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You ain’t got one damn song that can make me break down and cry

-David Bowie

Whitney Houston was always the most problematic of performers. During a 2010 performance in Dublin, Ireland, Houston warbled like a linebacker and at times appeared close to wandering off the stage. Her defense mechanism during that abysmal tour, one marked by cancellations, booing crowds and audience walk outs, was to say over and over how much she loved the city she was in. It was sad, and worse, because Houston seemed like a fundamentally decent person, it was heartbreaking and cruel.

The savage response of concert goers, eviscerating Whitney as a performer no longer capable of “entertaining a dead rat”, absolved them of stupidity. Whitney was a drug addict and an alcoholic. The happiest photo I’ve ever seen of Whitney has her cradling syringes, literally instances away from getting the high she craved.

She was burdened by the most mediocre of catalogues, low lighted, of course, by the execrable “I Will Always Love You”, a song that in later years compelled a junkie to attempt the soulless vocal gymnastics of her youth.

You know the roll call of awards; 30 Billboard Music Awards, 22 American Music Awards, etc, etc. Enthusiasm for her streak of seven consecutive number one singles must be tempered by a reflection on those songs; Saving All My Love For You, How Will I Know, Greatest Love of All, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, Didn’t We Almost Have It All, So Emotional and Where Do Broken Hearts Go. Not a classic or even important song in the lot.

Whitney was product, a creation of MTV at a time when the station was facing savage criticism for the lack of minority performers in “high rotation”. The solution was a singer with a personality and profile created to be bland and inoffensive. At the Soul Train Music awards in 1989 Whitney was jeered and laughed at by African American performers. Is it a coincidence that she took that very occasion to hook up with Bobby Brown, a miserable psychopath but one that could muster her some street cred with her contemporaries?

Houston spent her teens as a model, and that profession would have been a satisfying solution for a beautiful woman, with a great voice, who was nonetheless a cauldron of the superficial and the vacuous. The machination of the business rendered an artificial cover, one for the “humanitarian” Whitney, the “diva” Whitney, the “ultra-talented” Whitney, all devices used to create an image and pump sales.

At the core was a human being, one who was clearly overwhelmed by the demands placed on her slight abilities. She was given a Razzie for worst performance in the ultimate dreck film, The Bodyguard, and at that point she began a romance with cocaine and its trampy sibling crack.

Even as she found happiness in her addictions, the hypocritical pulsations of 21^st century America demanded she repent, that she “clean herself up”, that she debase herself with the sickening Oprah.

She should have been left alone.

With album sales at 170 million, and royalties, Whitney should have been left to wander into the washroom of her mansion, close the door, and live life as she pleased. Our burdens, and expectations, did not square with the choices of the woman. She should have been left to live life as she pleased, a desolate old skeleton comforted by her pipe and the memory of her vanilla warbles…

RIP