WHITNEY HOUSTON – “I Will Always Love You”
If there’s a single technique which – however unfairly – defines 90s and 00s soul music for the British public, it’s melisma, and if there’s a single record that cemented that link, it’s “I Will Always Love You”, at number one for a whole winter, by the end of which it was fixed as either one of pop’s all-time great love songs or one of its most reviled dirges.
Certainly it took me a very long time to scrape away that reflexive distaste and try and listen to the record fresh. There’s no denying that Whitney Houston uses the song as a vocal gymnasium, but the repertoire she shows off isn’t just note-bending and belting. She goes hushed too, clips syllables when she needs to, and lets words drain out into sadness as often as she sets them spinning. As a rule she sustains the “I”s – an unwavering blast of strength – and goes to polysyllabic bits at the end of each “you”, which seems fair enough since the you is the lover she can’t hold onto and must walk away from. Like most songs damned as melismatic showboating there’s plenty of thought involved: technique is hardly ever ‘just’ technique.
Certainly this isn’t an especially naturalistic reading. It became fashionable back then to praise the Dolly Parton originals as being subtler and more moving than Whitney’s Olympian approach. Maybe they are: they’re great records, easy to listen to and more conversational than Whitney’s cover. Dolly sings the song’s terrific, heartbreaking opening couplet – “If I should stay / I would only be in your way” – with matter-of-fact sadness: it bounds the song, establishing the singer’s love as doomed. Whitney – famously taking the verse a capella – breaks the line into five distinct phrases, broken puzzle pieces she’s refusing to fit back together because doing so would mean giving up. Dolly’s version is a tragedy – her love is also her cross to bear; Whitney’s is an elemental struggle, each bludgeoning crescendo a deliberate raising of the stakes.
It’s no fault of her performance that the arrangement can’t do it justice. After the initial coup of the naked verse the music tracks her in the most blundering way possible – bashing and flailing where she’s steely and graceful. Houston’s vocals don’t need the key changes and the stomping drums and they certainly don’t need that sax solo, but for all her strength she’s helpless against a greater force: this is a blockbuster soundtrack single and that’s what such things sound like. It means – despite Whitney’s flawless precision – I still find this single more bullying than beautiful.
5
The last single by a solo female artist to spend ten weeks at number one was “Secret Love” by Doris Day in 1954, on the surface a striking prairie torch ballad, with its cheery horses’ hooves, expressing the long-overdue liberation of a passion which for societal reasons has hitherto had to be hidden. The subtexts did not take long to crop up, not least in Calamity Jane itself; witness the extended scene where Jane and Katie meticulously and happily set up house in their own cabin – they are the perfect couple and not noticeably in need of men; Howard Keel’s is therefore a somewhat Subdued Bill Hickok, doing his amiable macho best to win Jane over but looking marooned, surplus to requirements. At no point in the picture are we lent a fig leaf of belief that the two are meant to be together.
Kevin Costner’s bodyguard likewise seems to be suspicious of love, and especially the physical variety, which doesn’t lend The Bodyguard much virtue as a credible film of romance-under-duress (Steve McQueen, for whom the picture was originally intended fifteen years before it was made, would have cheerfully thrown off all the jobsworth business as soon as he was able). But then he himself doesn’t have much purpose in the film since Whitney is so tangibly in love with herself, as well as betraying a profound fear of her self-love every second she is on screen.
“I Will Always Love You” was recorded twice by Dolly Parton in her small, semi-helpless, semi-weeping voice; the first, in 1974, was said to have been inspired by her personal and professional split from Porter Wagoner – she trembles but doesn’t break down. But in her 1980 re-recording she may have had Burt Reynolds in mind; though a highly dubious inspirer of tears, Parton descends into grievous sobs. Houston would never have allowed that to penetrate her steel flesh. She had originally wanted to do “What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted” but Paul Young had recently murdered that for the soundtrack of Fried Green Tomatoes, and was extremely reluctant to tackle a “country song” but was finally persuaded by producer/arranger David Foster to try to turn it into a soul ballad, and not necessarily a very deep one.
The opening verse is famously song quietly, and entirely unaccompanied, and sounds exactly as if she is singing only to herself, or for herself, practising her scales in a silent corner of an empty stage, but her will of iron prevents any emotional access for the outsider to her performance; there is, for instance, nothing of the grievous desolation when George Russell’s sextet suddenly break off their variations on “You Are My Sunshine” to allow Sheila Jordan to sing the first verse of the song straight, very slowly, and infinitely alone.
The music is then gently ushered in, and is functional; Foster keeps his distance, though the sax should probably have been faded out. Houston, for her part, retains her countenance and sings the spoken Parton part with immaculate technique and grossly concealed emotions, exploding only on the “joy” of “I wish you joy,” before the final extended chorus, where her vibrati and control become too pronounced for comfort, barely hiding a razorblade of abysmal pain and hurt, as though her larynx is the only thing holding her up, like a detached compass needle supporting a tower block. But still she will not let us, or anyone else, in.
The record was immodestly successful; in America it bested “End Of The Road”‘s chart-topping run by an extra fourteenth week, in Britain it was by some distance 1992′s best-selling single, number one for ten straight weeks, extending throughout Christmas and encompassing all of January 1993. It has also become one of the most requested songs to be played at funerals in this country, and in this respect it shares an attendant irony with “My Way”; just as the latter is aired to commemorate the lives of people who largely had zero control over what they had to do to earn a living, so Whitney’s “I Will Always Love You” is a facsimile of grief and undying affection, but essentially used as a smokescreen, to keep the straight public face, to hide the screams, to maintain wholly unnecessary order. As for the singer herself, she remained popular and in the charts throughout the remainder of the nineties, though not again to this degree, and the song may in time be seen as a horribly acute premonition of what would happen to her after the nineties, Whitney saying goodbye to herself, and why do I ultimately think that the performance could have been used with equal power to soundtrack the final, living deaths in Requiem For A Dream, a film which is all about impatience to be “free”?
‘Melisma’ isn’t in my dictionary, but I could kind of guess what it means. I believe this song was also used in a film?
I can go 6, never a big fan of hers (much prefer early Mariah) but you can’t deny the strength of the performance. And at least the song isn’t as over-exposed these days.
Listening to this again recently, I was surprised at the sensitivity of the performance of the opening lines and began to wonder why I had become so tired of this at the time. The subsequent verses and choruses, with the vocals and arrangements turned up to 11, reminded me what made it so difficult to love.
#2 there’s a great quote about (and definition of) melisma at the top of this blog post on Jackie Wilson: http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.com/2011/03/jackie-wilsons-melisma-20-notes-for.html
Depending on whose charts you believe, Doris day spent a record 8 weeks at number one. IWALY was touted as having broken this record by a female soloist.
personally I think Dollys version is how it should be sung.
Pub quiz time: this song was originally written for inclusion in a musical called “The nicest little whorehouse in Texas”
Is that a “True or False” pub quiz question?
I’ll come back to this later – and welcome back Tom! – but first a factoid that could well be used in a pub quiz: this is the only instance of a Christmas UK number one that was still at the top at the start of the following February. “Mull of Kintyre” shares this distinction according to official chart dates, but the chart in which it was deposed by Althea and Donna was announced on 31 January 1978.
Listening to this for the first time in years, I don’t find anything particularly objectionable about the vocal, and even find its air of narcissistic introversion slightly moving.
The backing track does sound stuck in the previous decade, and would have been much improved by the wan Moon River harmonica from Dolly’s version replacing that ugly sax. At what point, by the way, does this type of once-obligatory sax solo become a joke and disappear from megaballads? Did the invention of the tin whistle render it obsolete?
will find and post koganbot’s “why music sucks” review of this when i get home (or find koganbot and getr him to post): i have warmed to this over the years, since realising my initial coldness was more to do with kevin costner than whitney :)
so 10 obv: it’s a thing
I remember there being a thought at the time that a mega-hit single from a Kevin Costner film would become an annual event, or at least part of the Costner milieu that seemed to be unstoppable. I think the strength of Houston’s singing, and also that she was in the film, turned it into her hit rather than the movie industry’s. And Costner’s following films, A Perfect World, Wyatt Earp, Waterworld etc didn’t fit the template of either cross-media appeal or success.
I like it for its place in narrative exposition, but its the vibrato rather than the melisma that I find too overwhelming to get past – it adds to the sense of the whole thing being somewhat overbearing for a casual listen.
The backing track really is undistinguished. I mean, I think of this song as lyrically in the same ‘relationship is over, let’s make the best of it’ ballpark of that Diana Ross song Remember Me that turned up (new to me) in the ‘Which decade is the best?’ series a few months ago. But Ross is backed by a west coast version of the funk brothers (I’m guessing), at any rate by a band with a real groove and feel, and that gives Ross’s vocal something to bed into, and makes for a really pleasurable record. Whitney by way of contrast is backed by robots (and not in a good way) – there’s absolutely nothing to take pleasure in apart from her vocals. Dolly Parton’s backing track (not sure which version I have) is *much* better and her record is much more musically balanced and flat out musical than Whitney’s as a result. (My alphabetical itunes has just tripped over into Chet Baker’s instrumental ‘I wish you love’ and instinctively I want to say ‘Hey Whitney, sing with these guys!’)
Anyhow, I do find that almost none of this seems to matter that much when you have the video in front of you – effectively the visuals end up providing most of the accompaniment to the voice rather than the backing. She belts, we watch, and there’s an end of it. And perhaps that’s the right calculation for a movie song in an MTV world.
But as a pure record I can’t go for this: ‘who is this woman and why is she shouting at me?’ remains my unelidable response (particularly at the point of the key-change). Agree with Tom:
5
the saxophone has that squeezed squirty tone that always makes me think of the PlayDoh Factory on the “star” setting
wrong setting and colour should be radioactive orange^^^
Starts ok, but as the bombast builds the “when will this end?” feeling of those ten weeks comes flooding back. In a way it was worse than Bryan Adams – that run had at least been a novelty. “Why must everything overstay its welcome at number one?” I imagine myself thinking.
Ah, Play-Doh. Part of being an infant in the sixties. It’s the smell of the stuff I remember most fondly. I certainly didn’t squeeze it to relieve stress at that age (which today’s toddlers would probably be encouraged to do) but could have used it for that purpose when my creativity caused me to go a bit bonkers as a teen in the mid seventies.
Happy Days!
I love this song and I love this version of it. I love how confrontational Whitney’s vocal is: sure, the chorus is bludgeoning, and that’s precisely the right way to sing it if you want to walk away whilst preserving your dignity. She’s not the pathetic little woman who can’t let go of her feelings about a dead relationship, it’s a show of defiance that’s more linked to Gloria Gaynor singing “as long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive”. Whitney’s performance is one gigantic, behemoth “fuck you” to him, to the world telling her she should shrink back and nurse her pathetic emotions to herself, to the necessity of the thing ending. Semi-helpless and semi-weeping? Not Whitney, not at all. Overbearing? Sure! This is not a reading of the song that’s designed to make you feel comfortable.
