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
#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?