#18 - I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) - Whitney Houston

'I Wanna Dance with Somebody' is now safely embedded in the pantheon of great songs: a 2023 Billboard poll named it the greatest pop song of all time, and it continues to be an ever-present on pop radio and wedding playlists. When it was first released, however, as the lead single from Whitney Houston's second album, it prompted a widespread critical backlash. Rolling Stone found it 'ridiculously safe' and the novelist Trey Ellis called it 'lifeless'. This would culminate in the notorious moment at the 1989 Soul Train awards when Houston was audibly booed by the live TV audience. What was behind this controversy and what does it tell us about freedom, a concept which seemed to attach itself to Houston throughout her career, which people heard in her singing and expected her to represent?

All the songs discussed in this episode, including the original recording of 'I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)' can be heard here. If you've enjoyed it, please leave a review on Apple podcasts; thank you.

With very special thanks to Paul Wierdak, the producer of this episode. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Secret Life of Songs, a podcast on pop songs and what they mean to us with me, Anthony, a musician who writes and performs under the name sky coloured. On January 27th, 1991, at the annual culmination of the American Football season, Super Bowl 25, Whitney Houston stood, apparently calmly, at a specially-constructed podium in the centre of Tampa Stadium, dressed in a white tracksuit. She waved to the crowd as her name was called by the announcer, and, as the orchestra behind her began to play, bowed her head, in respect, perhaps, or simply to gather herself, took a breath, raised her hand to the microphone, and began to sing. Her performance of The Star-Spangled Banner is brilliantly paced: she starts powerfully but soberly, in the traditional manner of a national anthem; only the bend on the word ‘light’ at the end of the second line gives a hint of her personal vocal style. She abruptly switches into the lightness of her head voice on the lyric detailing the ‘broad stripes and bright stars’ of the flag, which gives her room to build to a bravura finish, launching, with what seems like effortless ease but is in fact the product of a lifetime’s intensive training, into a crescendo of successive belted notes, perfectly cresting at the closing couplet, ‘O'er the land of the free/And the home of the brave?’ Cinque Henderson, in a 2016 piece for The New Yorker, wrote: ‘the performance remains as influential a moment in television history as Elvis on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” … Its hold on us … can be attributed, ultimately, to a single powerful effect: the startlingly beautiful sound Houston makes when she sings the word “free.”’ Henderson then gives an exhaustive account of what she does on that word; she adds, to the highest note of the anthem, an extra two-note flourish which leaps even higher. What Houston does on the word ‘free’ is a sort of word-painting: the daring spontaneity of the embellishment, matched with her consummate dexterity, embodies the sense of the word she’s singing, and we feel freer in the presence of that voiced freedom; her recent biographer, Gerrick Kennedy, describes discovering her music as a shy teenager, and feeling an urge to dance with it: 'I can clearly see my younger self bouncing around and doing the same little two-step Whitney does and giving my body permission to move without fear of judgement or ridicule. In those moments, I felt so free.' 

That preternaturally lithe, fluid vocal style Houston commanded is displayed in full in ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’: the flip into her head voice on the word ‘heat’ in the chorus already had the mark of a vocal signature: part of what's so compelling about listening to her sing is the vicarious sense of freedom it gives us; we often speak of a voice ‘soaring’ but it rarely feels as apt as it does with Houston, whose voice at its finest gives a sense of flight, of emancipation from earthly constraints. I’m fascinated by that feeling, and want to know what's really meant by the frequent invocations of freedom prompted by the figure of Whitney Houston? As we’ll see, the meaning of freedom had been fiercely contested in the decades leading up to her period of prominence. Pulling apart the different, often clashing notions of freedom which resonate through her life and work will require looking at the world which shaped her, one defined profoundly by the history of American unfreedom and the persistence of white supremacy. In 1992, the year of her greatest pre-eminence in popular culture, which included the release of her film debut, The Bodyguard, and the bestselling soundtrack she made for it, the novelist Toni Morrison published a set of essays, Playing in the Dark, in which she introduced her concept of ‘American Africanism’, explaining that ‘a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to [canonical American writers’] sense of Americanness’, going on to say that Black figures in American literature ‘have provide[d] a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom’. Houston spent most of her life, and especially the early part of her music career, as just this sort of figure: one onto whom others foisted powerful, contradictory hopes and dreams, one in whom warring versions of the true nature of freedom’s blessings would play out, and who would inevitably, and unsustainably, come to embody an irreconcilable tension between these contradictory, still-unresolved conceptions of what it means to be free.