Of course it’s about her. Of course she’s showing off. What, did you think it should be about you?
9!
A friend of mine shrugged this record off at the time (before it even hit number one) with the comment: “She sings as if she’s overcompensating for a speech impediment on this single”. As harsh a comment as that is – both to Whitney and to people with speech impediments – it’s an idea I’ve not been able to shake since. The over-annunciation on the track is akin to an English person on holiday in Spain loudly and slowly trying to get a waiter to understand what his or her problem is, an image that managed to leave me completely unable to take the damn song seriously.
Also, I used to have a neighbour who would turn this up full blast every time her boyfriend walked out on her. Which was at least twice a week (that I noticed).
I really need to go back and listen to this properly, it’s been awhile. I might be a bit more charitable to it now there’s been a lot of water under the bridge, and it has been a hell of a long time since I last heard it.
Ok, just spent a little while reading up on melisma. Good to have a name for something I’ve talked about perhaps too much in the past. I have to confess that in the mid 90s I absolutely hated it because, yes, I did think it was show-boating, on a par with the most onanistic of mid-70s guitar solos, but also because it seemed to be put into dull songs that didn’t merit it. It’s that second point that I’ll still stick to today – it seems like it should be used as an expression of intense emotion, and if it’s used without that emotion then it makes the whole thing sound insincere. Of course, that’s as much a value judgement as anything else, isn’t it?
Suddenly struck me thinking about this song in relation to the film it’s in that one of its ancestors — not Dolly’s original song itself but this performance of it — may be Ebben! Ne andrò lontana, Wally’s aria from La Wally, as sung by Wilheminia Wiggins Fernandez in the film Diva (plot redux: the opera singer forced to learn to make the disinction between becoming a commodity fetish in the market and a fan’s fetish object): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hsmoo97CVA
Here’s a transation of the aria’s lyrics: obviously many many operatic arias might equally be the precursor to WH’s approach (some more similar in build and stance), but there’s enough similarity, including the relationship of extreme unequals, the impossible loneliness of the star, and (crucially) miscegenation.
(obv calling yr heroine “Wally” is rather more of a nono these days even than cross-race sex in Hollywood…)
I’ve mostly given up keeping check of statistics so I was surprised to discover recently that the Bodyguard soundtrack is one of the five biggest selling albums ever. I was also surprised when I first heard Dolly Partons version of this one and how gently forlorn it seemed.
I can hear real sadness in Whitneys version too and agree that it’s the arrangers on auto-pilot who really messed this up, but it was highly ubiquitous and one can’t just un-forget these things.
I just don’t rate it much as a song and so different interpretations, sales figures or anything else won’t win me over.
Okay, I thought, I’ll pretend I didn’t live through the Christmas of 1992 (when this spent 10 weeks at the top in Australia, too) and give this another shot. And I didn’t mind the first minute and a half. But then she started to crank it up, and I started hitting the volume-down button on my office computer; and up, and up, and down, and down, until I was searching for a half-a-blob setting that wasn’t there.
6 or 7 for the first 1:30, half a blob for the rest. 2 overall.
Re 18: you’ve nailed it for me. I know Lex has no problem with vocal show offs but it just sounds insincere. Especially when we’re talking about a singer who I’m sure could put me through the wringer without trying too hard. The finale to Saving All My Love dallies dangerously, but this goes into full foghorn mode. ‘Look at meeee!’ just doesn’t do it for me. God, I sound like a right 80s soul boy.
How many people knew the Dolly version first? It was another Terry Wogan favourite and Whitney’s take really pissed me off. Fashion doesn’t come into it. This is as ill considered as Paul Young’s Love Will Tear Us Apart.
The Bodyguard Soundtrack is probably a rarity in modern times in that both the film and soundtrack were a success. It spawned 7 singles in total 5 by Whitney,the dodgy Bill Withers cover and Lisa Stansfield’s effort. Aged 14 at the time of course I hated it, now I can just about tolerate the first 2 minutes which reading some the previous comments seems to be the going rate.
The over-annunciation on the track is akin to an English person on holiday in Spain loudly and slowly trying to get a waiter to understand what his or her problem is
Hahaha. Even so, I’m swayed a bit by those fighting the corner for the first minute-and-a-half, and it’s positively restrained compared to some Christmas tune I heard her melismassacring once.
But still: bombast, the most obvious key changes in the world, foghorn vocals – it pushes all my wrong buttons at once. Horrible record.
Mark whistled me here, so this was my Radio On review:
Whitney Houston “I Will Always Love You”: I talked in Radio On #2 about her “animal competence,” but really there’s no animal in it, it’s more like a jet engine preening and showing its parts. Which can be powerful enough. She kind of loses control about two-thirds of the way through this song, however — it’s the section in the video where the camera moves in close and she smiles bright and meaninglessly and opens her mouth and lets loose while the camera pulls back again and you see her now sitting in a chair in the snow (!) wearing nothing but a thin suit jacket. And from here on she’s just blaring away, trying to power all the windmills in Holland, and the song disappears in the whoosh. But before that, it’s undeniable. Really, this song is now a feature of the world’s topography, and there’s nothing to do but accept it. (8.5)
IIRC it was Curtis Stigers who asked to perform ‘What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding’ on ‘The Bodyguard’ OST and in the process provided Nick Lowe with a nice little earner.
One of the increasingly rare number ones I can actually not only remember, but remember being number one. For some reason I associate it with a very draughty Richmond station that December, and losing a shoe under the Windsor-bound train I was trying to board. There was a slight delay to the train while a nice man retrieved it for me.
Not only do I find the memory embarrassing, but the song too. I much prefer Dolly’s honest sentimentality to Whitney’s unsubtle and ultimately soulless vocal gymnastics.
I’ve been sitting in front of my PC, listening to Whitney’s version (that bloody video!), then Dolly’s original performance on The Porter Wagoner Show, then the clip with Burt Reynolds getting the long goodbye from Dolly in The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas. This doesn’t make it easy to be very charitable towards Whitney. I much prefer the Dolly Parton reading. Even if the happily married Dolly is acting, you can tell she’s much more adept at selling the song than Whitney. Whitney plays her role well in the film. The Diva to end all Divas, so self-absorbed in her bubble, that any perceived threat to her life is drowned out by a phalanx of sycophants feeding off her fame like so many hungry piglets. In steps Costner to throw everything out of kilter. She is in danger. He has to protect her. And he has to fight her tooth and nail to convince her. Then, somewhere along the line, dependency becomes love, or something like it, which of course sets up the final act when the threat is revealed. Then comes the song with all of its fake sincerity. It’s a hateful film, and Whitney is hateful in it. I wanted her to get nailed by the killer and see Costner taken out as well. The film was absolutely the most successful piece of dreadful trash that year (a year which offered up Basic Instinct and Home Alone 2), beaten only by Disney’s Aladdin in the box office. The song itself? A game of two halves, where the quiet opening lulls you before you are aurally barraged by Whitney’s belting, bludgeoning vocal and that cheap porn sax. All that melisma, as people above have mentioned, highlights the lack of any real emotion from Whitney. Acting the song, rather than feeling the song. Calculated, shouty, and ultimately unsatisfying. Much like the movie.
Absolutely loathed this at the time and still do for reasons which have been well covered upthread. Kudos to Lex for a stout defence though.
I just relistened to this. I still love it so much! My second favourite bit is the way she snaps “but above all this!” in the second verse – it’s almost didactic, a rap over the knuckles just in case you were thinking it was OK to leave. Highlights just who’s in charge here.
Favourite bit is obviously the dramatic pause, the drum hit and then the absolute FORCE of the second chorus. It’s kind of like she’s made the entire world stop on its axis and start spinning the other way. Such an amazing moment. So much emotion in it, I’m OK with this not being a song people like but the criticisms of “lacking emotion” and “soulless” are just lazy received wisdom!
@ Lex #16 & 30 – I wouldn’t have thought there was anything remotely admirable in the idea of Whitney twisting this tender, bittersweet love song into a “confrontational”, strident “fuck you” to her ex…but there you go. There’s absolutely nothing in the lyrics that lends itself to her (your?) interpretation of the song as a defiant “I Will Survive”-type belter – so if that’s actually what she intended, it just renders her version an even worse travesty. Btw, methinks you may have confused emotion with emoting.
Like any good debate, I’m finding myself swayed this way and that by the contributions here, and in the end my thoughts are somewhere in between. While it was number one I’d always enjoy it, even if my thoughts were drifting elsewhere during the last minute or so. I’d agree with many on here about the first part of the record, although I’d put the “switch-off” rather later than 1:30 – maybe around 3:15 when the vocal hurricane is unleashed and there’s nowhere else to go for the next minute-and-a-half. At the 1:30 point she’s building up to a strident second chorus but reins it in again for an exquisitely delivered final verse, during which I’m thinking that if I were the guy she’s giving the kiss-off to , I’d be going “my god, you had THIS fabulous woman and blew it?” The dignity in that verse is magnificent.
Like fatgit, I’ve YouTubed the Dolly Parton performance from the Porter Wagoner show: I don’t know the full details of whether they’d had an affair (and Dolly is still married to the same man she’d been married to for seven years by then) or whether the song merely refers to their professional split; but if they had been an item this is a pretty intense moment, Porter introducing Dolly singing the song she’d written about their break-up. Sort of a reversal of “The Winner Takes It All” in which Agnetha gets to do her own version. It’s a touching performance, although then you come to the spoken interlude, which for country fans signifies sincerity, but to these British ears at least just screams “hokum”. Give me Whitney’s version any day, at least until this point.
I note from Wikipedia that the video is credited to “Alan Smithee”, and we know what that means…
And this was number 36 in Channel 4’s all-time UK best-selling singles chart.
Like Lex, I absolutely love this one. I wanted to dance to it at my wedding, but my wife – a Dolly Parton fan – demurred. It made sense, really, because it is too powerful to be easily contained in a public ritual.
An operatic aria is a good reference point, but what I think of most when I hear it is John Coltrane: the combination of breathtaking power and perfect control. The way Houston uses melisma to play around with the tune reminds me of his harmonic and melodic exploration; she does for Parton what he does for Julie Andrews on ‘My Favorite Things’. (Both techniques share roots in Gospel, of course.)
The objections are similar, too: Tom’s accusation that she is “bullying” reminds me of Philip Larkin’s complaint about Coltrane’s “god-bothering”. For me, though, the parallels are wholly positive. I get the same sense of a rigorous musical intelligence cutting loose, to create something that is lyrical, expressive, liberated, heart-rending and beautiful. It is no wonder that the feeble, bland, session sax sounds horrible set against her sky-splitting voice.
