prefer Mariah to Liz F, still hate the mini-Mariahs on talent shows.
Re 48: seconded.
Lex at #13 is spot on re what we learn about the Houston character – it’s hard to imagine an attractive, confident woman like that (and I’m talking about the character, not necessarily Whitney) settling for second best and scraps when she could presumably grab a man of her own without too much trouble, but the portrayal is well drawn.
Agree with Tom that something’s going to give soon, but the line that seals the deal for me is not “toNIGHT is the NIGHT” – irresistibly sexy though it is – but “you said be patient, just wait a little longer / but THAT’s just an OLD fantasy” with the beats emphasising the crucial message to the guy and Whitney forcing out every syllable and stuff the vocal technique!
(Interesting to note from Wiki that the screenplay to “Fatal Attraction” was written in 1985 and taken round a few studios before the hit movie was made – something in the air obviously…)
A fabulous record and a great chart debut. We’ll no doubt talk about the vocal technique again when her later hits come up, but although I’m a bit of a rockist myself I think I’ll be more tolerant of THAT song than many…