* * *

Ronald Reagan, the incumbent American president during Houston’s initial, explosive rise to fame, loved freedom. As the historian Eric Foner writes, ‘in his public appearances and state papers, Reagan used the word more often than any president before or since’. Reagan’s contribution to the rhetoric of the Cold War was to position America as the ‘shining city on a hill’, surrounded on all sides by the darkness of tyranny, asserting in a 1983 speech on foreign policy, to take one of innumerable examples, that, ‘in this century, America has kept alight the torch of freedom … not just for ourselves but for millions of others around the world’. What was masked in speeches like this, however, was just how contentious the notion of freedom had been in recent American history, and, indeed, how the particular definition which Reagan held to was only one of a number of competing conceptions of freedom and a relatively young, fledgling one at that. It had developed in the 1940s and 50s, when political and economic thinkers clashed fiercely on how the notion of freedom should be understood.

Freedom, as Reagan understood it, was defined principally in terms of the absence of state interference. Often referred to as ‘negative’ freedom, after Isaiah Berlin’s definition in his essay, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, it was born in the counterrevolutionary reaction to the French Revolution, and was seen as a mostly fringe understanding of freedom by most thinkers until the twentieth century, when, as the historian Annelien de Dijn writes, ‘state intervention … necessarily [as] an infringement on individual liberty’, which was held to be ‘the very essence of Western civilization’.

A key figure in this development was the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek who, concerned with the implications of the 1942 Beveridge Report, wrote The Road to Serfdom. He argued that the report’s recommendation to expand National Insurance and establish a National Health Service was tantamount to a 'centralized', planned economy, and that without 'economic freedom', 'personal and political freedom' was impossible. If governments did not let what he called the 'impersonal and anonymous mechanism of the market' take its natural course, then, inevitably, an increasingly coercive state would result, undermining personal freedom and democracy. Eventually - pulling no punches here - such a development would lead to totalitarian rule by governments and for the people, as per his title, a form of modern serfdom.

Hayek's book helped popularise the identification of freedom with economic freedom or ‘free enterprise’. When The Road to Serfdom was published in the US by Reader's Digest in 1945 it sold over a million copies; Hayek's lecture tour there later that year was reportedly 'a phenomenon'. In 1941, President Roosevelt had included 'Freedom from Want' in his famous 'Four Freedoms' speech, arguing that social security and the guarantee of adequate health care were integral to a properly democratic society but by 1947, his successor, Harry Truman, had narrowed the list to three, replacing the freedoms from Want and Fear with the singular 'freedom of enterprise'. Sensing the growing orthodoxy around this conception of freedom, there were notable dissenters, including the anthropologist Karl Polanyi who, with striking prescience of what would happen when Hayek's directives were eventually put into practice, wrote in 1944 that ‘[this idea of freedom] … degenerates into a mere advocacy of free enterprise [which means] the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people.'