Or, to pick up on another suggestion, if melisma is the vocal equivalent of the overblown guitar solo, then Mariah Carey is Joe Satriani and Christina Aguilera is Eddie Van Halen, but Houston is Jimi Hendrix.
If you don’t believe me, try this performance; probably my favourite ever on TV. It’s from the World Music Awards: a weird affair in Monaco, apparently hosted by a spectacularly embarrassed-looking Prince Albert. Houston, though, is ON FIRE: soaring above the black tied awkwardness of the event. I defy anyone to watch this and tell me there’s no real feeling there:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSBNi8PCb7Q
By the time Whitney’s done with it, the only appropriate cinematic use for the song would have been over a Panzer charge filmed in super slow mo by Sam Peckinpah.
There’s too much lazy non-thinking in these comments, too much reliance on meaning-stripped ciphers, if indeed “emotion,” “fake sincerity”/”insincere,” “real feeling” and “soulless” ever meant anything other than easy steps to “authority” on the part of frustrated mid-eighties music press soulboys – other, that is, than yet more smokescreens, push-button catharsis. I’d like to see what Lex senses in it but to me the performance remains all about hiding (or in hiding) and while that in itself doesn’t encourage regular revisits to the record it suggests a more complex emotional maze at work; what is Whitney getting out of this song, how big a role does this performance play in directing where she’s going to go with her music and her life, and how greatly are we suckered in/entranced/mummified by what she presents to us, beyond consideration of the film or Dolly Parton or…well, listen in tandem with the 1982 Whitney, singing Hugh Hopper’s “Memories” on Material’s One Down, with Shepp on tenor; something was ALWAYS there.
A run of pretty damn fine efforts in the the 1980s and early 1990s and, periodically thereafter, some interesting work in which I’ve found quite a lot to enjoy. I can’t help but feel that there has been somewhat of a backlash against an artist who, at one point, was so big as to be inescapable. Kevin Costner is, in my view, unfairly maligned.
Spirited defenses of this have been put forward and I hear them – I even understand them. I still don’t like this though – not because of the delivery, but because of the song. Maybe I’m too British in my reserve but this doesn’t push the right buttons in a love song for me. The sentiment in the song itself, and I repeat not the delivery, is too big for me. “I Will Always Love You”. Not “I Love You”. Not “Don’t Leave”. It’s the totality that turns me off and a nagging voice in the back of my head says “yeah – nothing lasts forever dear”. I have a similar problem with a similar globe buggering behemoth of a spoiler bunny from a popular film.
yeah but there you go again, pushing your buttons as though emotion were a vending machine.
#33 great comment but a quick caveat – I’m not saying Whitney is “bullying”. It’s the structure of the track (which TBF she’s complicit in) and particularly the arrangement that comes off that way, adding unneccessary amplification to a performance whose extremity seems very precisely judged.
“overblown” is maybe not the best word to use in this context.
#38 Good point. Now I re-read your post, I see what you meant. I don’t really hear much of the arrangement, myself, except the drums at the key change, and that tinkling electric piano (?) at the end. And the gruesome sax, but I just tune out at that point.
You might add that the track’s status as part of a synergistic cross-platform strategy is another reason it comes off as bullying. But I have never seen the movie, and never will, so that doesn’t bother me much, either.
#39 Yes, I know what you mean. I did go back to it as I was posting. But then I decided that “overblown” was exactly the word I wanted to use.
yes but why?
I think I’m gonna have to hark back to the likes of Aretha’s R.E.S.P.E.C.T. to see how this shouty soul is done well. Melisma isn’t even considered in her performance, quite simply because she’s conveying this sense of liberation, asserting her request for respect. I don’t really want to say “throwing off the chains”, but that is what it feels like. She’s mad as hell and she ain’t gonna take it anymore. I don’t get that sense with Whitney. I can respect Lex’s view, and I’m sure many more share that view, but I’m far from convinced. There’s no throwing chains off here. This is vanity disguised as defiance. A temper tantrum.
The Violet Elizabeth Bott of shouty soul.
Nonsense. This is vulnerability hidden under a ribbon of steel. Damned if you’re gonna see me cry. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
“Whitney’s performance is one gigantic, behemoth “fuck you” to him, to the world telling her she should shrink back and nurse her pathetic emotions to herself, to the necessity of the thing ending. Semi-helpless and semi-weeping? Not Whitney, not at all.”
You’re projecting an awful lot onto this song that just isn’t really there – that reading doesn’t make much sense if you take the song on its own and even less in the context of The Bodyguard.
I think this is a pretty great vocal performance and a pretty awful song. I dislike the Dolly Parton version even more.
Every time I think Houston’s done I replay my badly-in-need-of-a-remaster copy of “Memories.” How alert, alive, and aware of paradox she sounds!
Song = “I’m off, and it’s not you it’s me. OK thx bye”
Can we haz Popular ’92?
#41 Well, I am working without the dictionary here, but to me “overblown” means excessive or unnecessarily elaborate, often with connotations of being over-ornate or over-emotive. There’s also a pun on saxophone technique, which links back to Coltrane. And the connection is not entirely fanciful: along with other 60s jazz players, he was a big influence on rock guitar, through the Byrds, Hendrix, and probably many others that i don’t know about.
One more in the “Gtr solo = melisma” stakes: Guitar shop afternoon shredders = X Factor contestants.
#35 Great thoughts about performance and emotion. It’s another reason I love that WMA clip: as you watch the play of expressions across Houston’s face, you get a sense of the complexities involved.
The other video that fascinates me in that context is the footage of Beyonce rehearsing ’1+1′ backstage at American Idol, supposedly filmed by Jay-Z on his iPhone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaGy2eBnG6k
The shifting depths of sincerity and artifice there are dizzying.
One of the most potent elements is that it is shot by her loving, supportive husband. It strikes me that Beyonce is trying have the career – and life – that Houston should have had; she wants to show that you can have that talent, and not be consumed by it. (Beyonce is Bono to Houston’s Ian Curtis, you might say.)
#34 Now that’s a film I *would* pay to see!
“Beyonce is Bono to Houston’s Ian Curtis, you might say”
I might not
(Here’s my tl;dr explanation of the 10 I awarded upthread)
“if melisma is the vocal equivalent of the overblown guitar solo, then Mariah Carey is Joe Satriani and Christina Aguilera is Eddie Van Halen, but Houston is Jimi Hendrix.”
This is perhaps one of my favourite things I have read about music maybe this whole year. Just the subversion of rockism inherent in it. <3
#48: you see Ed there are just too many assumptions going on here: “excessive” – in excess of what, and why is it an excess? “unnecessarily elaborate” – why unnecessary? “over-ornate” is tautology and “over-emotive” is frankly meaningless. also it does coltrane and hendrix a disservice as much as mariah or whitney since with all of these artists, the “fight” is involved; not just the standard fight against oppression/discrimination but also (and in some cases more compellingly) the artists’ own fight against their own well-intentioned pigeonholing. all are about breaking out of the shell, daring to exist on all aesthetic (and, who knows, spiritual?) levels at once (though all are/were distinctly uncomfortable about wearing any crown, thorns or otherwise).
#51: yes! but never overblown (which in standard rockcrit speak is usually shorthand for “uppity”)
#52 Good points all. I did not mean to endorse those charges against technically complex guitar solos, or melisma (some of my favourite music, etc….), just to give a shorthand for the conventional idea of those forms. You are quite right to challenge that received wisdom.
That said, “over-ornate” is really not a tautology. (Maybe in Mies van der Rohe’s world…) Something can be beautifully, exquisitely ornate, or it can be revoltingly, pointlessly ornate.
#51 Thank you!
Not particularly pertinent, but while we are talking about guitar solos I can’t resist linking to this again. Probably my favourite thing on the whole internet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_M9zWORBuA
I think the problem I have with this song is that the chorus is mainly on one note (at least the “I” and the “You” are, and they are the ones that are stretched out). Of course Whitney melismates/melismatises/whatever the word is all around that note, but the underlying tune is that one note. I think if the chorus is sung quietly, as in the first Whitney chorus or throughout the Dolly version, it doesn’t matter too much, but taken at volume it does become bludgeoning and grating over the 20 seconds of each chorus.
There may well be sound reasons for adopting the Whitney approach as have been explored above, but at a simple aesthetic level it’s that one note that sticks in my brain and makes me dread the chorus coming round again (even with the truck driver’s gear change for variation).
#52: Overblown* does not mean “uppity”, though, and most of the other phrases you get cross about further up seem to irritate you because you’re applying different definitions than the writer, or imputing some extra-textual significance that was never intended, based on some lazy unnamed journalists supposedly having once misused those words as shorthand for something else. It’s not really playing fair.
It’s been many long years since I saw The Bodyguard on some third year girl’s bootleg VHS on the last day of term, so I may be remembering wrongly, but doesn’t Dolly’s version feature in the film, and Whitney and Costner have some sort of good-natured argument over how depressing it is despite it being Costner’s favourite song? And then Whitney’s version crops up at the end, when the assignment is over, as a straight cover with a semi-wink to Costner, who watches in wry amusement? I could have it all wrong, though, it’s been about 18 years.
*literally a flowering plant that has passed full bloom, more generally used to mean bombastic, overdone, excessive.
I distrust such expressions because they have come to mean nothing; they are reducible readymade buttons designed to avoid opening any door. This isn’t just a case of somebody in 1985 NME being all huffy about their white labels; it’s a belief which somehow has solidified into lingua franca over the subsequent quarter-century – basically in this post-Cowell world, if you don’t address a song in EXACTLY THIS WAY you are barred from any world. This isn’t what Whitney intended but it’s how it was read by some people who felt they mattered.
Conversely, expressions such as “overblown” are used to keep artists in their place, observe WASP sobriety, don’t make such a fuss, didn’t we give you those forty acres, do you want us to take them away again? As though any emotional response could be framed and codified like some Leninist point of order (which is why V/Vfm cut-ups are the bigger avoidance, the lesson being: well, what’s YOUR alternative? What’s YOUR idea for a better world?).
Fair play maybe only exists on the first Soul II Soul album. Pop isn’t rounders.
I really liked tom’s analysis of the opening couplet, Dolly’s straightforward sadness v Whitney’s refusal to give up…. reminded me of my partner’s take on Willy Nelson’s ‘Always on my mind’ v. Elvis’: ‘Willy knows hes lost her for good, Elvis still hopes he can win her back’. For her similarly this makes Nelson’s version the better one. Sometimes I wonder if she’s trying to tell me something
#57 Well, yes, and similarly a Popular thread isn’t pop.
