Whitney Houston R.I.P.

Was anyone else forced to hear her Star Spangled Banner every morning in public school? It's one of those rare songs I've easily heard over 1000 times, and I'm pretty sure I have every last nuance of that performance memorized.

Pop music hadn't had time to digest The Terminator (1984) and Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985) when Whitney Houston released her 1980s albums. Thus, they were still in robot, not cyborg, mode. Fine robot music, for sure, esp. the robodisco of "So Emotional" and "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" (as well as its proper homecoming in "I Wanna Dance With Numbers"). But she didn't realize her cyborgian potential until "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)," her greatest single.

In his essay “An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography,” Stefan Helmreich provides an excellent definition of cyborgs that helps get at the distinction between RoboWhitney and CyborgWhitney: "Cyborgs need not be material compounds of flesh and machine; anything that can be described in terms of information dynamics can be considered a cyborg. The boundaries of cyborgs are subject to shifting and expanding as they are networked to other feedback dynamics across scales and contexts" (627-8). RoboWhitney hasn't networked to other feedback dynamics. That's what "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" and "So Emotional" are about. She isn't dancing with somebody but she wants to. She remembers the way that we touched but we're not touching right now (and note how the lyrics appeal to the distancing sense of vision to heighten the sense of disconnection; even the production tends towards discrete sound-images as much as a Wall of DX7). More importantly, the thwarted desire implies the self-presence that identifies all robots from Phil Oakey to the love duo in the underrated Heartbeeps to David in the equally underrated A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Like the aforementioned, she can't help but broadcast her thereness because she's perpetually letting us know how frustrated she is in her casing (which is how many critics have described her post-"Memories" work in general).

CyborgWhitney makes herself available for networking. Crucially, "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)" is the rare diva song where "I" is never mentioned. She has significantly lessened what Mark Sinker calls "the sense of regality, of dreadful awful majesty of style and skill as a weapon, the sense of renunciation, the sense that her role leaves her the loneliest person of all." She sings it down and invites us commoners in, not eradicating loneliness but finding a temporary prison for it. Nothing is forever in this network save for the infinite play of information dynamics. The song traces not a line from Whitney to a lover but a skein of flickering vectors, a series of points where for every win, someone must fail, where falling in love is sometimes wrong, sometimes right. There's a point where we exhale but a point back to where we're gasping for air. Even our identities are only momentarily whole when networking with another and looking inside ourselves only gets us halfway there. But, and herein is the song's genius, this holds true as much for Whitney here, in this modest moment (it's her shortest #1 single too), as it does for us which means at long last we can interface with her. We say shoop shoop as if to vault over language in an attempt to express the peace in this point of contact but even that is connected to other points back to The Sweet Inspirations and Salt-n-Pepa. It's Whitney Houston's cyborg manifesto and it holds out Haraway's world-changing vision. As Helmreich puts it, "Haraway found an unexpected, ironic, utopian promise in the figures of cyborgs initially created to automate warfare or de-skill workers; cybernetics opened up possibilities for recoding our human bodies and selves, for short-circuiting the idea that a durable 'nature' dictated our destinies. Somewhere in cyborg bodies might whir a liberatory consciousness."

what the

"all robots from Phil Oakey" <-- best bit

looks like banaka got to someone

Battlestar Houstonica

that reads strongly like c&p'd k-punk

(no offense kjb if it isn't)

seemed more like a car alarm to me

Public funeral will apparently be in the 18,000-seat Prudential Center in Newark. Everything about it is appealing, everything the traffic will allow...

Was anyone else forced to hear her Star Spangled Banner every morning in public school?

would've turned me full Commie

oh look, it's shithead

why don't you link us to the withering appraisal of The Bodyguard on your stupid webzine?

u have a webzine, Morbs...?

oh wait nm

my ukrainian coworker just told me that ppl are devastated about whitney in russia - 'the bodyguard' was a massive box office hit there and she later played in moscow and kiev

so, no public memorial.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/02/14/whitney-houston-nj.html

i would have liked to have seen bin laden's reaction to this news.

http://www.regretsy.com/2012/02/13/healing-through-tragicrafting-whitney-houston-edition/

The Singles Jukebox has a few things to say.

Dan better not read those "So Emotional" appreciations, he will hunt and slay.

we're lucky no one chose "Where Do Broken Hearts Go."

Ain't it shocking how terrible this song is?

it's not shocking actually

ha well played

Dolly Parton is set to earn millions from Whitney Houston's cover of her song I Will Always Love You, it has been revealed.

The track, which Whitney covered for the soundtrack of The Bodyguard, was originally penned by Parton in 1973.

Last month, Parton revealed to CNN that Houston's cover had already raked in lots of cash for her.

'When Whitney did it, I got all the money for the publishing and for the writing, and I bought a lot of cheap wigs,' she said.

and if one of her other songs had been the one everyone bought someone else would've earned all the money...

and would hopefully buy cheap wigs too

Dolly Parton is set to earn millions from Whitney Houston's cover of her song I Will Always Love You, it has been revealed.

haha "it has been revealed"

how is this news at this point

haha seriously

although i do really wonder what percent of dolly's earnings over her career can be traced directly to WH's recording of that song. 10%? 50%? 90%?

the-dream said a while back that he made like 15 million off writing "umbrella" alone, so the mind reels at how big the royalties are for "i will always love you"

Well, if Nick Lowe received a $1 million royalty check for that terrifying cover of "What's So Funny 'Bout..." on The Bodyguard soundtrack, I can only imagine what Parton earned.

haha "it has been revealed"

i'm picturing dolly having like a huge factory pallet of cash under a velvet sheet in her living room, inviting a bunch of journalists over, and then at the appointed time, whoosh.

like a huge factory pallet of cash under a velvet sheet in her living roomin her castle made of cheap wigs, for a more perfect world!

Diamanda Galas releases a statement on Whitney's death:

http://www.diamandagalas.com/houstonstatement.htm

wow, Diamanda... OTM?

I'm not used to saying that

you goths always stick together

dolly parton has got to be the richest lady in tennessee

i love her so much

yeah she is the sweetest

also i know this is not news to anyone and i do like whitney but holy jesus does dolly sing her song better than houston.

love dolly so much. I'm sure IWALY made her a ton of cash, but it's not like she didn't have other huge hits too y'know

she's got porter waggoner money still, bless her heart

diamanda is always otm

well yeah she's got hits but like, the biggest pop hit she wrote AND performed, "9 to 5," you know that wasn't a cash cow like IWALY

diamanda is always otm

she was not OTM here as much as she was just mad and racist

http://diamandagalas.com/images/letters/diamanda_vs_timbaland_thetakedown-1.gif

shades of marisa tbh

this would be a good one to let go

this would be a good one to let go

― little clouds of citrus spritz as i peel (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 10:40 PM (Yesterday)

^^^^^

Just heard the last of a radio special on Whitney's actual music, with good tracks from her last album. No acrobatics, but steadfast and melodious: "Though I don't know if I'll make it through/I look to you." Anybody familiar with the whole album?

I Look to You is a very good album, it's quite understated in many ways - and her voice didn't just lose a lot in her "later" years (sounds so sad), it also gained something, as did her performance, in its roughness and grit. "I Look to You" is good, and "I Didn't Know My Own Strength" and "Nothin' But Love" are great songs, the latter produced by Danja, but nothing desperately-trying-to-be-modern about it (only "Million Dollar Bill" comes a bit close to that, perhaps). And there's more good tracks, and nothing that's out of place.

some impressive gospel performances at the funeral