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.
7
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…
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′.
I don’t really know why this is being considered as “pop”? Is it because of the 80′s sheen, or because it hit # 1? In the 70′s this would be “soul”, and in the 90′s and beyond it would be something akin to “R & B”.
It’s a good song, and partly because Whitney doesn’t do her famous over-the-top vocals on it, I find myself still enjoying it all these years later. “Subtlety” is something Whitney would later lack, and – in my opinion – she always lacked honesty. I can still recall her trashing Madonna for her slutty image back in the day, and yet to me Madonna’s “Live to Tell”, while being only as sincere as pop stars can be, seems infinitely more believable the Whitney’s bellow on “Didn’t We Almost Have it All”. The fact that Madonna never succumbed to the temptations of fame that could derail or submarine her career, while Whitney became a drugs-vacuum, is richly ironic in the light of those earlier comments.
The fact that Whitney would go on to inspire Mariah, and a million teenage “Look at me listen to me I have such BIG emotions” girls, taints her for me. Her later histrionics are also burned into my brain. But at this point in her career, she was an attractive young woman with a great voice singing soul-pop at a time when so much of it seemed inauthentic, and that justifiably made her a star. There were a good few years when she was the anti-Madonna, and for some reason, she was respected all the more for it.
Recently read Ken Emerson’s Always Magic In The Air about Brill Building pop and got all excited discovering that Gerry Goffin had co-written this — which means I totally forgot that not only had Marcello given the same information on this thread, but that I’d commented on it. Anyhow, I don’t have much to add to what Marcello already said regarding Goffin except that the extreme self-denial of “Take Good Care Of My Baby” is as relevant as the uncertainty of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” (but “Take Good Care Of My Baby” tastes like a day old lollipop in comparison to both “Saving” and “Tomorrow” and is plenty disturbing for that very reason, the combination of self-abnegation and icky sweetness). But then, equally relevant is “Touch me in the morning/Then just walk away/We don’t have tomorrow/But we had yesterday,” in a song co-written by “Saving”‘s co-writer Michael Masser. (According to Emerson, it was definitely Goffin not King who wrote the lyrics to “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” But I can’t tell you who contributed what to “Saving” etc.) For further resonance, the line “‘Cause tonight is the night, for feeling alright” recalls my favorite Shirelles song “Tonight’s The Night”*, which like “Saving” is set not in the night but in its lead-up, anticipation being necessarily uncertain.
My reading of “Though I try to resist being last on your list” is a bit different from Marcello’s; I’d put a comma after “resist”; so she’s trying to resist the guy, since she knows she’s last on his list (but she can’t resist him). I like Lex’s idea that the narrator is drawn to the role of other woman on the basis of her own character, though I’d say this is in the song as potential (songs are about what they’re about and are also about what they could be about), and I like MBI correctly pointing out how celebratory this performance sounds (though I don’t see its sounding celebratory being incompatible with its pain; in fact, the two may be linked). The potential I project onto the song is that she’s giving all her love to him not just because she won’t give it to anyone else, but because — what’s always there in this relationship — tonight could be the last time, may be the last time, she doesn’t know. So “all” doesn’t just mean exclusive, it means that tonight she’s giving her all, in the possible last chance for giving.
*Which is not by Goffin/King
Such a force of nature she was, and a tragic decline. RIP.
This is such sad news, I’m at a loss for words. RIP
Very sad but unfortunately not a shock. RIP.
Just heard the news. Even when a star is in decline, when that light is extinguished, the sky becomes a little bit darker. RIP Whitney.
Bloody Erithian woke me at silly o’clock with the news! I won’t ask what he was up to at that hour. Some of us don’t get invited to the wild parfties any more.
It’s one of those moments to note wryly amidst the carnage wrought by the pressures of pop (and other) celebrity that those founding gods of R&B, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and BB King, are not only still with us but still performing.
Bloody Erithian sent me the same text at the same extraordinary hour but I had my phone switched off. HA!!
Rosie makes a good point about Chuck, Richard and BB. And, of course, Keef is still occupying the crease too against all logical odds and despite several referrals by the fielding side against a succcession of great shouts given not out.
Meanwhile, someone texted me a message hoping that when Whitney is waved through the gate by St Peter, Serge Gainsbourg is not lurking around in the shrubbery. Made me smile, that one.
It wisnae me, Jimmy, that’s more your style!
Sorry about silly o’clock Rosie, I was on football club business if you’ll believe me…
The Grammys should be very interesting now.
Although Whitney was obviously caught off guard by Serge on telly, the idea that she was some kind of naive and dizzy pop flumpkin vulnerable in the bad wolf’s gaze is somewhat daft, given the tenor of the second half of her life. If they do meet again, she’ll eat him alive.
Or, well, not alive. RIP the pair :( :( :( :(
This “football club business”, it wouldn’t involve stoppybacks at a local hostelry would it?
The Swede can be forgiven on this occasion* on the grounds that it was light when his version came through. But a Sunday morning is a Sunday morning, after all! Anything before the end of The Archers Omnibus is strictly off limits. Not these days because I’m listening avidly but because I refuse to emerge from under the duvet and switch the radio on until it’s safely over.
* But I still remember being woken for Michael Jackson.
This isn’t quite the venue to explain! – maybe offline.
Always sad to see the tributes on the news, this time with the glitterati already in place in LA to comment. And the finality of seeing the dates, 1963-2012. Particularly for those of us approaching the half-century ourselves, seeing a near contemporary who won’t make it. But again, what glorious music when she was at her peak.
That’s a well written and concise piece, Tom for a song (and video!) I’ve always enjoyed. I immediately/involuntarily chucked out a tear when I heard she died, as in: ah, Whitney, what happened, I knew her back when etc. but also I guess for this and How Will I Know?