Whitney HoustonGreatest Hits Cd 1 Cool Down Full Album Zip
Donnell Simon
Though I was already at Billboard magazine, I was free-lancing like crazy to pay bills and earn extra money to help my family. As a result I also wrote for the very un-prestigious Black Beat, a pulpy teen appeal magazine I could sell short profiles to for $125 a shot. So I pitched them a piece on the young singer/model and got in contact with her publicist.
Following that dinner I started asking around about Bobby and Whitney. Within the industry quite a few people knew they were seeing each other. However, it was also noted, that Bobby had gained an impressive reputation as a lover and was not the most faithful of boyfriends.
Now we moved into that part of the conversation I was most interested in, which was the intersection of music and politics. Hip-hop was ascendant and R&B, both sonically and lyrically, was being transformed by it. The pop crossover strategy of ballads seemed very old fashioned in the wake of Mary J. Blige and other new directions in the music.
A NOTE TO FREE SUBSCRIBERS: I have almost 700 subscribers to this newsletter, yet only a small percentage of you pay for the content. I love having you read my work, but really need more financial support to keep this newsletter going. A monthly subscription is only $7. Please consider being a financial supporter of #THENELSONGEORGEMIXTAPE.
I wrote short record reviews for Playboy magazine throughout the \u201890s, which was a steady check and not very challenging work. But my dream was to conduct one of those epic Playboy interviews. It was an assignment I never landed. My consolation prize was conducting a couple of what they called 20 Questions, which was kind of a mini-Playboy interview. I did one with Chris Rock which, honestly, wasn\u2019t very insightful, since we were good friends and kind of walked through the conversation. However, my 20 Questions with Whitney Houston in 1991 sticks with me, since it turned out it was at a pivot point in her career and life.
My connection to Whitney pre-dates her mammoth-selling 1986 debut album. Her potential stardom was a hot topic of conversation in the clubby world of New York R&B music. In the bars, clubs and recording studios executives, musicians, and tastemakers of the day talked about this gifted teenager from New Jersey usually referred to as \u201CCissy Houston\u2019s daughter.\u201D
Cissy, while never a solo star, sang lead in a stellar vocal trio, the Sweet Inspirations. She was a respected veteran of the gospel and soul worlds, she\u2019d sung background for both Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley. Not only was Cissy known as a fine singer, but her cousin was the pop/soul diva Dionne Warwick. So her daughter definitely had a serious pedigree. Moreover this teenager was tall, thin and beautiful and, in fact, had already been making money as a model in New York.
The first time I heard Whitney\u2019s voice was in 1982 when she was 19 years old. She sang a ballad called \u201CMemories\u201D for a New York art-funk band called Material, which was a critics\u2019 darling though they never sold very many records. It\u2019s an odd, arty song that juxtaposed her vocals with the saxophone of avant-garde jazzman Archie Shepp. In the first verse Whitney\u2019s youth is apparent as she seems to walk through the song. But by the second verse there\u2019s a strident sensuality to her voice that belies Whitney\u2019s age. In fact there\u2019s a heaviness, a darkness that kicks in when she sings the lines \u201Cyou can\u2019t stay but you can not go\u201D that announces very adult emotion. If Whitney\u2019s young voice was a river it would have been clear and seemingly shallow, but below the surface it had thick, inky layers with a current that got stronger with every stroke.
We met at an office in the West 50s off Eighth Avenue one gray winter afternoon. She was tall, light, pole-lean, with short, close cut hair and with very little makeup. She wore tight jeans, a sweater, and a very mischievous smile. Despite her slight frame Whitney\u2019s speaking voice had the huskiness of a grown woman with a bit of roughness that said I-am-not-innocent. I\u2019d already heard stories that Whitney partied hard, didn\u2019t back down from a confrontation and was, rumor had it, bisexual.
I remember her manner more than the substance of our conversation. The actual article itself is lost to pulp magazine history. What I do recall vividly was her fascination with the Jackson family. Not just Michael, but all the brothers. She seemed obsessed with the idea of this family of music. After all, she\u2019d come from one too. Being young, black and famous was tremendously appealing to her.
If you see Whitney\u2019s official Arista Records signing photo you\u2019ll see the Whitney that I met. She sits with Arista president Clive Davis and Gerry Griffith, the A&R man who signed her. No weave. No gown. No high heel. The natural \u201CNippy,\u201D (her family nickname) belied the glamorous looks she\u2019d soon be known for.