And yet, even as a consensus was building around the notion that freedom meant nothing more than deregulation and the restriction of the welfare state, a very different movement was underway which also held freedom as its sovereign principle. The phrase seen most frequently on the placards of protesters on civil rights marches was 'Freedom Now!', or often simply 'Freedom'. Martin Luther King's first book was titled Strive to Freedom, and his most famous speech ended with a quotation from an old spiritual: 'Free at last! Free at last! Praise God almighty we are free at last!' The concept of freedom invoked by civil rights activists in the 1950s and 60s had its roots in the campaign to abolish slavery, the defining form of unfreedom, a link King himself made in his speech at the March on Washington, citing Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, and making the case that although a century had passed since that epochal statement, African Americans were still ‘not free'. Eric Foner has written about how freedom, in the context of the civil rights movement, bore little resemblance to the narrow, 'negative' form of liberty advocated by Berlin and others; it 'meant', he writes, 'equality, power, recognition, rights, opportunities. It required eradicating a multitude of historic wrongs - segregation, disenfranchisement, exclusion from public facilities, confinement to low-wage menial jobs, harassment by the police, and the ever present threat of extralegal violence'. Especially towards the end of his life, King focussed his campaigning efforts on eradicating poverty, naming it one of the three evils of society, along with racism and militarism, and arguing that unless Black poverty was alleviated, the gains made by the movement would prove empty, quoting Frederick Douglass's verdict on the failures of Reconstruction: that the freedom gained following the end of slavery was 'freedom to hunger ... freedom without roofs to cover their heads ... freedom without bread to eat, without land to cultivate.'

King was making these remarks in the summer of 1967, against a backdrop of urban unrest, in which communities across the country had seen fierce protests against pervasive discriminatory employment and law enforcement policies, as well as the living conditions in what was then universally referred to as the ghettos of American cities. Some of the most violent exchanges between Black protestors and police were seen in Newark, New Jersey, from which images of National Guard tanks patrolling city streets were broadcast in national media. Whitney Houston, who was four at the time, later recalled hearing gunshots in the streets, and being made to hide under the family dining table during the worst of the violence, which would leave at least 26 dead. Her father, who was a well-known figure in the local community, serving as an official in the city administration of Newark's first black mayor, moved the family out of Newark after the riots, but the family retained links there: her mother, Cissy Houston, was head of music at New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, where her daughter sang in the junior gospel choir and performed as a solo vocalist for the first time.

The familial links between Houston and important figures in the gospel and soul traditions were made much of in the initial publicity around her. She was a first cousin of Dionne Warwick, god-daughter to Darlene Love and an honorary niece of Aretha Franklin, who her mother sang with professionally and who the young Houston would watch in recording sessions her mother brought her along to. Cissy Houston herself was an important figure in gospel music with a national reputation, although she never made a major breakthrough as a solo artist, and generally had to content herself with an extraordinary list of artists she sang backing vocals for, which, along with Franklin, would include Mahalia Jackson and Elvis Presley. When she recognised her daughter's inclination towards singing, she took it upon herself to train her thoroughly in the techniques and stylistic conventions of gospel music. In her own singing career, she had made a decision to stick loyally to gospel and not, despite pressure from her husband, cross over into secular popular music, to become, in her phrase, a 'backslider', but by the time her daughter was showing interest in singing professionally, she appears to have viewed this as a mistake, and prepared a strategy early on to give Houston the greatest possible chance of mainstream success. The story about Houston's first public performance is now well-known: she was tricked by her mother into covering a gig for her, when Cissy knew influential music business figures would be in the audience. Word spread quickly within the industry about this very young woman with a beaming smile who had inherited the great gospel and soul legacies of the 1950s and 60s and who already boasted a colossal vocal range and virtuosic technique. The acclaimed record executive, Clive Davis, who had resurrected the fortunes of Columbia Records in the 1970s, approached the Houstons after catching wind of the buzz around her, and offered to develop her into the next major pop singing superstar on his own label, Arista. As Houston recounted, in a 1993 interview with Rolling Stone, ‘I went into another room and sat in a chair, and my mother came in after me and said, “You know, this is very difficult, but I’m going to tell you the truth: You should go to where you are going to get the best out of it.” Meaning, let’s say a company offers you a contract, and they’re saying: “Whitney, you can choose the songs. You can do whatever the hell you want to.” As opposed to Arista, with Clive Davis saying: “We’ll give you this amount of money, and we’ll sit down, and as far as the songs you want to do, I will help you. I will say: ‘Whitney, this song has potential, this song doesn’t.’ So my mother was saying … ‘You’re eighteen years old. You need guidance.’ Clive was the person who guided me.’

