Its February 2012 and Whitney Houston has died. It's a popular fad for the contrarian set to be vocal about their disinterest or happiness. I assume its mostly affected; I say that, I'm accused of being an ******* and met with graphs and chart about how its perfectly reasonable to feel that way.
The internet takes another chunk of civilities face to an early grave.
If you didn't see it on MB (and I didn't check to see if it happened) you probably saw it somewhere else or around the office place. its not unreasonable, Newton's Law of Motion says "o every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction." This is no different.
But if there was something to be gained from a senseless and early death, or at least something for us to chew on at the musical trough its at least these two things: The existence of the genre "Adult Contemporary", and American Society's need to dig up the past to show homage when its, at best, niceties in the wake of a passing, and at worst, the Grammys trying to make a buck.
But first things first. Adult contemporary. Ostensibly there to fill the dead silence of department stores and to drown out the screams of dental patients to the waiting and terrified patients in the lobby. If this were Luther Vandross I wouldn't have thought twice about it. But only the aforementioned contrarian set would posit that Houston didn't have talent. The woman was called "the perfect instrument" and while she isn't my cup of tea, and she's inspired to many rehashed, half-assed imitators on the Idol shows, theres no denying she could have done nearly anything with those vocal chords.
When writing on a music form on the internet, it most likely takes a Jesuits discipline to remember there needs to be a balance to what rattle through out headphones to make the world go 'round. So calling a spade a spade, Houston's work was certainly craft, and whether or not there was passion is for you to decide. It was certainly conditioned ("ok this track needs to be passionate") but it isn't disqualifying. And if anything it harkens back to a time when music was created more like films than the garage-born DIY stuff we see today. Houston's music was "American Graffiti" while many of what would follow her reign at the top sends to be the sonic equivelent of a soap box racer. Tin Pan Alley was written by Writers, played by Performers, and sang by Singers. Why is this different than Houston and why do we consider it less?
If there is any performance that settled the argument it was her Super Bowl performance of the Star-Spangled Banner. A song crafted with such a ridiculous arrangement (vocally) one might be on to something to refer to it as the vocal equivelent of the Rach 3 (Rachmaninov Piano Concerto 3).
No jingoism intended. The song happens to be very difficult to sing correctly, and as an American, we've been punished by countless no-talent hacks botching the god damn thing so badly they ought to be tried for treason. But I digress.
Its a curious thing to say, 50 years on, that what we appreciate in the here and now (the 30's) is more valued than what we've seen since the Studio's of the 70's mastered shlock. Theres some digging done on this issue that requires more time and interest than some mad jackle on a throw away blog of rambles and grumbles.
and further more, is it this too-little too-late mentality that requires that we go to the grave after ever artist dies and dig up some deep respect we have for them? As one friend posted on his Facebook "Who intentionally listened to Whitney Houston in the past 12 months?" if we're being honest with ourselves, it was probably less than 1% of the American populous.
So why the Grammy play-up? Is it just the human condition of wanting what we've lost? Is it a postmortem concession for an industry that abandons as quickly as it propels? Houston's is a genre that no longer carries water. While it may have been the Resurrection of Tin Pan Alley (or 2.0 as it were), it didn't survive the 80's. It had something of a revival in the late 1990's with a coffee house make-over. But by then the game had changed, and the nation had clearly changed. Houston was good, but in the newest incarnation she wouldn't be taken seriously.
Talent had gone, surplus to requirement. Good players were not needed to play boring chords on an acoustic guitar. Was what we're seeing sweep across the landscape a human lament for a genre that, having left its own for dead, had played by the rules so well, did everything right, and were still abandoned by a disinterested public?
The question that should remain is not about Whitney Houston but about music in general. Is there a purpose in sticking within the western scales and digestible time signatures? Has music moved well beyond craft in an age where I can get 12,000 views singing off-key versions of Foreigner songs into my webcam.
If Whitney is to be mourned, then let her be the figure-head of craft. Let her not represent a genre lost to time and filled to the gills by throw-away, over produced garbage. Instead let her be a symbol for everyone who worked their figures to the bone to be a session musician. Is there no room for them any longer?
Is there No Country for Old Men who play the saxophone any more?
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