The expressions you distrust have come to mean nothing *to you*, maybe, but I honestly feel that’s really as far as this supposed lingua franca goes. The people who are supposedly using the expression “overblown” to keep artists in their place… do you think any of those people are here, on this thread? Do you actually think the people who used the phrase “overblown” – like Ed, who’s patiently reaffirmed his choice to use it over three posts despite your objections – are being tacitly racist by using this loaded word which has acquired so much extra meaning from supposed “standard rockcrit-speak”?
I just think it’s unfair to accuse people of not having thought enough about what it is they’d like to say, and then tell them what it is they apparently just said. Especially when all this stuff about the people who talk of “emotion”, “pushing buttons” etc. wanting to package all emotional responses in a standard, sterile, acceptable form is both baseless and as fundamentally lazy as anything you’ve complained about.
The entire central plank of your first post and subsequent defences is in itself a massive assumption (and one that nobody thus far seems to share). Personally, I find it a very interesting assumption, though I believe the notion of Whitney’s performance as putting a defiant face on a crushed body and soul – while a wholly plausible reading – is undermined by what I remember of the film (above); I don’t hear it in the frankly astonishing WMA clip posted above, and I don’t think it’s fair to read it as a premonition of future woes – but it bears consideration and does indeed demand repeated listens. But it’s still an assumption, based on a personal reaction rather than an empirical fact.
It’s the music I find overblown rather than Whitney; if the whole thing was more like the first couple of verses, I’m sure I’d like it a lot more. As it stands, I feel the band track does its best to dampen the blows she keeps delivering; if there’s any packaging of emotional responses going on here, it’s arguably done by the record itself for the benefit of the audience, which explains your point about funerals, Tom’s point about what melisma has come to represent, and why this song – in this version – seems to be a popular karaoke choice despite being both very hard to sing and really quite a brutal lyric when it’s there coldly scrolling across the screen.
For me, Tom’s point about it “tracking her in the most bludgeoning way possible” her is the key – however much subtlety there is in Whitney’s performance, it’s easy to miss it because the music competes with her to use its own cue cards instead – the record almost seems to WANT you to miss what Whitney’s doing, to settle for the easier reaction (“Greatest love song of all time!”). Because of this record’s ubiquitous crossover success (and I’m using “crossover” to mean the record attracting a huge non-singles-buying audience), and the stylistic trappings being so very effective at conveying a blunter but more direct set of emotions than Whitney seems (to me) to want us to get, the soul music landscape changed. We seem to have got to a point where a mass audience both accept any record that has those trappings as “emotional”, and won’t accept a record that actually IS “emotional” without those trappings – and a smaller but still pretty big audience will automatically reject any record that has them. Kind of a mess, really.
I’d give it a six.
My full response is not on this thread because it’s a bit long, Nixon, but I more or less agree with punctum’s reading. And “overblown” really is a thoughtlessly overused word — as a sub editor I would instantly cross it out of anyone’s copy, and get them to rewrite, and this time think out what they actually want to say.
#60 Apologies, I hadn’t seen that – the link doesn’t work for me, I had to delete some weird characters at the end of it, but obviously loads of people have read it so maybe it’s just me! I’ll crop out the bit above about no-one agreeing. Fair play, see?
(Also: argh, discussion split across two threads.)
I don’t want to turn this into a semantic debate on the word “overblown”, but this is all new to me, which is why Punctum’s criticism seemed to me to come out of nowhere. I don’t know where this “thoughtlessly overused” stuff is coming from – obviously I’ve just not been reading the right books? How did we get to the point where a word’s dictionary definition isn’t good enough, and where a writer needs to use four or five words in place of one to make it clear they’ve thought out “what they actually want to say” (bombastic, fussy, overcomplicated, laden with unnecessary and extraneous touches, needlessly grandiose and/or grandstanding, cluttering up an otherwise fine record attempting to score cheap emotional points by grafting on stylistic elements from other records in the hope that some of those records’ impact will rub off on yours, even to the detriment of the actual song) – or else have a motive of social-racial conditioning attached just because they feel a simpler arrangement or a more low-key performance might have worked better? Seriously, I’m not trolling, I’m fascinated – this has literally never come up for me before.
Oh, except you can apparently only edit your last post. Bugger. Er, please feel free to pretend “(and one that nobody thus far seems to share)” doesn’t exist.
ooh, no, you’re right — it’s inserting some bizarre “no follow” device for me too, will check with the management in the morning about that
My problem with her “overblown” vocal is what she’s really singing is “And MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE will always love MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!” She doesn’t sound genuinely emotional about this other person – as on, say, ‘Stay With Me’ by Lorraine Ellison, another “overblown” vocal – but instead it’s like she’s trying to suck the universe into her like a black hole of vocal pyrotechnics. It just doesn’t seem connected to the song itself, it’s technique divorced from meaning. Least that’s how it sounds to my ears.
Thanks for the intervention, Nixon. I think maybe this debate is getting a little… Ooh no, I can’t say it.
Two quick points:
1) It is entirely untrue that in general usage “uppity” and “overblown” carry the same connotations. “Uppity” is a seriously offensive word, and a white person who uses it straight, as it were, is a racist, plain and simple. Google what Rush Limbaugh has been up to this past week, and the reaction to him, to see what I mean. “Overblown” carries nothing like the same charge. You might very often find it applied to Rick Wakeman, for example.
2) Read the original comment, where I first used the offending word. It was not remotely central to the point I was making. I was just looking for a quick way to identify the style of technically difficult, purportedly expressive guitar soloing most often associated with hard rock and heavy metal I would – and did – defend it in that context, but I am not going to claim it is the most perfectly chosen word that anyone could have used.
Anyway, I think now I am hoping it will all blow over….
Punctuation fail.
What I meant:
“…with hard rock and heavy metal. I would – and did – defend it in that context, but….”
You’ve nothing to apologise for, Ed. There’s a reason why some people are stuck with sub-editing posts on this forum.
hurrah, mintness thinks i am a mediocre and unemployable loser and that the quality of my opinions reflect my social status!!!! :D
Re 60: as a sub-editor, all I can say is if you’re able to be fussy about words like ‘overblown’, you’re seeing a much higher quality of raw and/or edited copy than I am.
While I enjoyed Lord Sükrat’s accompanying piece and believe that there’s a rich and deep discussion to be had about the meaning of Whitney Houston, I don’t think any of that disarms basic objections to this particular record itself. It’s an unashamedly big version of the song – the muted beginning only serves to emphasise that – and builds to something fairly huge, too huge for some tastes (including mine). I don’t see how the argument about that is substantially different to the debate about, say, The Whole Of The Moon.
((Poor me doesn’t really see what’s wrong with overblown – either the word, or indeed, the concept. There was an excuse I gave a lot, when I was younger, for loving things I knew were thought to be objectively terrible, but still persisted in loving, because “but it is so much what it is!” (“quite so utterly utter!” in other words maybe?) but all of these things which are just so completely ridiculously over the top – whether they are Steven Hillage guitar solos or histrionic singing styles or Mr D.James’ sheer-show-off-display-of-virtuosity of Red Baron barrel-rolls of quick cut drum edits. All of these things are overblown, yet there can be a sheer delight in the thing for what it is – too much. Gloriously, unashamedly, too much.))
Too much, yes, which is an expression I’m very fond of.
Can I suggest that the backing is (overused word alert) kitsch? I know Barry Ryan thinks it’s “a beautiful word”, but that dreadful electric piano sound (what is it?? It’s always on later Gerry Goffin abominations like Miss You Like Crazy) is enough to engulf ANY vocal performance in hundreds-and-thousands and golden syrup.
Re 56: I’m intrigued by the idea that in the film it’s a bit of an in-joke between Kevin and Whitney. Can anyone verify this? Puts a very different spin on Whitney’s rendition.
Re 64: equals “insincere”, yes? If so, I’m glad I’m not on my own.
Re 65: Not “overblown”, but this debate was getting a little “overheated”.
Re 68/69: Mark – I’d say you’re a very fair and very thorough sub :-)
Insincere, yes.
(And I think ‘Stay With Me’ might be too sincere, if I was the man she was singing to on that record I’d want to get as far away from her as possible. Get a grip woman!)
Not heard “Stay With Me”. It’s not a cover of The Faces?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8I6NBm6dQ4
It’s not a cover of the Faces.
“Stay with me, Baby” right?
A song I always wanted Trini Lopez to cover, a’la “If I had a hammer” …
#74: Thanks for that. Turns out I had heard that – just not that version of it though – and I definitely thought it was “Stay With Me Baby” as mark says, which it seems some covers are and others are not. No wonder I was confused.
Given that this is actually Whitney’s last No 1, a word for her 1999 comeback – I only ever heard the singles, but they did such a great job of restaking her claim to relevance in an R&B landscape that had shifted vastly since her own heyday. “My Love Is Your Love” has that gorgeously relaxed porch vibe to it, reggae shuffle + gospel choir + those brilliant details in the arrangement (spiralling strings, plucked guitars) + a really understated performance from Whitney. And “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay” has that terrific Rodney Jerkins stutterbeat underpinned by XYLOPHONES! So spare, and allows Whitney to deliver another fantastically nuanced take on the song – the first verse is a marvel, it’s all about the curl of her lip in each of the line-closing ad libs:
“Friday night, you and your boys went out to eat – ahhh
Then they hung out, but you came home around three – yes you did!
If six of y’all went out – ah!
Then four of you were really cheap – yeah
Cuz only two of you had dinner
I found your credit card receipt”
Plus, her fierce exclamations towards the end! “TAKE care of my business”!
I mentioned this elsewhere, but Stay With Me Baby – maybe because it’s always been held up as a lost classic, at least as far back as the mid 70s – has always seemed (hem hem) overdone; it’s as if they went into the studio intending to cut the ultimate, untoppable soul ballad. So it always* strikes me as rather calculated. It has since been bawled out by two of my very favourite singers, Scott Walker and David Essex, neither of whom made it seem any more “sincere” to me. Which makes it a very neat companion piece to IWALY.
*Granted, it really cut me up when I listened to it on the day its author, Jerry Ragovoy, died. Only then did I discover the record’s creation was rather unusual. Apparently a top end studio and similarly top end musicians were booked for a Frank Sinatra session – he bailed, so Ragovoy and Ellison took advantage of the situation.
I file it next to “River Deep, Mountain High” as an example of purposeful embiggenment.
The first record I ever bought for myself (effectively) was “It’s been such a long way home” written, so I thought all these years, by Jerry Ragavoy. Such is the nature of Misprints.
Yes, I entirely agree about “Stay with me baby”, in fact there seemed to be a spate of cover versions around 1974, like someone discovered this song hadn’t been a hit and sounded like it should have been.
The only thing is with songs like this, sometimes, is: “But who would buy such a thing? I wouldn’t for a kick-off!”
Re 79: Ha! Yes, good call. I think River Deep is made beautiful by its rag doll/puppy/pie lyric which is so at odds with the production and the planet-swallowing vocal.