What Houston is describing here, quite plainly, is her and her family's conscious decision to sacrifice artistic control for a greater chance of commercial success - what Davis called 'potential'. Elsewhere, in a 1990 interview with the magazine Essence, Houston, being questioned on this process of shaping her sound to give it greater commercial appeal, responded by, in the words of the interviewer, 'belt[ing] out a gospel-sounding, gut-busting phrase, then stop[ping]. "That’s nice,” she says. “I love that mess. But does it make a record and does it have worldwide appeal? And what happens after that? Longevity - that’s what it’s all about. If you’re gonna have a long career, there’s a certain way to do it, and I did it that way. I’m not ashamed of it.”’ It's clear, from these snippets of her thinking, that it would be quite wrong, as some did at the time, to characterise Houston as a helpless naif who Clive Davis unscrupulously manipulated to accomplish his own commercial goals. She was quite willing to give and defend the rationale behind the project to make her look and sound like the perfect mainstream pop star. However, when we look at what that process involved, it's clear just how much had to be sacrificed in the service of that goal, and it seems strained to assume that that eighteen-year-old hothoused gospel singer really grasped what she would have to restrict about herself, what freedoms she would be giving up, in the pursuit of what she believed God had put her on earth to do: 'be a singer'.

And so Houston was presented, in a carefully planned series of initial public appearances, in sequined ball gowns, singing Diana Ross covers, placing her squarely in the tradition of respectable, stylish pop chanteuses, comparable to, as Davis saw it, Barbra Streisand, Lena Horne and Houston’s cousin, Dionne Warwick. Her interviews at the time have all the marks of rigorous media training; she’s polite, with a permanent smile, and speaks with an accent bearing no trace of her New Jersey roots. Lighting and makeup were both used to make her skin appear lighter and when she was presented in a white sari in a photo intended for her debut album cover, Davis rejected it, complaining that she looked ‘too ethnic’. Notoriously, Davis did not want anything ‘too black sounding’ on her recordings, sending back an early take of ‘Saving All My Love for You’ for using too many gospel stylings and telling her after one performance not to embellish phrases so they go ‘on and on just aimlessly’; ‘We don’t want a female James Brown’, Davis is supposed to have said. Implausibly, Davis has recently maintained he was unaware of the racial element of Houston’s PR strategy. As her biographer Gerrick Kennedy points out, Davis had ‘launched enough artists to understand the mechanics of pop radio and what an artist needed to do to cut through. Claiming naivete around Whitney’s Blackness and how that impacted the approach that was taken with her early records is one of the many revisionist liberties Clive has taken with how he framed his role in Whitney’s life and career’. Such strategies were commonplace in the music industry; Berry Gordy instructed singers on the Motown label to rein in elaborate melismas as he worried white listeners would struggle to sing along with them, and, rising to fame in the wake of Houston’s success, Mariah Carey would still report that the head of her label, Tommy Mottola, erased similar, soulful vocal embellishments from her records to ensure ‘crossover success’. The very ubiquity of this hemming-in of Blackness in music would have meant that much of it went unstated, or functioned as a set of euphemisms, so an individual might appear innocent - indeed might believe themselves to be innocent - of the racist implications of what they were suggesting.

