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
“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” …