WHITNEY HOUSTON – “Saving All My Love For You”
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.
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Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 2,057 views • Share/Save
i dunno, i quite like THAT song myself, and i certainly like this one. i’m not sure the arrangement still codes sophistication like it once did, but it lends the whole things i woozy, intimate atmosphere that in some weird way reminds me of “the man with the child in his eyes”. and whitney’s singing is terrific throughout
despite actually using the phrase ‘x factor mariah wannabe’ in another thread, i pretty much agree with lex’s take on the kneejerk anti tecnique-ers (which is basically just a variation of ’style over substance’ nonsense) and i like the idea of why mariah appeals to young girls so much – “impossible princess” as someone once has it. that said, this sort of singing tends to be a style that has to be done really well (which, on x factor, it usually isn’t) before i like it, as opposed to something like haughty bored whitegirl style, which has to be done really badly before i don’t like it.
#46 I don’t think it’s girliness that people object to so much as cheap showboating that wrings titanic, paint-peeling emotion out of songs that are often trite.
The boys do it too, though I can’t name one that has the pipes of a Whitney or Mariah. I remember seeing Usher singing with Luther Vandross on TV and he was really straining for effect, dragging out every line as if it was a matter of life and death. Then Luther opened his mouth and blew him off the stage without breaking a sweat.
The arrival of Whitney Houston in these charts feels every bit as significant as Madonna’s, with the roster of female pop legends of the ’80s almost complete. That doesn’t mean I am or was a particular fan – her later hits were too over-the-top for me – but revisiting this has been an eye-opener. I never really noticed that it was an adultery song, which tells me that I never really paid attention to the lyrics, or at least to that crucial first verse, and never saw the video. Easy enough to explain the latter: when this was hitting big in Britain, my family and I were driving around the Cotswolds and Lincolnshire, staying in B&B rooms without TVs in them (I can only remember a couple of B&Bs in all of that trip where we did get a TV in our room, and one of those was on a 50p meter), so to me this is a radio hit. Maybe it’s fortunate that I didn’t notice the adultery theme, for the sake of those long family car journeys and my teenage embarrassment levels.
Houston’s pipes certainly sweep away the competition, but does her voice alone make this a good song? Those horrible ’80s keyboards threaten to condemn it to the schlock category to which Christgau and others consigned her. But Houston’s performance is pitched pretty much perfectly, and the song is really only undermined by that keyboard sound; if it weren’t I could see my middle-aged self loving this unreservedly.
I keep wanting to back off from 7’s or 8’s when I have no desire to own the song, but for me this has a definite something that’s missing in many of my 6’s, and I was prepared to overlook the ’80s production of “Careless Whisper”, so I’ll agree with Tom’s 7.
Number one in Australia for two weeks, by the way, in February 1986, just before Feargal Sharkey and just after Starship’s “We Built This City”.
Wringing titanic emotion out of something trite? Cor, welcome to Pop!
True. Maybe it’s the singers themselves that are trite. Some mere slip of a girl (or boy!) coming over all Mahalia Jackson strikes me as a little, I don’t know, out of balance?
I do know what you’re getting at, actually, it was a bit of a cheap shot. :) I do think it’s best to think about the bad examples of the hyperdiva style as just that – something that can work but can also go wrong, just as attempts to rock out can result in Jet as easily as AC/DC. Digging into why the good ones work and the bad ones don’t is the fun part.
A bit like those child prodigies doing maths PhDs at Oxford, isn’t it. Yes, yes, very clever, BUT YOU’RE TWELVE.
On the other hand: Juliet was 13. GET A GRIP, GIRL, YOU’LL GROW OUT OF IT.
Am I allowed to say the mixing desk in that studio is like a Vogon fleet?
#57 ah, but isn’t maths, like pop music, pretty much the only field of endeavour where it’s thought to be suprising if you’re still any good after the age of thirty? (er, probably also sport and that). it all makes sense.
Of course living in America I’m regularly treated to the spectacle of singers turning ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ into a showcase for the most ridiculous vocal acrobatics at sporting events which seems to be the most unseemly time to put the focus on yourself rather than the song. The Simpsons did a brilliant parody of that but I’ve been unable to find it online.
They are the Hendrixes of the larynx! Has anyone ever Mariah-ed up “God Save The Queen”?
which “god save the queen”? i’d like to hear mariah tackle “and other c*ntlke tendencies”
#53 – I guess my point is that no, her voice alone doesn’t make this a great song – yes, it’s her performance; but it’s because she has that voice that she can put in that performance.