So it’s worth reflecting on the impact this strategy might have had on Houston herself, and consider what she was being told, constantly, in both subtle and unsubtle ways: that who she was, both in terms of the community she was born into and of her sheer bodily existence, was potentially a problem: something to be deflected from and finessed into quasi-invisibility. Writing at the peak of Houston’s stardom, the feminist author and social activist bell hooks, drawing on the observations of Frantz Fanon on the psychology of colonised peoples, wrote: ‘the pain of learning that we cannot control … how we are seen is so intense that it rends us. It rips and tears at the seams of our efforts to construct self and identity. Often it leaves us ravaged by repressed rage, feeling weary, dispirited, and sometimes just plain old brokenhearted.’ This pain, in Houston’s case, ran alongside the necessity of repressing her bisexuality: she had been in a sexual relationship with a woman, Robyn Crawford, until she broke it off at 19, when she was making her first moves in the music industry, apparently believing that to be a successful Black female pop singer was going to be hard enough; to be a Black lesbian pop singer, impossible. This did not stop rumours about Houston’s sexuality circulating constantly. In interviews from almost the beginning of her career onwards, there are two constants: questions about her Blackness and questions about her sexuality. It’s distressing to see her using her evident intelligence and force of personality to try to move media focus away from these acutely discomforting areas; all in vain; the prurience and thinly-disguised disapproval keep coming: the price, it seems we’re meant to conclude, of success.

And the success of her early career was staggering; for a time she was simply the pre-eminent American pop vocalist and one of the most famous women in the world. Davis’s joy at the emphatic vindication of his promotional strategy for Houston was unbound; in a television interview decades later, you can sense the depth of feeling as he says, ‘When we finally had the seven consecutive number one records that no one - nobody, no male, no group, no artist - had ever had before, words can’t express the kind of thrill, delight, pride that this has been accomplished.’ Houston’s own feelings about her success seem to have been more complex, at one point saying: ‘I feel kind of embarrassed … I almost wish I could be more excited, that I could match what is happening out there to me.’ Davis was right that they had accomplished something unprecedented but note that the fullness of his pride is reserved not for a particular breakthrough in the recording studio or during a musical performance but for a demonstration of the extraordinary selling power of the product he had developed in Whitney Houston. It's a triumphant expression of the era’s dominant conception of freedom: to exercise the right to develop raw material - in this case the wealth of musical knowledge and talent embodied in Houston - into a marketable commodity, sell it to consumers on an open market and keep the profits. ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ is perhaps the defining example of his musical enterprise.

* * *

At this point in Houston’s career, one successful album and three number one singles in, Davis still seems to have had overwhelming directorial control of her output. Narada Michael Walden, the producer of Whitney, the 1987 album from which ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ was released as the lead single, said simply that at that stage, ‘Clive Davis picked all the songs’. Davis was nothing if not strategic, and recognised that the single from her first album which had broken Houston through to the newly-vital promotional platform, MTV, 1985’s ‘How Will I Know’, would need a sequel: a record which, while distinct enough to prompt listeners to buy it, would closely simulate the sound and feeling of the previous hit, finding airplay on the same stations and television channels, and affection among the same - huge - listenership. He approached the same songwriters, husband-and-wife team George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, to write a song for Houston’s second album, rejecting their first attempt, ‘Waiting for a Star to Fall’, as he felt it was unsuitable for Houston. The song would become a hit for the songwriters themselves when they released it under their performing name, Boy Meets Girl, in 1988.

We can only speculate on the reasons Davis rejected what is a plainly a great pop song, which one can imagine Houston’s performance only adding brilliance and depth to, but if we hear it alongside ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’, it seems at least plausible that Davis reacted against the intimations of introspection and emotional complexity of ‘Waiting for a Star to Fall’, which, although it has the sort of powerful, declarative chorus you would expect from a Whitney Houston single, opens with a tentative introduction and contains lines such as:

I've learned to feel what I cannot see
But with you, I lose that vision
I don't know how to dream your dream
So I'm all caught up in the superstition