Re 80: I’m guessing that I’m the sort of person who would buy such things! I love a lot of maudlin, end-of-the-world flowerpots (Timi Yuro’s Interlude) and wailing distaff deep soul (Doris Allen’s Shell Of A Woman), so it should push a lot of my buttons (sorry for the cliche). But it doesn’t. Something’s not quite right.
Here’s something Jerry Ragovoy wrote which is the polar opposite of Stay With Me and Whitney’s hit – so easy, effortless and gorgeous:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqLysf7FdfE
I’m being dim I’m sure, but what’s “It’s been such a long way home”?
Jerry Ragavoy liked to go big, his productions for Garnett Mims are pretty colossal too.
I have one Whitney record, the 12″ of “I’m Your Baby Tonight” which still sounds pretty good to me.
#77: I like both of those singles more than anything else Whitney Houston ever did. You pretty much nail the appeal of “Your Love Is My Love” – at least in my eyes. I also really like the way the chorus just rolls through – it sounds like there is barely a pause for breath but it’s so relaxed and easy. Maybe effortless is one of those words that I am not allowed to use (on the grounds that it doesn’t mean anything anymore or some such) – but I think it genuinely does sound like she isn’t trying – and that makes it all the sweeter for me.
For the genuinely overblown, see the Xmas #1 a year on from this one. Now there’s an entertainer with an inflated ego.
Re 77: Yes, she seemed to have returned with such supreme assurance at that point. Who knew what was to come? I’m particularly fond of My Love Is Your Love, for all the reasons Lex states.
#71: I like to think the slightly raised emotional temperature is a tribute to the intensity of Houston’s performance.
#70 “Too much” is brilliant. I am going to start using it as much as possible.
Re #60, 67, 68: One of the things I like about commenting here is that my copy does not usually get subbed. Other people probably feel the same way.
KDT at #70 probably nearer the mark here than anyone else; otherwise no change – too many unqualified memes still bubbling up; “genuinely emotional,” what do you mean by “genuinely”? “unnecessary,” “needless”; pop isn’t a pair of shoes or a loaf of bread – there is no “need” for it.
#64: you’re not getting how words can often be polite code for other, less broadcastable words or feelings.
Sorry to come across as a pedant here, but language is the only means of communication we have and therefore words and how and why we use them are important.
Re 87:
“#64: you’re not getting how words can often be polite code for other, less broadcastable words or feelings”
Of course they can be – that doesn’t mean in this case they are.
“I know you are, but what am I?” doesn’t, or shouldn’t, belong here.
I’m not convinced that words such as “real,” “sincere,” “genuine” etc. are being used here as anything more than signifiers without signified. Why are they being used? What do “we” believe or recognise to be “real,” and why is this reality as opposed to anybody else’s perspective? Otherwise it’s the “I-don’t-like-this-therefore-it’s-no-good” school of clowntime crit.
#81, “It’s been such a long way home” is a (fairly obscure) Garnett Mimms single. I got ‘given’ it as a prize at a fair, one of those “pull the lolly out and if the end is coloured red, you win” type things, and I ‘won’ the demo single of the above mentioned.
It’s a great track.
words and how and why we use them are important
On the other hand, we’re talking about whether Whitney has overcooked a Dolly Parton cover – these have a good claim on being the least important words ever written.
The criticisms are actually fairly clear, and far from empty imo – I’d say that avoiding them and attacking other posters’ articulacy, rather than engaging with their points, is the lazy option here.
What do you mean by “overcooked”?
OK not to beat this to death, but since Nixon and Karen both asked what my problem with “overblown” is and several other people are flapping around, I’m going to post the full sub’s dissection I did at snatched intervals at work yesterday.
Immediate caveat: I entirely take Ed’s point that this is a place we come NOT to be subbed — me too, some days I can barely get a word down w/o a typo, this is a holiday for me too — and I wasn’t trying to pull rank there, just to note that in a professional context, it’s a word that sets alarm bells going, and there’s a reason for this (an over-involved reason, some will think: others will think tl;dr again, and they’re right too).
Mark M (too many Marks!) is correct, I work as a sub in a fairly specialised realm: I have to work with material which involves the entire history of fine arts, applied arts, arts and craft, design and architecture, jumping in and out of polemics and manifestos and movements from all ages, what they meant then and what they mean now. And some of the writers I’m working with are not scholarly historians but eager young journalists still somewhat entwined with the fierce first-time-out stances they took at art school or picked up from the rock press as teens or whatever, and filtering everything through that (now perhaps rather dated) lens. And so they make claims which in context are far from clear (partly because it’s very hard for any one contributor to have a grasp of the full collated context of an issue of a magazine that hasn’t come out yet), and I get apparently prissy as a consequence sometimes — because my job is making things clear, so the debate can move on to matters of substance and away from confusions of definition or usage, and not have the reader baffled by the fact that a word seems to have been used in three contrasting senses in as many pages.
(Important to note: while youngsters blundering through stuff they haven’t entirely grasped, they also sometimes — often! — get their teeth into genuine problems that theoldsters have simply internalised and institutionalised during the process of mastery. By professional I’m pednatic [update: I'm going to leave this unedited, to teach myself not to be such a ponce!], but by temperament I’m if anything indolent and mischievous — I want to see what comes out of the clash between know-nothing energy and know-too-much settled pragmatism…)
It comes in three parts.
First is basic clichewatch: in the context of the discussion of rock and pop, and in particular in the one-word dismissal of prog from any kind of serious discussion, “overblown” is simply an overused word; you just see it too often (you see it much more often probably when you read as your job, but I’m just the canary in the mine here, for the person picking up the paper. In fact Karen — and I think also Ed — were pretty much using the word upthread in a cheery cheeky challopsy “reclaim the diss” mode (in other words refusing and challenging the normal coded associations) but this underlines the point I’m making: it’s become a word better pushed against than allowed to glide blithely by. And the “reclaim the diss” mode is a mode always fraught with risk (and when risk is involved, care is advisable, because someone may get bitten!)
Two relates to hidden associations: here the extreme compression of — and rather too often unearned adherence to — a polemic whose actual context is long gone (the alleged peril of prog as the dominant genre in rock entirely and actually quite easily vanquished), in other contexts where the shorthand in fact does active harm, because it calls on a we-all-know-why-this-is-stupid-and-bad solidarity that is, in effect, a call not to bother to pay attention (based on projected assumption rather than detailed idstinction). As in, we all know R. Wakeman acts the clown and has long been dismissed as nothing more than one, hence all these black men playing long sax solos and black women singing non-simple melodies are by definition also equally ridiculous etc etc.
And this is where my rarefied fussiness kicks in: because this is a site at the borderland between journalism — the instant record of the now — and history, and journalist-critics and historian-critics operate in very different ways, and it’s worth (now and then; it would be intolerable to do it all the time) separating these out, if only to acknowledge that, as time passes, these problems can sometimes get baked deep into the habits and easy first-to-hand terms, and create (or probably more realistically exacerbate) gulfs like the one Nixon identifies above. (And that others are only too aware of.)
From my specific perspective — which I don’t want to bring too greatly to bear because Popular comments threads are more an escape from work than a pitiless continuation of it — there really is a long and extremely involved history of the cultural politics of “ornate” (or “rococo” or “gothic” or “prog” whatever shorthand you light on) vs “modernist” or “brutalist” or “minimalist” or “punk”, AS WELL AS a quite distinct (division of labour) politics of “pre-composed vs improvised” — and these wind together into something way more complex than the kind of instant snapshot definitive judgment that “overblown” feels as if it’s calling on. (Just to give a hint of the complexity, in the “modern” vs “postmodern” debate — which I have next to no patience with, but have to untangle all the time — “punk” is generally lined up with the former and “minimalism” with the latter, so it very quickly becomes the case that someone juggling a bunch of snapshot judgments comes across as much more contradictory and confused on page than they probably actually are in their heads. They know perfectly well what they like and why: but when they get to the point of explaining this, using various borrowed shorthands from other longstanding discussions, it very quickly becomes an incomprehensible and contradictory knot, that needs patient unpicking, via more considered restatement.
Finally, I’d have to say without even really thinking about it that I don’t have any sense of instant recoil from “overworked” or “overcooked” as words — though I don’t think either make much sense in respect of this song (if anything the problem with the arrangement is that it’s UNDERcooked, though I explored on the other thread why I think it has to be this way, for the effect I think the song as after).
OK, so this sounds a bit random — “oh, so he’s fine with this word but anti that! how are we meant to know what we’re allowed to say? — so I’ll try and unpick it. (And then shut up!) (Hurrah! they shouted…)
“Overcooked” and “overworked” are straightforward metaphorical transfer from other crafts: and in both cases they invoke the artist’s or maker’s own judgment, about whether the thing worked in is going as planned. (It’s obvious how this applies in cookery; “overworked” would presumably either mean a canvas — too much stuff has been put on, it’s become a muddle — or that a material, such as clay, has been palped so much it’s lost its plasticity or its coherence or its colour or whatever physical quality was felt by the maker to be needed…)
This means that as metaphors there’s a very clear — and likely quite illuminating -and even possibly agreed-on – next step of discussion: how is the process of song-making different from the process of say cookery; how are the desired endpoints different. What was the maker attempting and what’s the result? — these metaphors don’t exclude (I think they encourage) that further question.
“Overblown” is different in two ways: first, it’s not AT ALL evident where the word has been borrowed from — it’s an old word, with several different context of usage, from weather description to wind-instrument technique — but knowing this doesn’t really help determine the next step of the discussion. How does the metaphor actually work?
Chambers suggests — plausibly? — that the terms arises from a jokey intensifier of the word “fullblown”: in other words, the artist was aiming for fullblown but went too far. If this is the usage we settle on — and sidestepping the suggestion that a joke too often repeated is tiresome in itself — it’s still different in one crucial way: where “overworked” and “overcooked” acknowledge the artist’s own agency and choices as pat of the dialectic, “overblown” seems simply to cast that aside. There’s this big pre-agreed chart of what’s appropriate and acceptable and measured and proper, and this artist has here gone beyond that. It entirely closes a door on exploration of where and what the artist was aiming for; effectively shuts it out of the discussion.
Hence: if “overblown” means something like “too big — in context — for his boots”, well, Marcello’s most contentious reading is really not so very far away from this. “Overblown” merely expresses a blustery outrage that the artist has ignored what you all took to be the pre-agreed protocols of pop. It assumes the artist is never allowed to challenge the status quo. (And I know that none of you using it believe this — an that the people using it as challopsy reclamation believe exactly the opposite — but to get to THIS part of the discussion; is Whitney indeed challenging the status quo, or not at all, you have to go through a different word-door…)
IN MY OPINION :)
I thought it might be glass-blowing, which is a craft-ish metaphor too!
