Among Broadway’s young theater gypsies, Whitney Houston’s 1994 performance at the American Music Awards has been circulating as a unique theatrical tribute. Houston never appeared in a Broadway show, but her AMA medley of “I Loves You Porgy” and “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going”—preserved in a 10-minute YouTube clip—connects to the current Porgy and Bess revival and speaks to the deepest desires of Broadway hopefuls. The video’s distribution confirms Houston’s standing as perhaps the most significant—certainly the most influential—singer of the past quarter century.
I started to write “pop” singer but the very nature of Houston’s art automatically implies popularity—among listeners as well as wannabe singers. Hers was an art that functioned primarily as widely accepted communication. The Broadway/YouTube exchange is absolutely fitting since Houston’s AMA performance idealizes the popular communication that Broadway itself has lacked in the recent decades that it has fallen from popularity to become a subculture. In that amazing YouTube samizdat, Houston unearths “I Loves You Porgy” and links it to the Dreamgirls anthem to show her command of musical legacy. It was also a quintessential act of cultural continuity.
Houston’s rendition implicitly paid tribute to the legendary songstresses who essayed the Gershwin tune (from Billie Holiday to Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone), as well as to Jennifer Holliday, whose signature song became the litmus test for R&B singers during the 1980s when Houston was embarking on her own recording career. (She doesn‘t personalize “Porgy” as Billie Holiday so chillingly did; Houston had a different personal story to convey—which can be heard on I Look to You, her overlooked last album.) In 1994, Houston essayed those landmark songs after her chart-topping album sales and the multimedia breakthrough occasioned by the movie The Bodyguard to announce her personal triumph.
If “triumph” sounds cold and egotistic, the warmth and wonder of the AMA performance corrects the meaning. Houston’s outsize talent and remarkable control of her instrument are on display, but this is no mere technical exercise, it communicates genuine pop joy. Houston celebrates the moment of her mass popularity by singing songs that have had deep meaning for generations of music lovers and lovers of female singers who have vanquished personal adversity through the magnificence of song.
To view a video of And I’m Telling You I Have Nothing, please click here.
In the clip there’s a quick cut to Houston’s husband Bobby Brown smiling with professional admiration and personal gratitude. This is how pop stardom is supposed to work. Today’s Broadway gypsies admire it because it is rare to behold. Houston embraces the language of show tunes as an expansion of her pop records territory and another mountain scaled. This performance is the apotheosis of what her career has meant. She interweaves jazz/gospel melisma, showbiz finesse and operatic power to represent the pinnacle of her endeavors. She segues from the classics into her then-new single “I Have Nothing (If I Don’t Have You)”—star-to-fan code that every diva-follower understands.
The moment not only expresses the sheer joy of singing but also contains political celebration. Houston’s success was as much an emblem of the Reagan revolution as the dissenting voice of hip-hop but expressed the cultural flip side—the positive possibility of social advance. In videos like “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” Houston in her curly blonde wig really was the All-American Girl. If it seemed at the time that Houston might neglect soul-music’s legacy by being hyped as a bleached, MOR pop object (sometimes singing drivel, but not always), her climb nonetheless represented social advancement whose terms were yet unconfirmed—and are constantly renegotiated by black crossover artists. (I remember overhearing two young white men going through the Whitney Houston section at a record store, gawking at her album covers and exclaiming “I would kill to fuck her!”—a crude public statement of broken-down barriers.)
Houston’s National Anthem recital at the 1991 Super Bowl was perhaps the definitive performance of that political hymn, proclaiming at the time of Desert Storm a forceful, soaring belief in American potential. She was proof of it herself. That’s part of what makes Houston’s death particularly disturbing: Her great voice—an aural beacon—has been dimmed. Noting her fall isn’t half as devastating as recalling the ascension, prominence, acceptance and promise that she epitomized and that her tunefulness and smile and slinky womanly figure once made glorious.
That AMA/YouTube clip shows Houston improvising her new hit song as only a great artist could; she takes its slickly structured climax then reconstructs it several times. Teasing the effect, testing herself, showing off what’s possible and then delivering…well, class. That unsettling term of social categorization that is frequently used to reward proper behavior is also part of Houston’s achievement. Yet, being a pop star, she had to keep touch with the wide audience she dreamed of pleasing. Even that magisterial medley was an act of noblesse oblige that brought a tuxedoed and gowned awards show audience back to the call-and-response of the congregational church. This common touch—sending out great feelings and having them reciprocated—is why Broadway gypsies are watching the performance and trading it among friends. They would kill to repeat the Whitney Houston dream.
Follow Armond White on Twitter @3xchair.