#55 and #57 – when the Whitney wannabes come on X Factor etc, if their voice is good enough – like Leona Lewis’s was the other year – I always think of them as having so much untapped potential. Maybe they sound trite singing whatever cover they think they should be doing on a light entertainment TV programme, but if that fundamental talent can be pushed in the right direction with the right material and production…the diva wannabes never annoy me. They’re just kids with good voices who don’t necessarily know how to use their talent in the best way. What annoys me is that they end up in the hands of dolts like Simon fucking Cowell. But I guess we now edge into bunny territory.
More interesting and pertinent comments on the importance of technique from Diamanda Galás (who, oddly enough, is bunny-free) in this interview:
DIAMANDA: Some people hear it as technique, because they can’t hear anything but technique, so they think, “Oh, it’s about virtuoso singing.” Are they mad? Why do they think a person would be a virtuoso? So she can tell the story properly! Why else? This moron did a review of Ella Fitzgerald, some idiot from Time or Newsweek or whatever, and said that Ella Fitzgerald didn’t have as much soul as Billie Holiday, but that she was a great technical singer. And I was like, “Who the fuck are you to make this comment about Ella Fitzgerald? This woman was one of the greatest singers in the fucking world, and because you can’t hear what she’s doing, it’s just technique for you?” Wow, what a slag to say that. I feel bad for real musicians and real singers. I just feel they have a hard time of it, because a lot of people can’t hear. Or because the A&R people can’t hear it, so they assume that the public can’t hear it — which as we know isn’t quite the same thing.
Dunno about Mariah-ing up “God Save The Queen”, guess you could say Brian May Hendrix-ed it up and look where it got him – the roof of Buck House!
Mind you here’s what Roseanne Barr did with The Star Spangled Banner:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrFW2aYHVR8
Am I the only person who much prefers ‘The Greatest Love Of All’ to this, by the way?
Now there the general loopiness and messianic/ confessional tone of the song really work well when interpreted Whitney-fashion (though I’d still rather hear Kevin Rowland sing it).
I prefer George Benson’s version by quite a wide margin.
LondonLee (#60) – that’s just dreadful, a genuine form of torture. I occasionally watch the Super Bowl (for reasons that aren’t quite clear, I’m not particularly interested in sports except for proper football otherwise), and those Star Spangled Banner renditions just make me squirm.
I don’t have a clear stance on melismatic singing, showboating and all that otherwise. If it works, it works, and I tend not to even notice it when it does. Eurythmics’ “There Must Be an Angel” is a recent example – it never occured to me until it came up here that it was awash with melisma. It just sounded good to me, so I liked (and still like) it.
Which is, of course, not a particularly interesting statement. Like Tom says, trying to work out WHY the good stuff is good and the bad stuff is not is what’s fun. And I don’t know where I should start to try and unravel that at the moment.
But let’s take the position that vocal acrobatics work when they are used to convey genuine emotion or a particular message. That would explain why those sporting event Star Spangled Banners are so horrible. Not because of knee-jerk anti-Americanism on my part, it’s just that I find it hard to believe that anyone could love their country THAT much. Same thing with excessive showboating on children’s songs or christmas songs – what is the emotion that the singer is trying to get across in those cases? Just how much they LOVE that STAR and its EXTREME TWINKLINESS?
@53 Rory. What an absolute *ass* Christgau proves himself to be (again). He describes everything on Whitney’s first album except ‘How will I know’, so including SAMLFY, as ‘critically unforgivable’. There are worse things than Rockism, Pope-wannabe-ism among them.
@51 pink champale
unlike haughty bored whitegirl style, which has to be done really badly before i don’t like it.
Haw haw – indeed. Me too. In general, if one only likes the perfect version of some genre/type then one don’t like that genre/type as such, rather one is just responding to excellence. Your genre/type preferences proper are revealed by what genres/types you enjoy the c-grade/distinctly inferior versions of. And those genre/type preferences proper tend to follow pretty tight demographics. I don’t watch any of those pop idol shows so i guess that means i don’t like whatever Whitney does as such, rather (like everyone else) I can just spot excellence. About sub-sub-Siouxsie and sub-sub-Patti-Smith I’m much less discerening and easily faked out – I like Karen O. and Camera Obscura regardless of whether they’re especially good let alone overwhelmingly so.
#68 I think that’s very true swanstep. I can just about appreciate Gangster’s Paradise or some of Eminem’s stuff but I’m still happy to listen to Classix Nouveaux and A Flock Of Seagulls.
@68 I know which critic’s website I’d rather hang out at. [Looks pointedly at immediate vicinity.] And very good point about responding to excellence.
I disagree in various ways with the statement “Ella Fitzgerald didn’t have as much soul as Billie Holiday, but … she was a great technical singer” but I think I disagree in more ways with dear old Diamanda’s response to it.