The first time I heard her sing live was at Sweetwaters, a popular black music watering hole on Amsterdam Avenue a few blocks up from Lincoln Center. Unlike most young singers Whitney had excellent pitch and didn\u2019t do much show-offy riffing. Instead her tone was clear and she stayed close to the melody, singing through the song and not around. If young Whitney had been a contestant on The Voice, the judges\u2019 chairs would have swung around in unison.
My initial reaction was that as a recording artist Whitney would be a sleeker, more girlish Aretha Franklin with Diana Ross\u2019s crossover good looks. But the \u201880s weren\u2019t the \u201860s. For Davis and Griffith the surest way for a black singer to reach the pop charts in that era was with a melodic mid-tempo song or a big pop ballad, a formula defined by Quincy Jones\u2019 Grammy award-winning \u2018The Dude\u2019 (\u201C100 Ways,\u201D \u201CJust Once\u201D) and Lionel Richie\u2019s string of ballad hits with the Commodores and as a solo artist.
Everyone who was anyone in the world of pop music was trying to submit songs for Whitney\u2019s album. One of them was a New York-based producer/singer/songwriter named Kashif, who was at the cutting of edge of black music and technology. Aside from the usual 808 drum machine and electronic keyboards that had become the norm, Kashif employed a Fair Light computer with which he was able to sample voices and sounds in ways more sophisticated and less obvious than what was happening in hip-hop at the time.
Aside from being a hit-maker, Kashif was part of a sparkling crew of talent under the management of Hush Productions, a company run by a slick operator named Charles Huggins. Under his Hush umbrella Huggins handled the career crooner Freddie Jackson, belter Melba Moore (who was Huggins\u2019s wife), producer/writer Paul Laurence Jones and songwriter La Forest \u2018La La\u2019 Cope. Aside from his production company Huggins owned a three-story structure on 58th Street just off Broadway that housed his offices as well as a recording studio, making Huggins one of the few black men to control any midtown Manhattan real estate.
Because of Huggins\u2019 stable Hush Productions was a natural place for Arista to look for music to showcase Whitney. Along with La La, Kashif created \u201CYou Give Good Love,\u2019 a mid-tempo ballad that opens with glistening keyboards and surrounds Whitney\u2019s warm young voice with a quietly sensual rhythm. The arrangement was calculated to touch on the texture of contemporary R&B, but with a paint-within-the-lines vocal that showcased the beauty of Whitney\u2019s voice, though not its full power.
The first time I saw Whitney, the newly packaged pop diva ,was at the same Bottom Line cabaret where I\u2019d first seen Prince a few years before. \u201CYou Give Good Love\u201D was out and rising and I\u2019d heard an advance of the album, which I\u2019d found disappointingly soft and bland. The tomboy I\u2019d met a few years ago was wrapped (or trapped) in easy-to-digest ballads and perky post-disco dance tracks. I particularly disliked \u201CThe Greatest Love of All,\u201D which had been a minor hit for George Benson in 1977 and, for me, was a self-satisfied anthem for the kind of self-love sloganeering I loathed.
Arista\u2019s very calculating song selection (with \u201CGreatest Love\u201D the primary example) felt to me like a betrayal of Whitney\u2019s gift. This young woman was the heiress to the great tradition of the church-nurtured, gospel-trained, soul diva. It had always been these voices that drove the R&B-based culture I was raised on. For the great soul divas a song\u2019s melody was a guide, not a road map. After the first two verses (or sometimes earlier) they detonated songs with righteous secular fire.
In the mid-\u201880s onward many popular black singers sang between the lines or floated around them. But there was very little phlegm, spit or dangerous curves in the vocals. Part of the change was technological. Vocals became increasingly processed and perfect. The breaths that were typically heard in earlier eras were now removed electronically, so that newer recordings had an artificial precision more soothing than stirring. While the 1980s b-boys were looking for the perfect beat, aspiring singers of the period were literally breathless.
I may have had nostalgia for the sounds of my childhood but Whitney, who knew firsthand the commercial limitations placed upon her soul singing mother and her peers, had become the purveyor of songs designed to satisfy mall shoppers and suburban commuters. It was a strategy to overcome the sound (and racial) barriers that had held back so many, especially since Top 40 radio had become a format where all the rough edges \u2013 be it rock, country or soul \u2013 were sawed off.
7fc3f7cf58