Not quite sure why I didn’t think of wind instruments in a discussion about a song with, er, a sax solo prominent.
googling “overblown glass” mainly brings up David Bowie’s Glass Spider tour!
I suppose you’d better get your semantics discussion in while you can – there isn’t exactly much scope for it in what’s up next :P
[EDIT: We have # things now! Are they new or have I just been not logged in for a while?]
that’s what you think
they are quite newly returned flahr, thanks to alan
#87: you’re not getting how words can often be polite code for other, less broadcastable words or feelings.
I am perfectly aware of this, especially living in a country with a President who has caused a rise in the rhetorical temperature from the other side that isn’t entirely unrelated to how he looks.
What you’re not getting is how much people can get pissed off when other people imply that they are being racist. Or that they are too stupid to know it.
Which people?
So you didn’t notice how your conflation of “overblown” with “uppity” annoyed some people above? Including me.
You don’t think it’s substantively true then? It’s the same racism which is always quick to slag off black artists for being “sophisticated” and “polished” as opposed to “raw” and “soulful” (whatever the hell any of these are supposed to me), i.e. keep suffering for our rubbernecking listening pleasure, completely ignoring the background and the history. Read CSM’s comments on this topic in his Hendrix book, made over twenty years ago yet depressingly little has changed since.
I dunno, Vince Goddard got slagged off for being “sophisticated” and “polished” as opposed to “raw” (not Soulful, I’ll give you)
The idea that an artist continues to ‘suffer’ is something that gets applied to black and white artists. Different matter if they started out with suits/ties/sophistication….
Basically it gets applied to anyone – black or female or gay or working class and/or whatever – as a means of slapping them back into their place/corner.
Well, I haven’t heard the word “uppity” used since watching “Blazing Saddles”.
Admittedly, that was yesterday…
Mr Uppity was black but upper-class; I don’t know how he fits in.
He doesn’t; that’s why it happens.
#102: Some people do but not me, in fact my black music tastes tend toward the more sophisticated end and I don’t think of “overblown” and “sophisticated” as being remotely the same thing. Maybe because I don’t see the latter as being an insult.
Besides, does anyone these days, apart from a few grizzled old men buying old Charley compilations in Honest Jon’s, seriously doubt the greatness of, say, Prince or Gamble & Huff? You seem to be fighting an argument that was laughed out of the room a long time ago. But I don’t read Mojo or Q so maybe it hasn’t.
Off topic by this point, but Lord Sukrat, um, fr’xample playing a guitar solo on top of a megalithic long barrow: I think this is ~overblown~ in a way that “overcooked” or “overworked” just will not do. Sometimes you need the exact word, reclaimed or not. Ridiculousness is part of the concept which isn’t adequately expressed in your two substitutitues. But I’ll take the prog discussion back to twitter because this is v v off topic.
It could do with being a bit MORE overblown imo, as Tom implies out the rest of the record isn’t really willing to go the distance with Whitney and is too comfortable settling into the really-quite-boring vernacular of blockbuster ballad. If you really could go wherever you wanted without being slapped back into your place why go and sit right next to Bryan Adams?
(Also ‘overblown’ is such a red herring here – Purple Rain is overblown in the best way possible)
Re 108: for certain pop war veterans, the ideological battles of 1981 can never be put to beds. I see Punctum as being haunted by flashbacks (to use an era-appropriate reference) in the manner of Magnum, P.I.
#110, 111: I was going to give ‘Diamonds And Pearls’ (which I love) as a more recent example (to IWALY…was a Prince/Houston collab ever touted?) but yeah it strikes me people have used it as much against rock stars (I’m sure I did re ‘Innuendo’) as divas.
I agree the term does seem inappropriate here tho (and to Whitney in general? I’ve not thought of any performance by her as really OTT unlike with Mariah or Celine, with the latter’s blustery ballads closer to Bryan Adams in the soft/power stakes and Whitney’s follow up ballads to IWALY, ‘I Have Nothing’ (which I’d take over this as it somehow sounds grander overall) and ‘Run To You’ (going the other direction, this was more stripped down iirc, even despite IWALY’s acapella intro), play a bit closer to that than IWALY also.
Essentially when it sounds like the vocals are fitting around the music/a melody (as I think they are on Vanessa Williams ‘Save The Best For Last’) rather than the other way around (as I think may be the case on IWALY) that is what I prefer.
This discussion will be interesting to compare with the one on the song (or mammoth rock n’ roll pantomime experience if you will) now ten entries away and I look forward to a supreme dissection on it by Lord Sukrat, time permitting (major bonus for an additional thousand words on Michael Bolton and why we do not care for him at all)…
#104 Shurely “overcooked” is worse from an imaginary-racism point of view? She messed up the recipe a white person wrote, she didn’t do as she was told and now everything’s ruined, etc etc :) I am grateful for the explanation, though I think the conclusion is based on a few unsubstantiated reaches in the last couple of paragraphs (I will expand if anyone wants! Though I suspect everyone is sick of this now… Also I am typing on my phone and it is tiresome)
DIGRession
108/112 Not wishing to come over all Sepp Blatter, but is racism still a problem in pop? (or pop writing?) I mean, is it still a widespread thing in 2011, not “shouldn’t we ignore a bit of good old racism” – I’ve been reading a lot of Sixties Motown reviews that leave a sour taste, but I’d been writing them off as the product of a different time long since widely discredited and repudiated. That Punctum’s mind went straight there, when I’d be frankly astonished if it occurred to anyone using the O word on this thread, has been a real eye opener.
playing a guitar solo on top of a megalithic long barrow WITH A WIND MACHINE <– sorted
#93 As Alan Greenspan supposedly said: if you think you understood me, I obviously haven’t made myself clear.
Thanks for the thoughts on subbing. It’s a vital function, and I can see why you would take it seriously, even here. However, it can be vexing when an editor responds not to the words in front of him or her, but to some preconceived ideas of his or her own.
In case you missed it, as they say, I have copied the bulk of my original comment here. Let’s take a look:
“Like Lex, I absolutely love this one. I wanted to dance to it at my wedding, but my wife – a Dolly Parton fan – demurred. It made sense, really, because it is too powerful to be easily contained in a public ritual.
An operatic aria is a good reference point, but what I think of most when I hear it is John Coltrane: the combination of breathtaking power and perfect control. The way Houston uses melisma to play around with the tune reminds me of his harmonic and melodic exploration; she does for Parton what he does for Julie Andrews on ‘My Favorite Things’. (Both techniques share roots in Gospel, of course.)
The objections are similar, too: Tom’s accusation that she is “bullying” reminds me of Philip Larkin’s complaint about Coltrane’s “god-bothering”. For me, though, the parallels are wholly positive. I get the same sense of a rigorous musical intelligence cutting loose, to create something that is lyrical, expressive, liberated, heart-rending and beautiful. It is no wonder that the feeble, bland, session sax sounds horrible set against her sky-splitting voice.
Or, to pick up on another suggestion, if melisma is the vocal equivalent of the overblown guitar solo, then Mariah Carey is Joe Satriani and Christina Aguilera is Eddie Van Halen, but Houston is Jimi Hendrix.”
Now, it really escapes me how anyone could possibly deduce from that that the use of “overblown” in the final paragraph implies an assertion that ” all these black men playing long sax solos and black women singing non-simple melodies are by definition also equally ridiculous [like Rick Wakeman]….”
Unless, as you seem to imply, “overblown” is a power-word in the rock crit lexicon, with a meaning not fully appreciated by us amateurs, that is potent enough to negate any context in which it might be placed. It appears to be a sort of verbal high explosive that demolishes any argument you might attempt to build in its vicinity.
In which case, it might be helpful for us newcomers to be warned. The Economist and several other publications have style guides to let their staff know what are acceptable uses of language. Perhaps FT needs one, too.
#115 Heh.Very good.
Ed, I assumed — as I did say — that you and Karen were indeed using the word in a positive sense: “reclaiming the diss” was my shorthand. I didn’t particularly expand on my reservations about this approach, beyond saying that it’s inevitably a risky tactic. I do think the word has become loaded, if not quite inherently explosive; this sometimes happens, and it’s worth looking at, because it’s always interesting why so. I very much don’t want people to feel defensive about the words they’re thinking of using on FT, because I’d like there to be open exploration of these embedded nuances. Ideally not divisive or embattled exploration. (And definitely not a thread like this over every other word!)
Nixon, re “overcooked”: well, as I said, I don’t think it’s a very exact term for what people are reacting against in this particular record — partly because, yes, “undercooked” fits better; partly because I don’t believe the dislike is problematic or even surprising. It’s very much meant to strike you the way it does, I believe; and unavoidably some will recoil, because of the stance it’s taking (so to me, it’s cooked exactly right, in the knowledge that this will distress some listeners and piss others off). The way I’m reading “overcooked”, I don’t think the “imagined racism” aspect IS such a threat, first because I don’t automatically consider the composer’s intentions or input the definitive, normative element (this fits into what I called the division-of-labour politics of pre-composition vs improvisation: I think it’s basic to the story of jazz that the improvisor is potentially bringing something unexpected, perhaps astonishing, to the written material; that the chef’s realisation transforms the recipe, as it were — with the risk always there, of course, that the transformation is a disaster…)
And second, I’m more comfortable with a metaphor this particular, because I think the source of the image is accessible to all: everyone knows what cooking, and overcooking is — and this actually means the discussion of whether it’s an appropriate metaphor is also accessible, easily started and fruitfully pursued. But with “overblown” — because it’s source is unclear, and thus unagreed on — there’s more of a tendency to declare (as a sort of overcompensation for this lack) that “everyone knows what’s meant” < -- this to me is always a perilous juncture in an argument, because it's hurrying a lot of people past a potential debte who actually don't quite know (or more to the point agree on) what's being said, with the suggestion that anyone who "doesn't know" is a bit of a dope or a contrarian crank or troublemaker. To me*, this isn't a divisive record because one side are clever and cultured and correct, and the other side slowpokes of no account: it's divisive because it was devised to be, consciously or unconsciously (or both), and the how and why of this are some of the most interesting elements.
Finally KDT: yes, you're right, they're not synonyms, hence not interchangeable in all contexts. I think to reliably to capture the cluster of meanings you're after, and to dodge or confront backchat, you need more of a self-evidently oxymoronic phrase really, which declares and acknowledges and undermines the contradiction others claim to see or hear. You're actually making a strong (and restitutive) aesthetic argument, so don't try and slip it through as everyday speech: make the stance the hook!
*Admin's advice: There IS a "no follow" block device on links that use the a href formula, which is unfortunately built into the WordPress bloggy machinery and hard to sidestep. Inelegant full links seem to be the most reliable way round it. So see here for my full post, if anyone wants, and didn't yet:
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/i-am-the-0-00000001-percent/
Like this song quite a bit — quite a racket from what I remember, so I read the sax solo at the end as doing its job in providing er, relief. Always notice that kind of thing more tho’, and almost always can’t think of an instance in which that tone of solo doesn’t work (Lady G’s “The Edge of Glory”) in a song.