You can imagine Davis going back to Merrill and Rubicam and pushing them for something more emphatic, more direct; in musical terms, something more major-key, more upbeat. There’s little of the vaguely poetic self-analysis of their original submission in ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’. Frequently in this series I’ve referred to standard pop song form, usually to indicate where a songwriter has diverged from it for some particular emotional effect; this is a case of a song following the template wholeheartedly. The structure is rigorously conventional: an 8-bar verse, followed by a pre-chorus which propels us into the 16-bar chorus. Everything is designed for that huge payoff, methodically prepared for by the song’s introduction, which is simply the chorus’s instrumental backing. The verses journey across the key of F# major, withholding the grounding ‘home’ chord, reflecting both the sense of the lyric - the singer is looking for something - and the tried and tested pop songwriting method of building suspense towards the resolution of the chorus. [demonstrate]. The pre-chorus doubles the rate of harmonic change - an increase in the harmonic rhythm which builds momentum - without ever sounding the tonic chord in root position, withholding its sense of ‘homecoming’, until it arrives, right on cue, at the chorus, which starts, as we’ve already heard during the introduction, with four clear bars on the tonic. It drops for two bars to the ‘minor fall’ chord of D#m before a satisfying two-bar cadence back into the tonic via the chords IV and V; this 8-bar pattern is then repeated.

The song’s melody sticks loyally to pop song formula by starting low in Houston’s range and constituting mainly short, choppy rhythms, building up gradually in terms of pitch and length of phrase, only hitting the long, soaring notes in the chorus, which is written in Houston’s ‘belting’ range - i.e. the higher part of her chest voice - which allows her both to display her full vocal power and to deftly flip, in her characteristic manner, into her head voice on the word ‘heat’ in ‘I wanna feel the heat with somebody’, which at that point is the highest note in the melody the listener has heard.

The bridge provides eight bars of variation around the relative minor chord - D# minor - before using the pre-chorus material to facilitate a whole-tone key change into the final chorus, which Houston sings in Ab major. Almost all the sounds in the arrangement are produced on electronic instruments: drum machines and synths dominate; the only clear non-electronic element, of course, is Houston’s voice; viewed in this way, the song really does seem to present a lone human voice, albeit an extraordinary voice, which seems to bottle the entire American soul tradition, within an entirely synthetic pop soundworld.

The result was immediate chart success and, almost as quickly, a ferocious critical backlash. Broadsheet music critics felt it was a cynical retread of her previous successes; the reviewer in Rolling Stone called the album ‘smug, repressive and ridiculously safe’ and dismissed ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ as a mere ‘anagram’ of ‘How Will I Know’. Black writers were if anything more damning: Nelson George wrote, in 1988, that ‘in her commercial triumph is a hollowness of spirit that mocks her own gospel roots’ and the novelist Trey Ellis, in a 1989 essay, said that the song is ‘so lifeless because … [she has] applied Porcelana fade cream to [her] once extremely soulful [throat]’. The implication being made by Ellis’s reference to Porcelana skin-whitening cream was foremost in the campaign, followed by a number of Black radio stations and supposedly endorsed by the civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton, to boycott her music, labelling her Whitney ‘Whitey’ Houston. This reached its highest pitch at the 1989 Soul Train Awards, America’s foremost Black music showcase, when Houston’s name was read out as one of the nominees for Best R&B/Urban contemporary single by a female artist, and was audibly booed by some of the live Los Angeles audience.

