WHITNEY HOUSTON – "I Will Always Love You"

The last single by a solo female artist to spend ten weeks at number one was “Secret Love” by Doris Day in 1954, on the surface a striking prairie torch ballad, with its cheery horses’ hooves, expressing the long-overdue liberation of a passion which for societal reasons has hitherto had to be hidden. The subtexts did not take long to crop up, not least in Calamity Jane itself; witness the extended scene where Jane and Katie meticulously and happily set up house in their own cabin – they are the perfect couple and not noticeably in need of men; Howard Keel’s is therefore a somewhat Subdued Bill Hickok, doing his amiable macho best to win Jane over but looking marooned, surplus to requirements. At no point in the picture are we lent a fig leaf of belief that the two are meant to be together.

Kevin Costner’s bodyguard likewise seems to be suspicious of love, and especially the physical variety, which doesn’t lend The Bodyguard much virtue as a credible film of romance-under-duress (Steve McQueen, for whom the picture was originally intended fifteen years before it was made, would have cheerfully thrown off all the jobsworth business as soon as he was able). But then he himself doesn’t have much purpose in the film since Whitney is so tangibly in love with herself, as well as betraying a profound fear of her self-love every second she is on screen.

“I Will Always Love You” was recorded twice by Dolly Parton in her small, semi-helpless, semi-weeping voice; the first, in 1974, was said to have been inspired by her personal and professional split from Porter Wagoner – she trembles but doesn’t break down. But in her 1980 re-recording she may have had Burt Reynolds in mind; though a highly dubious inspirer of tears, Parton descends into grievous sobs. Houston would never have allowed that to penetrate her steel flesh. She had originally wanted to do “What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted” but Paul Young had recently murdered that for the soundtrack of Fried Green Tomatoes, and was extremely reluctant to tackle a “country song” but was finally persuaded by producer/arranger David Foster to try to turn it into a soul ballad, and not necessarily a very deep one.

The opening verse is famously song quietly, and entirely unaccompanied, and sounds exactly as if she is singing only to herself, or for herself, practising her scales in a silent corner of an empty stage, but her will of iron prevents any emotional access for the outsider to her performance; there is, for instance, nothing of the grievous desolation when George Russell’s sextet suddenly break off their variations on “You Are My Sunshine” to allow Sheila Jordan to sing the first verse of the song straight, very slowly, and infinitely alone.

The music is then gently ushered in, and is functional; Foster keeps his distance, though the sax should probably have been faded out. Houston, for her part, retains her countenance and sings the spoken Parton part with immaculate technique and grossly concealed emotions, exploding only on the “joy” of “I wish you joy,” before the final extended chorus, where her vibrati and control become too pronounced for comfort, barely hiding a razorblade of abysmal pain and hurt, as though her larynx is the only thing holding her up, like a detached compass needle supporting a tower block. But still she will not let us, or anyone else, in.

The record was immodestly successful; in America it bested “End Of The Road”‘s chart-topping run by an extra fourteenth week, in Britain it was by some distance 1992’s best-selling single, number one for ten straight weeks, extending throughout Christmas and encompassing all of January 1993. It has also become one of the most requested songs to be played at funerals in this country, and in this respect it shares an attendant irony with “My Way”; just as the latter is aired to commemorate the lives of people who largely had zero control over what they had to do to earn a living, so Whitney’s “I Will Always Love You” is a facsimile of grief and undying affection, but essentially used as a smokescreen, to keep the straight public face, to hide the screams, to maintain wholly unnecessary order. As for the singer herself, she remained popular and in the charts throughout the remainder of the nineties, though not again to this degree, and the song may in time be seen as a horribly acute premonition of what would happen to her after the nineties, Whitney saying goodbye to herself, and why do I ultimately think that the performance could have been used with equal power to soundtrack the final, living deaths in Requiem For A Dream, a film which is all about impatience to be “free”?

Listening to this again recently, I was surprised at the sensitivity of the performance of the opening lines and began to wonder why I had become so tired of this at the time. The subsequent verses and choruses, with the vocals and arrangements turned up to 11, reminded me what made it so difficult to love.

Depending on whose charts you believe, Doris day spent a record 8 weeks at number one. IWALY was touted as having broken this record by a female soloist.

personally I think Dollys version is how it should be sung.