Overall this is as good as opera in pop gets — which is not entirely convincing if you just don’t do opera.
After considering my dislike for Whitney’s performance on this record, and carefully sidestepping the semantic minefield, my conclusions are formed from my personal reaction to it, rather than any stupid notions about what is allowed or not in Pop or more pertinently, what is allowed in romantic balladry. Quite simply, there are no rules. Whitney’s performance, then has become admirable. I can admire its effectiveness in relation to Whitney’s role in The Bodyguard. I can admire its place in the funeral music canon. I can appreciate its HUGENESS. I’m not saying I like Whitney’s IWALY, I don’t. Does the fault lie with me for not liking it? Of course not. Pop is not a stick to beat people with. I previously suggested it was “shouty soul”. To an extent I believe it is. However I can’t believe that as a label it can be regarded as negative. “Stay With Me, Baby” is a wonderful song, which makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Delightfully shouty. “River Deep, Mountain High” is also a delight. I seem then, to have no problem with begging or declaration. Whitney is rejecting, ultimately sacrificing love and all that comes with it. Isolating herself in order to attain some elevated state. This is something I fail to understand. It’s not something that I fail to accept. Accepting something and fully understanding it, don’t come hand in hand. Therein lies mystery, which can be enough to love something without truly understanding it; eg. salted caramel. However, in some cases mystery can be annoying. It’s a mystery to me why HUGE ROMANTIC MOVIE-TIE IN SONGS annoy me, but they do. And I fear for #784, because I know I will be confronted like this again. I sense many others will be conflicted in their reactions, but I won’t expand in order not to wake the bunny.
Ed, I love your original post and I have absolutely no problem with your use of “overblown”; is perfectly fine shorthand for technical/artistic overreaching that can be either admirable or ridiculous or both. Also, I have been an editor and a subeditor etc. and have even edited Mark (albeit not for pay), though that mainly consisted of deciding that when he couldn’t make up his mind whether “ProgRock” was one word or two, I made it one, as the most idiosyncratic.
“Overblown” has never coded as “sophisticated,” or as “uppity.” Actually tends to read as “unsophisticated,” though not in your post.
Again, not in this thread, but I perceived the knock on Whitney at the time as her being too showbiz and too complacent. This may have been a misperception (I mean, my perception of the knock, though one ould say the same about the knock itself), as I was not paying a lot of attention to the conversation regarding Whitney.
Also, my original review from way back then comes within a hair’s breadth of saying “overblown,” does it not? It also implies overblowing as quite a lot of blowing, the norm already being a jet stream.
#120 Thank you. I’m glad you liked it. “Admirable or ridiculous or both” is spot-on.
#77 Thank you for reminding me about “It’s Not Right, But It’s OK”: Houston’s second-finest hour. I hadn’t listened to it for years, and it’s wonderful. I love the beat – and are they xylophones, or thumb pianos? – and I love Houston’s icily controlled fury in the first half. She’s keeping herself in check to stop herself screaming. Best of all, though, is the second half where she cuts loose, improvising again, but in a very different way from IWALY’s joyous mastery; it’s jagged and fragmented, with ideas picked up and then discarded. It’s a bit of a stretch, but if it’s like a guitar solo again – which it is – the player it reminds me of most is Robert Quine.
‘My Love Is Your Love’, the album, was a big disappointment, though. I picked it up for £2 in Our Price, I remember – I guess sales fell a long way short of some rose-tinted expectations – was immediately underwhelmed, and let it slip away somewhere down the line. A quick skim just now has not really convinced me I was wrong. Am I missing something?
Caught most of the 1992 segment of today’s POTP (ha, knew that weekend R2 listeners aren’t ready for the Prodigy yet; also reminded that Undercover were even worse than I remembered them) and gave this a fresh listen.
It’s still a shield, impenetrable, and the feeling I get from it now is that she’s not necessarily singing the song to a human being, or if she is it’s her old self, the chirpy, messy girl who sang “How Will I Know?” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”; she’s “moved” beyond that now and closing down all the access roads – and it’s clearer than ever that she’s the one doing all the moving away in this performance; I’m closing my “self” down for you, my spectators, and all that you will see from hereonin is a Whitney brand, something to gawp at, like the Taj Mahal, anything to hide what I’m really feeling and thinking.
The three-note ascent of “you” at the end is the equivalent of Roger Waters fitting that final brick into the wall, and it’s just as terrifying.
[...] an extra from Clash in the Titans? Sure — run FROM you more like. In a recent Populist entry, Tom Ewing noted how Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” far from being the tragedy realized [...]
I have been listening to ‘Memories’ a lot today, and realized something I’d missed before: the Archie Shepp connection makes the Coltrane parallel explicit. What would IWALY have been like with him soloing instead of the feeble Kirk Whalum? (Thanks, eNotes).
Couldn’t and shouldn’t have happened; WH was never going to be satisfied hanging out in the lofts and doing guest shots on John Zorn albums – “Memories” is clearly a stepping stone, a calling card. Her talent lay in her bifocal abilities – her technical facility (she phrases like a jazz singer most of the time) and her emotional empathy (if it’s acting, she was a terrific actress).
Whether she would be happier, and still alive, if she’d opted for the jazz route (see also A Winehouse) is another what-if issue that’s never going to be resolved.
That list of “Rock stars that completed their artistic endeavours and retired happy” so far consists of David Bowie, and that’s it!
Others carry on making music for all their days, or never get anywhere near to it!
I always love you Whitney…in your life and your death…you will be in my heart for ever I live…
Jethro Nasarat
Petra
The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
Whit has five entries in the top 40 in the midweek chart (which is a right old spoiler isn’t it?) and this is the highest, but only at number 10, so it seems unlikely to add to its previous 10 weeks at the top and reshuffle the all-time leader board.
She’ll be lucky if she ends up with one or two entries in Sunday’s chart, as iTunes sales drop off (as they already are – only one album, her Greatest Hits double, in the Top 40, and that’s only at #7; hardly Michael Jackson-style saturation) and the more familiar and dreary parade takes form, with hot new joint by DJ Fresh featuring Kia-Ora or somebody (I mean who gives a fuck; his grandparents probably bought a copy each) at number one, which will be as fondly remembered as the Cascada one.
(Stop press: the Last Trump at Daventry has been postponed as requests have been made for a David Guetta remix.)
An honest/serious question: Does anyone know Whitney’s albums very well? What are the great non-single tracks? *Are* there any, as people used to say, ‘deep cuts’ where Houston stretched out a bit? (With her voice there must be some, right? How could she stop herself? She can walk up to any any accompanying pianist at any time and just start howling and it’ll sound amazing…) Are there any gems buried on B-sides or on The Preacher’s Wife soundtrack say?
@131 A great question. I had been wondering the same thing. In spite of my diss upthread, I have been listening to ‘My Love is Your Love’ a bit, and it is pretty good: not-quite state-of-the-art end of millennium R&B, with Whitney’s voice having acquired a couple of rough edges but still amazingly controlled and powerful, and still way ahead of her peer group.
My chart predictions were nearly spot on – only three songs in the Top 40 singles and none in the top ten; two compilations in the Top 100 albums and the higher of these is at #7. In the meantime “Give Me All Your Lovin’” is set to be Madonna’s worst chart performance since, well, since she started having hits here.
“Miles Away” peaked at 39, but that wasn’t the ‘first single from a new album’. Maybe all those ‘guests’ confuse things…
Maybe also because it’s ‘download only’ and all the Mad fans who’ve been keeping their multiformat single collections up to date, don’t feel the need to collect downloads.
Maybe because of all the disqualified sales that gave out free downloads to album purchasers.
And maybe this should be discussed someplace else. then again…
After everything I’ve read about Give Me All Your Lovin’ I was surprised by how much I liked it. Strong chorus, bit of an Antmusic manifesto about the lyric. Download only? What a bizarre and unnecessary way to shrink your profile.
I remember being severely disappointed when Take A Bow broke her run of 35 straight Top 10 hits (which I’m guessing must be a record). No.16!
Back to the matter in hand, yes, Whitney’s lesser known cuts. I’m all ears. Any suggestions?
A gospel song, ‘I Love The Lord’ from The Preacher’s Wife s/track has been recommended to me… The following live version is pretty impressive: http://youtu.be/a2ShTtaZpgU
I dunno about the new Madonna single… It feels divided against itself to my ears so I’m not surprised that its not much of a hit. The cheerleader chant bit is slightly obnoxious and in-your-face- and self-glorifying (as well as feeling very tired after years of Stefanis and Pinks and Avrils and Perrys doing almost the same thing), and the rest of the verses and choruses feel quite reserved/mellow/plain/aggressively uninteresting/purely functional. But that’s to say that there’s something in GMAYL to irritate almost everyone (and not in any good way), and taken as a whole the track’s short of personality (which doesn’t bode well for the album).
My only real suggestion, I’m afraid, is ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, which was a hit in the US but, of course, not in Britain.
One reason I love it is that it is a perfect illustration of my point above – which I had not consciously realised when I wrote it – that Houston = Hendrix. Her version is as emblematic of 1991 as his is of 1969. The feats she accomplishes with melody, timbre and volume are if anything even more jaw-dropping than his, the tempestuous playing of the Florida Orchestra the equivalent of his distortion bombs and feedback wails.
It doesn’t hurt, also, that it is intrinsically a great tune. Why is it that Britain is lumbered with the world’s worst national anthem? The US, France, Germany, Russia: all a thousand times better than ours. A land without music, indeed.
Most melancholy national anthem? Douze points to Bulgaria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d_6-smez-Q
Just when you think it’s going to change to a major chord, it gets EVEN SADDER.
National Anthems: this is the right time to be discussing this as far as I’m concerned, being as we’re in the thick of the 6 Nations, which always reveals the awful, dirge-like qualities of GSTQ by comparison to other nations. Italy’s national anthem is my favourite – it’s got an instrumental opening passage and does a sharp left turn into a different tune after the first sung section, before building to a nice rousing finish. La Marseillaise is, as noted above, also fantastic (though the notion of being “cheese eating surrender monkeys” doesn’t really chime with an anthem calling for impure blood to water their furrowed fields – perhaps The Simpsons’ writers were not up to speed on it).
I don’t think it’s right that the UK is a land without music though; it’s just GSTQ. Land Of My Fathers, especially when stood in the stands at the Millennium Stadium when England are in town, never fails to raise the hairs on the back of my neck and Flower of Scotland, whilst somewhat dirge-like, also seems to capture something of Scotland about it (mostly, in my view, a grim recognition of past glories and a “don’t fuck with us” attitude). I’ve never really understood why England don’t co-opt Land of Hope and Glory – which whilst not as good as the anthems that Ed points out (and probably not as good as the Bulgarian one either), is at least a little bit more jaunty.