To understand the strength of this feeling it’s necessary to look at the position of African Americans in the late 1980s. Following the legislative gains made by the civil rights movement in the mid 1960s, an optimism had been born that genuine racial equality and integration in the U.S.A. might be possible. That this had not been accomplished was patently clear by the time of Houston’s prominence although, as a number of writers attested at the time, many white Americans, holding onto increasingly sentimentalised pictures of the iconic campaigns against racism in the previous generation, were able to believe that parity had been achieved. Historian Alphine Jefferson, writing in 1986, alluded to the growing gap between the rose-tinted self-image of contemporary America and the real state of things, saying, ‘in every aspect of Afro-American life and culture there is a dichotomy between the rhetoric of U.S. ideals and the daily reality of its black population./From bare human necessities to basic civil rights, the status of Black America is worse in the 1980s than it was in the 1960s.’ Influenced directly by Hayek’s writings, Reagan’s policies - cutting back on social programs, reducing regulation, and breaking the power of organised labour - all exercised in the name of ‘freedom’, while a blow for all but the wealthiest in American society, were particularly devastating for already-marginalised social groups. The 1980s saw ‘a significant rise in Black unemployment’ and the beginning of an accelerated growth in the racial wealth gap which would not slow until the 2010s. Confirming Martin Luther King’s warnings in the months before his assassination, sociologist Richard Lowy wrote, in 1991, that the ‘failure of American society to deal with racism and poverty in the 1960s is structurally linked to the reemergence of racism, ethnic prejudice, and racial violence in the 1980s’.

We can understand some of the animosity towards Houston if we consider that a key part of the perception of racial progress centred on the notion of ‘the new Black middle class’, which received much coverage in the 1980s and was represented most prominently in culture by The Cosby Show, first airing in 1984. At one point in a recent documentary, Houston and her siblings are compared to the Cosby kids, and Houston herself was, even before she became famous, sometimes teased for being a ‘princess’, adhering to notions of good manners and respectability drilled into her by her mother. ‘Houston personifies an unstable Black middle-class entity’, writer Marla Shelton argued in 1995, ‘that cannot be completely accepted and celebrated by the majority of African Americans because during the 1980s this community became even more economically and politically oppressed.’ In August 1987, when Houston was midway through her record-breaking streak of seven number one singles, and her album topped the Billboard 200, Time magazine published an article - ‘Down and out and no place to go’ - which catalogued the social breakdown of the city Houston was born in: it recalled that ‘Twenty years ago [Newark] had 9,000 businesses and more than 200,000 jobs [while] today it has less than half that many businesses and 120,000 jobs. The population, which … totaled 430,000 in 1950, has shrunk to 330,000 … Newark has few rivals in [its] percentage of substandard housing and, though only the 48th largest U.S. city, ranks fourth in incidence of murders’. Part of the negative reaction to Houston, perhaps, was not simply the suspicion of inauthenticity but a sense that the promotion of individuals like her - outstanding talents achieving unprecedented success in their field - was being used as a means of suppressing the demand that more systematic action be taken to address racial disparities.

And finally, the controversy around this record cannot be understood without the original political role of gospel, the musical tradition Houston was held to represent, in mind. Mahalia Jackson, who Houston’s mother had performed with, sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before King gave the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and Aretha Franklin, Houston’s ‘Aunt Ree Ree’, sang at his funeral. Those who could recall the intimacy of gospel-influenced music and the politics of the civil rights movement may, if they perceived it as such, have found it painful to hear those sounds presented in an apparently wholly depoliticised setting, and perhaps a particular insult to hear them out of the mouth of a singer who, as repeatedly asserted in her initial overheated publicity, was the living inheritor of the flame once carried by such icons of the struggle for Black freedom. She doesn’t mention Houston by name but it’s certainly plausible that the civil rights activist and writer Angela Davis was thinking of her when, in 1985, she wrote that ‘Of all the art forms historically associated with Afro-American culture, music has played the greatest catalytic role in awakening social consciousness in the community … Black people were able to create with their music an aesthetic community of resistance, which in turn encouraged and nurtured a political community of active struggle for freedom … some of the superstars of popular-musical culture today are unquestionably musical geniuses, but they have distorted the Black music tradition by brilliantly developing its form while ignoring its content of struggle and freedom.’ This freedom Davis felt Black musicians should be audibly striving for was not, it’s fair to assume, the same freedom Reagan was constantly invoking at the same time in his efforts to bring about political and economic reforms which would undo many of the gains of the movement Davis had become so central to, but as we’ll see, there was almost equal ambiguity surrounding her concept of Black musical form; notions of authenticity and expressive freedom which, while easy enough to deploy in the abstract, become harder to pin down when looked at in the practice of music-making itself.

