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
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)