Pub quiz time: this song was originally written for inclusion in a musical called “The nicest little whorehouse in Texas”

I’ll come back to this later – and welcome back Tom! – but first a factoid that could well be used in a pub quiz: this is the only instance of a Christmas UK number one that was still at the top at the start of the following February. “Mull of Kintyre” shares this distinction according to official chart dates, but the chart in which it was deposed by Althea and Donna was announced on 31 January 1978.

will find and post koganbot’s “why music sucks” review of this when i get home (or find koganbot and getr him to post): i have warmed to this over the years, since realising my initial coldness was more to do with kevin costner than whitney 🙂

so 10 obv: it’s a thing

The backing track really is undistinguished. I mean, I think of this song as lyrically in the same ‘relationship is over, let’s make the best of it’ ballpark of that Diana Ross song Remember Me that turned up (new to me) in the ‘Which decade is the best?’ series a few months ago. But Ross is backed by a west coast version of the funk brothers (I’m guessing), at any rate by a band with a real groove and feel, and that gives Ross’s vocal something to bed into, and makes for a really pleasurable record. Whitney by way of contrast is backed by robots (and not in a good way) – there’s absolutely nothing to take pleasure in apart from her vocals. Dolly Parton’s backing track (not sure which version I have) is *much* better and her record is much more musically balanced and flat out musical than Whitney’s as a result. (My alphabetical itunes has just tripped over into Chet Baker’s instrumental ‘I wish you love’ and instinctively I want to say ‘Hey Whitney, sing with these guys!’)

Anyhow, I do find that almost none of this seems to matter that much when you have the video in front of you – effectively the visuals end up providing most of the accompaniment to the voice rather than the backing. She belts, we watch, and there’s an end of it. And perhaps that’s the right calculation for a movie song in an MTV world.

But as a pure record I can’t go for this: ‘who is this woman and why is she shouting at me?’ remains my unelidable response (particularly at the point of the key-change). Agree with Tom:
5

Ah, Play-Doh. Part of being an infant in the sixties. It’s the smell of the stuff I remember most fondly. I certainly didn’t squeeze it to relieve stress at that age (which today’s toddlers would probably be encouraged to do) but could have used it for that purpose when my creativity caused me to go a bit bonkers as a teen in the mid seventies.

Happy Days!

A friend of mine shrugged this record off at the time (before it even hit number one) with the comment: “She sings as if she’s overcompensating for a speech impediment on this single”. As harsh a comment as that is – both to Whitney and to people with speech impediments – it’s an idea I’ve not been able to shake since. The over-annunciation on the track is akin to an English person on holiday in Spain loudly and slowly trying to get a waiter to understand what his or her problem is, an image that managed to leave me completely unable to take the damn song seriously.

Also, I used to have a neighbour who would turn this up full blast every time her boyfriend walked out on her. Which was at least twice a week (that I noticed).

I really need to go back and listen to this properly, it’s been awhile. I might be a bit more charitable to it now there’s been a lot of water under the bridge, and it has been a hell of a long time since I last heard it.

Okay, I thought, I’ll pretend I didn’t live through the Christmas of 1992 (when this spent 10 weeks at the top in Australia, too) and give this another shot. And I didn’t mind the first minute and a half. But then she started to crank it up, and I started hitting the volume-down button on my office computer; and up, and up, and down, and down, until I was searching for a half-a-blob setting that wasn’t there.

6 or 7 for the first 1:30, half a blob for the rest. 2 overall.

The Bodyguard Soundtrack is probably a rarity in modern times in that both the film and soundtrack were a success. It spawned 7 singles in total 5 by Whitney,the dodgy Bill Withers cover and Lisa Stansfield’s effort. Aged 14 at the time of course I hated it, now I can just about tolerate the first 2 minutes which reading some the previous comments seems to be the going rate.