1) if a critic doesn’t feel the emotional tug of a performance, (doesn’t get that “soul”, if you will) then they have every right to say the performer doesn’t have soul, even if they’re talking about (gasp) Ella (who I love).
2) “real musicians and real singers” yeah yeah OK but there are many different kinds of technique, innit, if there are non-real musicians and singers then name names and we can have a real discussion about technique and effect.
#71 –
1) Sure, taste and whether we feel the “soul” in a performance is individual, but in practice, mainstream critical consensus has generally been guilty of exactly what Diamanda charges – dismissing virtuosity as “soulless technique” due to bias against the idea that virtuosity and soul go hand in hand, or ignorance about how that can work. Often I get the impression that critics just aren’t prepared to hear the soul in a certain type of performance. So it’s a valid complaint.
2) “Real singers” is an unfortunate phrase but she obviously means technically proficient musicians who know their craft!
#68 – yeah, agree on fundamental genre preferences, and I wish people would be more honest about this. I’m not sure whether what we cherrypick outside of those genres is necessarily “excellence” though; it tends to be more what jives with whatever values we already prize. Indie audiences, for example, tend to enjoy hip-hop and r&b the most when artists ostentatiously move away from those genres’ values and traditions.
if a critic doesn’t feel the emotional tug of a performance, (doesn’t get that “soul”, if you will) then they have every right to say the performer doesn’t have soul, even if they’re talking about (gasp) Ella (who I love).
If that happens then the critic needs to examine their own response mechanisms; why aren’t they getting the tug? Is it because the singer is incapable of communicating it or is it because the critic has been conditioned to be a receptor of only certain modes of emotional expression? Since they are not the singer they have no real authority (as opposed to a “right”) to say whether or not the singer has “soul” or not (and indeed that leads onward to what is being perceived as being the “soul” but that’s another argument for another time).
Most critics’ problem with Fitzgerald is that they are ill-conditioned to receive notions of playfulness (see also Mariah passim); they have been trained (probably through doomy teenage Eng Lit reading lists) to perceive Billie & Co. as Voyaging Damned (and therefore more understandable and comprehensible to them). In addition there is a certain stability, a hard-won calmness, to Ella’s singing which can sometimes come over to ill-informed writers as “blandly sunny”; a sense of self-restraint which in British historeligious terms is more in keeping with the Protestant/C of E method of worshipping, in contrast to the more explicitly “emotional” carousel of Catholic procedurals – which is of course not to say that neither has considerable merit, just that there are certain ways of expressing emotion which don’t have to be shrieked downwards from the roof or sobbed upwards from the gutter.
#71.1 (!!) I only partially agree with you about that – mainstream critical concensus has been pretty kind to Ella and to the likes of Aretha (as mentioned upthread) but I get the same impression as you – that some ears aren’t open to some stuff.
Everyone seems to be able to find a critical orthodoxy to fight against! Pop and rock critics do so love to be the underdog, it seems. How long has critical consensus generally been guilty of exactly what Diamanda charges, in your view?
swantep – yeah, this is true. it would certainly explain why, on my ipod, i have only three songs off ‘the writing’s on the wall’ (all of which i think are about the best thing ever), but all eight sides of ‘wu-tang forever’. (and also ‘bobby digital’)!
lex – absolute agree on “responding to excellence”. for a start every number one is a “response to excellence” by the people who go out and buy it over and above the those who, as an expression of their baseline taste, buy the other non-number one records by that artist/in that genre. and all of them will be responding to something slightly different. there was a radio 4 programme a couple of years back where a classical music critic who was utterly ignorant of all pop music was played a (largely not all that good, admittedly) selection of pop hits by her daughter. she dismissed pretty much everything apart from ‘paranoid android’ (with it’s, ahem, classical structure and complexity) and “all by myself”, the tune of which is apparently nicked from one of your actually classical composers. so there you go.
@73: I agree with pretty much all of that (apart from the “most critics” bit which I don’t know how to quantify at all) are there times when the critic shouldn’t be examining their own response mechanisms? Is the case of (for example) someone not getting the soul in Ella different from someone not getting it from any other artist?
One of the many reasons I like doing Popular is that – unlike reviewing for Pitchfork, where there’s no comments box – I don’t feel any compulsion to get a record right: if I can’t find a way into a song, maybe I will when other people have their say. Or maybe I’ll find their ways in unconvincing. So the ‘crowd’ (not The Crowd) forms a nice safety net around ‘getting it’ or not.
Most criticism doesn’t seem to work like this.