The least said about the modern drinking anthem that Ireland have to use because they’re an amalgam of South and North, the better.
What is it? Tubthumping? (I’m not a rugby fan)
Maybe it’s because I’m allergic to Elgar, that embodiment (to my mind) of Edwardian, retired old buffer, Disgusted of Malvern Wells, remember-leead-you’re-BRITISH, all-foreigners-are-cads, stiff-upper-lipped, aggressively-moustached jingoism, but I shudder at the thought of LoH&G as English National Anthem. That’s entirel unfair, of course, because my choice would be Jerusalem and Hubert Parry fits that description every bit as closely as Elgar does. But Jerusalem would give us an anthem to stand alongside the Marseillaise as one of the very best.
I’m not against nationalistic bombast, it’s just that in that field Sibelius << Elgar, just as amongst concerti for violoncello Dvořak << Elgar and amongst English composers Elgar is overinflated compared to Byrd, Tallis, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Delius and others.
Angels in America’s best character, Belize, has a great speech ripping on The Star-spangled Banner among other things, here (go 3 mins in if you want to cut to the chase).
In general, the French and US anthems are great but do feel like they might have got lots of people killed over the years: ‘rally the troops’ and ‘we’re all troops’ are their big messages. Jerusalem is the best anthem-ish piece I know of: it’s got all of the melodic and arrangement power you could ask for, but it talks explicitly about building things on the home-front hence can’t easily be pressed into service of as a march-to-war. I guess J. is too closely associated with the Labour Party and the left more generally to ever become an official national anthem. Too bad if so (having ‘satanic mills’ in your anthem would be very metal).
In practice, I think “Jerusalem” transcends any left/right divide (William Blake was after all anything but a party man), and is gleefully (even drunkenly) sung all across (and beyond) the political spectrum; and as such could be genuinely unifying nationally, for England. (Memories of being awoken by drunken rugger-bugger ex-public schoolboys singing it late at night en route home to their university abode in St Andrews: and of it being a glorious farewell to a Catholic priest – in fact of French Mauritian origin – moving on to a new parish in East Anglia)
While I love both the tune and the words, I’m not sure it’s quite national anthem material though.
@WL: It’s called Ireland’s Call and was written in 1995. It basically exists to get to the chorus which achieves what it sets out to do, I guess, in as much as it allows people to bellow it out in suitably rousing fashion. Or alternatively, sound like they’ve had several pints and put themselves one over the eight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIxe5ooQtqI
This is a good video example as everyone stumbles over the opening verse and then belts out the chorus, as they can remember that it goes “Ireland, Ireland” at the start of it. The Irish are better off with The Fields Of Athenry (which is only slightly less modern than Ireland’s Call).
My main problem with Jerusalem as a song is that old joke about being able to answer in the negative to pretty much every line. I can’t really take it seriously. Good tune though – better than LoHoG.
140: so the composer responsible for the ‘Cello Concerto’ and the ‘Enigma Variations’ is “over-inflated” and inferior to Vaughan-Williams and Delius and Holst…?!
But having said that and much as I love Elgar (I was only outside the house where he used to stay with his friends each year at Settle, North Yorkshire on Sunday morning – with the church bells ringing and the St George’s flag flying from the tower it felt as quintissentially English as it gets) including “Pomp and Circumstance” I’d take Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’* over LOHAG any day – wonderful poetry and a stirring tune to put any other national anthem to shame.
Why the English still have to put up with that dirge ‘God Save The Queen’ (which is the British national anthem anyway)when we have 2 such peerless alternatives at our fingertips beggars belief.
*the Lesley Garrett version available on You Tube is well worth a listen.
Watching This Morning in the Anticoagulation Clinic at Guy’s “this morning,” it trailed amongst other attractions, “Cooking With Lesley Garrett.” Wearing a red tie. Happily the nurse called me in before I could sample this aesthetic delight.
Liked this:
http://tellingfrombirdstoll.tumblr.com/post/17887802849/whitney-a-death-or-the-parable-of-the-toyota-corolla
And, for relevance:
–
Let’s admit that, if we’re honest, greatest singers of all time tend not to approach songs with all the empathy of an articulated lorry approaching a hedgehog. Sure, onlookers are treated to a Technicolor spectacular, but something is lost along the way.
Thus, her take on Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You. Take a moment to recite the lyric in your head. Has ever a piece of popular verse been more deserving of the epithet ‘love song’? ‘Love’ as in selfless regard for another, a heartbroken protagonist realising there’ll be more suitable partners for their beloved further down the line, and so exiting stage left to leave the way clear. It is, to say the least, a melancholic state of affairs. And like Nick Cave said in The Secret Life of the Love Song, “Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care.” Accordingly, Parton’s reading of the song is dignified, restrained, a handwritten note quietly pushed under the back door.
By contrast, Houston alerts all local news stations of her paramour’s address, lands a gold-plated helicopter on his front lawn, stops and poses for pictures, has a quick “No, don’t talk me out of it, I have to go through with this!” session with a shrink on the driveway, blinks back tears in a to-camera piece about ‘My journey’, briefly consults her full-time mascara assistant, knocks on the door, and hands over a giant factory-written Hallmark card when it opens. Meanwhile, melancholy lies bleeding somewhere in an adjacent block, having crashed to earth when its quiet floating was cut to shreds by rotor blades. Poor bastard. It never stood a chance.
By any reasonable reckoning, in judging a great singer – as opposed to a technically great voice – we must factor in the ability to interpret a lyric. And alas, though it would be apt – and mean the world a more beautiful place – her version of I Will Always Love You is not frequently listed in the Top Ten Songs By Which To Exit Divorce Courts. Instead, with all the appropriateness of coffins taking their curtain call to Walking on Sunshine, newly married couples walk down the aisle to it every week. Somewhere, in all the showboating of vowel stretching time, the essence of the song has been so utterly lost that down means up and left means right. Which makes Whitney Houston the very definition of style over substance.
–
And another thing… ”The Star-Spangled Banner’ is where the “Whitney is scary” line really makes sense to me. All that power and skill, in the service of group identity and collective purpose. It is a little bit frightening. A nation with that as its anthem is capable of anything.
With ‘God Save the Queen’, you’d be lucky to get through early closing Wednesday in King’s Lynn. Even when Brian May plays it.
Everyone who said ‘Jerusalem’ is right, of course. The line about “questions to which the answer is no” in the first verse is funny, but completely misses the point. In the second verse, Blake says maybe the answer is no, but it’s irrelevant. We can make it a yes, here and now. A nice idea.
until I worked in the USA on a summer camp back in the 80s I hadn’t realised that Americans sing another anthem to the tune of GSTQ which begins ‘My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing’.
Wiki informs me that The Star-Spangled Banner only officially replaced this (and other tunes) as the US National Anthem in 1931.
I don’t mind GSTQ that much as a tune IF it is performed with some energy, but more often than not it gets a dirge-like rendition from uninterested sports players.
When I worked in the USA on a summer camp back in the 80s, they used to get the kids to sing Guthrie’s ‘This Land is My Land’, which is a great unofficial democratic anthem.
They also have ‘God Bless America’, which is as bad as GSTQ, TBH.
“My country… etc” is used to great effect on the (excellent) Tune-Yards album.
In fact, it’s so good, I had completely missed that it’s the GSTQ tune.
Ahem… ‘This Land is *Your* Land’, which makes the democratic point rather better. Intended to be the anti-’God Bless America’, says YouTube, and who am I to argue?
And while I’m fact-checking, ‘Whokill’ is the Tune-Yards album. ‘My Country’, of course, is the song.
The US also has ‘America The Beautiful’ (the amber waves of grain, sea to shining sea one) and ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ (the mine eyes have seen the glory, where the grapes of wrath are stored one).
Whitney singing America the B.
Whitney singing the Battle Hymn
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” was originally a Unionist song written by a committed abolitionist, Juliet Ward Howe (not to be confused with Harriet Beecher Stowe!), to the tune of “John Brown’s Body”: interesting if it’s uncomplicatedly become an all-American hymn, especially in the Old South, where John Brown is to this day not well thought of.
(I’m not saying it hasn’t: I remember singing it in assembly at all three schools I was at, age 5-17: all three English as English as English)
@152 Thanks for those links.
“Written by a committed abolitionist” means that an African-American woman singing the Battle Hymn, to a military audience, in Virginia, has a particular edge to it.
Re 146: the Mail or Express had the headline “At Last singer Etta James is dead”, which is possibly worse than “the voice of diet coke”.
The courageous stab at ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at this year’s NBA All-Stars game by Mary J Blige, herself a pretty great singer, really puts Houston’s achievement into perspective:
http://m.youtube.com/index?desktop_uri=%2F&gl=US#/watch?v=nQdSVb6xD-A
@ed, 156. Just in case you or anyone else hasn’t seen/heard it, Marvin Gaye’s 1983 NBA all-star game national anthem (w/ drum machine) is truly a thing of wonder. He transforms the melody and the timing in unexpected ways that nonetheless feel completely inevitable and obvious as he sings. Genius. Flat out.
@157 Wow. Just wow. Thanks for posting that: I hadn’t heard it. As you say, flat-out genius, from the bold decision to chop off the first two words onwards. Impossibly subtle and irresistibly moving.
I love the backing track, too. You keep half-expecting the next line to be “By the rockets’ red glare, I’ve got sexual healing….”
It doesn’t hurt that he looks super-cool in that suit and shades, too.
Watching the Gaye again, I was reminded of another stand-out feature of that performance: the impassioned emphasis he gives to the word “free” in the penultimate line. You could write a book about that “free”.
Obviously with her recent tragic demise we have had a chance to listen again and re-evaluate Whitney. When you go back and listen to the bodyguard this is not even the stand out performance; try I who have nothing or run to you; but apart from her supersonic voice what was her importance; well as someone who has always loved soul and r&b I was always annoyed that the earlier pioneers fats domino, chuck berry, Sam Cooke Solomon Burke etc., never got their proper commercial acceptance and were subject to inferior covers and so it continued with Donne Warwick and then the Jackson 5; however in the 1980s Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston set about rewriting the record books and becoming commercial juggernauts. They claimed huge success for black music and dismantled rock and pop’s domination of charts, awards and records. Paving the world for today’s situation where r&b dominates; all my long haired bearded hippy friends from years ago with their prog rock snobbery towards black music now realise that the world rocks to one beat; thanks Whitney rip.
I was wondering if you ever thought of changing the page
layout of your blog? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.
But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could
connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having 1 or 2 pictures.
Maybe you could space it out better?
#126:
“That list of “Rock stars that completed their artistic endeavours and retired happy” so far consists of David Bowie, and that’s it!”
Never say never again…