Mark whistled me here, so this was my Radio On review:

Whitney Houston “I Will Always Love You”: I talked in Radio On #2 about her “animal competence,” but really there’s no animal in it, it’s more like a jet engine preening and showing its parts. Which can be powerful enough. She kind of loses control about two-thirds of the way through this song, however — it’s the section in the video where the camera moves in close and she smiles bright and meaninglessly and opens her mouth and lets loose while the camera pulls back again and you see her now sitting in a chair in the snow (!) wearing nothing but a thin suit jacket. And from here on she’s just blaring away, trying to power all the windmills in Holland, and the song disappears in the whoosh. But before that, it’s undeniable. Really, this song is now a feature of the world’s topography, and there’s nothing to do but accept it. (8.5)

One of the increasingly rare number ones I can actually not only remember, but remember being number one. For some reason I associate it with a very draughty Richmond station that December, and losing a shoe under the Windsor-bound train I was trying to board. There was a slight delay to the train while a nice man retrieved it for me.

Not only do I find the memory embarrassing, but the song too. I much prefer Dolly’s honest sentimentality to Whitney’s unsubtle and ultimately soulless vocal gymnastics.

Absolutely loathed this at the time and still do for reasons which have been well covered upthread. Kudos to Lex for a stout defence though.

@ Lex #16 & 30 – I wouldn’t have thought there was anything remotely admirable in the idea of Whitney twisting this tender, bittersweet love song into a “confrontational”, strident “fuck you” to her ex…but there you go. There’s absolutely nothing in the lyrics that lends itself to her (your?) interpretation of the song as a defiant “I Will Survive”-type belter – so if that’s actually what she intended, it just renders her version an even worse travesty. Btw, methinks you may have confused emotion with emoting.

Like Lex, I absolutely love this one. I wanted to dance to it at my wedding, but my wife – a Dolly Parton fan – demurred. It made sense, really, because it is too powerful to be easily contained in a public ritual.

An operatic aria is a good reference point, but what I think of most when I hear it is John Coltrane: the combination of breathtaking power and perfect control. The way Houston uses melisma to play around with the tune reminds me of his harmonic and melodic exploration; she does for Parton what he does for Julie Andrews on ‘My Favorite Things’. (Both techniques share roots in Gospel, of course.)

The objections are similar, too: Tom’s accusation that she is “bullying” reminds me of Philip Larkin’s complaint about Coltrane’s “god-bothering”. For me, though, the parallels are wholly positive. I get the same sense of a rigorous musical intelligence cutting loose, to create something that is lyrical, expressive, liberated, heart-rending and beautiful. It is no wonder that the feeble, bland, session sax sounds horrible set against her sky-splitting voice.

Or, to pick up on another suggestion, if melisma is the vocal equivalent of the overblown guitar solo, then Mariah Carey is Joe Satriani and Christina Aguilera is Eddie Van Halen, but Houston is Jimi Hendrix.

If you don’t believe me, try this performance; probably my favourite ever on TV. It’s from the World Music Awards: a weird affair in Monaco, apparently hosted by a spectacularly embarrassed-looking Prince Albert. Houston, though, is ON FIRE: soaring above the black tied awkwardness of the event. I defy anyone to watch this and tell me there’s no real feeling there:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSBNi8PCb7Q

There’s too much lazy non-thinking in these comments, too much reliance on meaning-stripped ciphers, if indeed “emotion,” “fake sincerity”/”insincere,” “real feeling” and “soulless” ever meant anything other than easy steps to “authority” on the part of frustrated mid-eighties music press soulboys – other, that is, than yet more smokescreens, push-button catharsis. I’d like to see what Lex senses in it but to me the performance remains all about hiding (or in hiding) and while that in itself doesn’t encourage regular revisits to the record it suggests a more complex emotional maze at work; what is Whitney getting out of this song, how big a role does this performance play in directing where she’s going to go with her music and her life, and how greatly are we suckered in/entranced/mummified by what she presents to us, beyond consideration of the film or Dolly Parton or…well, listen in tandem with the 1982 Whitney, singing Hugh Hopper’s “Memories” on Material’s One Down, with Shepp on tenor; something was ALWAYS there.

yeah but there you go again, pushing your buttons as though emotion were a vending machine.

“overblown” is maybe not the best word to use in this context.

yes but why?

Nonsense. This is vulnerability hidden under a ribbon of steel. Damned if you’re gonna see me cry. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.

Every time I think Houston’s done I replay my badly-in-need-of-a-remaster copy of “Memories.” How alert, alive, and aware of paradox she sounds!

Can we haz Popular ’92?

“Beyonce is Bono to Houston’s Ian Curtis, you might say”

I might not