Lex (#72) – that’s just what I was thinking as well, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that you’re “responding to excellence”. I think it’s often the case that people enjoy music (or films, or games or whatever) that’s outside their own genre preferences when they find instances that in some way are close to what they already like. But both may well be true simultaneously, in a way, otherwise you wouldn’t get those cases where almost everyone enjoys something regardless of what they usually tend to like.
Swanstep’s observation about genres that you truly like being revealed by the enjoyment of c-grade material is absolutely spot on, though. My shelves are stacked with compilations of everything from mainstream mid-’90s German rave to progressive trance to speed garage. I’ll lap up anything that can be classified as house or techno in the very broadest sense, as long as it’s cheap enough (rummaging through budget bins for new “finds” is a long-standing hobby). And I have a very high tolerance for crapness within those genre parameters.
Vocal technique is the most fundamental blindspot I have in my appreciation of music. I’ve never been able to spot good singing from bad, or even known what ‘good vocals’ were supposed to be. In my indie years I was happy with stuff I could relate to, like an passion or personality, so I put up with a load of dross but never really got round to appreciating technique as something one could use. Too often I associated it with the foghorn track that no-one’s mentioning.
I am interested in it – I enjoyed reading a long interview with Robert Plant once where he dismissed his vocals in Led Zeppelin’s early years as histrionics, but said he got good on their later albums and praised what, to my ears, seem like fairly mundane performances. But I just never got it. That said, I saw x-factor for the first time recently and it was easy to see, amongst the individuals at least, which ones had the weapons in their armory and which didn’t, so perhaps I’m getting better. I do try to take a little care now when I’m singing in the shower, maybe that helps!
Anyway, I can’t put this song on right now, but I just wanted to drop in while thread is still going to say: fantastic discussion, there’s lots I can work with when I do get round to listening.
“Am I the only person who much prefers ‘The Greatest Love Of All’ to this, by the way?”
what, even Eddie Murphy’s rendition in Coming To America?
The difference between Ella and Billie seems to me the be the same as that between, say, Smokey Robinson and James Carr. Both very soulful but painting in different colours and tone.
75: “All By Myself” uses Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto of course and a rare instance of a classical melody being used in pop music without making a complete pig’s ear of it – the longer album version being even better.
80:I much prefer The Greatest Love Of All – both her and George Benson’s version. Think George’s is just an amazing track and although Whitney houston’s is not up there wit that thin it’s easiest the best thing I’ve ever heard by her. Not fussed about any of her other stuff except possibly “Queen of the Night” (one of the few of her tracks that I remember being taken seriously in club/dj charts).
Light Entertainment Watch: Whitney’s been on both Wogan and Des O’Connor a few times;
THE BRITISH RECORD INDUSTRY AWARDS: with Curiosity Killed The Cat, Whitney Houston, Spandau Ballet, Five Star, Level 42, Simply Red (1987)
DES O’CONNOR TONIGHT: with Thelma Barlow, Peter Baldwin, Joe Longthorne, Cliff Richard, Whitney Houston (1990)
DES O’CONNOR TONIGHT: with Whitney Houston, Donald O’Connor, Luke Perry, Leslie Nielsen (1992)
THE MONTREUX GOLDEN ROSE IMMC GALA: with Jean Beauvoir, Whitney Houston, Cutting Crew, Smokey Robinson, Alison Moyet, Boy George, The Cure, The Communards, Mel And Kim, Terence Trent D’Arby (1987)
THE MONTREUX ROCK FESTIVAL: with Whitney Houston, Smokey Robinson, Alison Moyet, Boy George, The Cure, The Communards, Mel & Kim, Terence Trent D’Arby, Samantha Fox, Robbie Neville (1987)
WOGAN: with Edwina Currie, Lee Durrell, Gerald Durrell, Whitney Houston, Anthony Perkins (1986)
WOGAN: with Doris Collins, Susan Hampshire, Edna Healey, Whitney Houston (1988)
THE WORD: with Flavor Flav, Boy George, Whitney Houston, Jesus Loves You (1990)
#21 Oddly (or not oddly due to the colour) the cover of the sleeve remins me of Joni Mitchell’s Blue more (and whilst they are at a different angle they seem to be doing similar things).
I was an eleven year old boy with a fourteen year old sister who loved this. I therefore always hated it. Now? Yes, its pretty good isn’t it?
Joni Mitchell’s Blue – yes, that’s it, that’s what I was thinking of too but couldn’t quite put a name on.
At the time (I was 10) I didn’t think much of this – sounded like a slushy ballad to me. Like some of the other posters, I entirely missed the adulterous theme.
The next time I probably heard it was about eight years ago on a seven or eight hour taxi drive across the desert in Uzbekistan, where our taxi driver had one tape – Whitney’s greatest hits. That has pretty much killed any chance of me appreciating Whitney – it felt like drowning in syrup.
Listening to this afresh and actually listening to the lyrics, it is better than I remember. For all the discussion of technique vs soul above, Whitney’s fairly restrained on this one – the only fault I can find is that the opening lines seem sung a little too sunnily and bland. However, those horrible keyboards and the arrangement ensure that this isn’t going to get more than a 5 from me.
Turning to Ella, I freely admit I haven’t made any great effort to listen to her and appreciate her, or any other jazz for that matter (I reckon I’ll tackle jazz when I finally feel that there’s no more good rock and pop being made anymore). However, I’ve been exposed to a fair amount of Ella via my girlfriend, and it hasn’t tempted me to listen to more. I do feel that she sounds a bit too smooth, too perfect and too detached. I don’t hear Marcello’s “hard-won calmness”, just the calmness. I’m happy to admit this may be my fault rather than hers, but I see why some people don’t like her. (I feel similarly about some, though not all, of Sinatra’s songs too.)
I loved that Xgau review of album #2 when I read it, even though (or maybe because) I knew practically nothing of Whitney, and was shortly to quite like her next bunnied song. It’s that he came up with the word “Christendom” (think of how ordinary it would have been to say “the most revolting singer in the world” or in “pop” or something of the sort), which I took to mean showbiz glitz funneled and subdued into pious respectability. (Except “glitz” probably is the wrong word.) I also like the quick humorous inversion with which he said that her talents are ill-served by her producers and writers. I’m not unbiased here, obv, but his building the Village Voice music section around freelancers was one of the ways he created the equivalent of comment threads.
Mariah’s unfunneling the glitz probably had something to do with my Mariah love. (I do think the constant linking and comparing* of Whitney-Mariah overlooks their vast differences, but in the early ’90s the comparison was unavoidable just because their many-octave reach was so in your face.)
My guess is that Ella Fitzgerald’s music codes too middle class for the sort of middle-class person who becomes a rock or pop critic, neither bohemian enough nor lumpen enough. And her poor and sometimes rough early years are not stapled to her story in the way poor Billie’s are stapled to Billie. As for Ella’s actual music, I barely know it, which may be owing to its coding too middle class etc.
*I’m treating “the constant linking and comparing” as a singular; just feels right, but I’m not sure why. Or anyway, “the constant linking and comparing… overlook” seems wrong.
My first encounter with the Whitney/Mariah/American Idol singing style was actually a few months pre-Whitney. Solid Gold was hosted by Marilyn McCoo, and every week she would sing a current hit song (not necessarily a r&b one) and do so in that bombastic melismatic style, whether or not it was appropriate to the song at hand. My immediate reaction was revulsion – what the hell was being done to those poor songs? I was a 12 year-old top 40 kid – no rockist super ego was telling me that I wasn’t allowed to enjoy this, and indie wasn’t even a blip on my radar. However much fun I’m sure it is to cast all of this as an indie-vs-pop fear of straightforward non-ironic emotion, a lot of folks who can’t stand the Whitney singing style are just fine with pre-Whitney-era mainstream rock and r&b, much of which isn’t lacking for direct emotion. As for technique vs soul, I try to stay away from that kind of language, because I have no idea what soul is, besides a genre name. I wonder how Lex feels about Yngwie Malmsteen (I very much like the Vai/Satriani analogy that mark s made upthread, and Whitney-style singing has a not-dissimilar effect of me from what the guitar-mags dudes do – and no, I’m not scared of good guitar playing either).
(“Saving All My Love For You” = marginally less dull than “You Give Good Love”, nowhere near as good as “How Will I Know”)
(genuinely sincere question: how does Michael Bolton figure into all this?)
re #82 “Queen of the Night” (one of the few of her tracks that I remember being taken seriously in club/dj charts).
I can imagine ‘I’m Your Baby Tonight’ doing well on that basis too – probably my favourite 90s single by her (it’s that or ‘It’s Not Right…’). And ‘So Emotional’ and ‘Love Will Save The Day’ slot in well with Janet tracks from the same time. I like quite a few of her uptempo numbers for that main reason.
@89: and to be honest I don’t really know how “seriously” it was taken as I wasn’t going to the type of places that would have played it by then just remember seeing it in various dj charts and hearing it on Kiss FM a lot in the days when that station still played the music that it won it its license.
And of course a large chunk of Whitney Houstons “I Wanna Dance With Somebody Who Loves Me” was sampled on Shut Up and Dance’s massive 1989 M25 party track ‘5,6,7,8′.