* * *

Questioned in 1990 on her relation to Blackness, Houston replied, ‘Black? … What’s Black? I’ve been trying to figure this out since I’ve been in the business. I don’t know how to sing Black - and I don’t know how to sing white, either. I know how to sing’. Despite the heavy judgments made of her by some of her contemporaries, it was not, in the 1980s, an easy question to answer. Ironically, in the same essay Trey Ellis comments disapprovingly on Houston’s ‘Porcelana fade-cream’ vocals, he makes the case for an emergent ‘New Black Aesthetic’ which reflected the rise of more complex, more varied representations of Blackness in American culture. The insinuation of inauthenticity around Houston’s early records typically rested on the notion that, while her voice was the ‘real deal’, it had been transplanted into an insipid, commercially viable, i.e. white, soundworld. If we look at the backgrounds of the producers she worked with on these songs, however, it doesn’t seem as straightforward. Narada Michael Walden, for instance, was a mixed-race fusion drummer who had played with Wayne Shorter and Weather Report before being mentored in production by none other than Quincy Jones, during his imperious phase when he single-handedly created a cutting-edge African American popular musical synthesis of funk, soul and disco in albums such as George Benson’s Give Me The Night and Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and Thriller. The track record of Kashif Saleem, who produced singles for both of Houston’s first albums, is even more telling: he is credited as being one of the earliest adopters in R&B of sampling and MIDI, a new electronic music technology which enabled the synchronisation of drum machines and synthesisers, and which would become a vital element in virtually all modern pop production. His work in the early 1980s included the brilliant ‘Love Come Down’, performed by Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King, which demonstrates his distinctive melding of funk with a synthesised sonic palette:

When I listen to the arrangements of ‘How Will I Know’ and ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’, I hear a quality that can really only be described as funky: a complex layering of syncopated rhythms which cumulatively convey a sense of irresistible physical movement; the fact that the bassline in ‘How Will I Know’ is played on a synthesiser, to my ear at least, makes it no less compellingly danceable.

The role of electronic technology is decisively foregrounded in ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’: we hear the song’s drum pattern heard, on what is unmistakably not an acoustic drum kit, in isolation for two bars at the very outset of the song.

The drum machine this beat is being played on, immediately recognisable by its distinctive ‘cowbell’ and heavy kick sound, is the Roland TR-808, subject of countless musicians’ tributes, legacy music magazine articles and a 2015 feature-length documentary narrated by Zane Lowe. It was the iconic musical instrument of the era, having the same muse-like significance to 1980s dance and hip hop as the Fender Stratocaster guitar had had to rock n roll. Its use in ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ encapsulates the contradictions of the reception of Houston’s music: on the one hand, its presence is surely part of what so many heard as synthetic, artificial and cynical, on the other hand, it was a clear link to the most original Black musical creative expression of the time: it was used on countless pioneering House tracks, as well as ‘Planet Rock’, the 1982 song by Afrika Bambaataa, generally considered the first great hip hop record. In the 808 documentary, Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee describes the situation in New York after the ‘Planet Rock’ release: ‘every record had to have an 808 in it in order for it to have any sort of success on the dancefloor’.

So, complicating the judgement of ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ as an ugly hybrid - a true and authentic representative of the tradition - Houston’s voice - trapped in a sterile, white pop setting - is the fact that much of what we hear as ‘pop’ in the song’s arrangement itself has Black origins. The sociologist Paul Gilroy, writing in 1995 on trends in musical practice by artists across the Black diaspora, observed that ‘This new role for music as a cipher for authenticity has developed hand in hand with a technological revolution in musical production … music has come to signify authenticity at the very moment when it has evolved into new styles that are inescapably hybrid and multiplex in character.’ African Americans before Houston had embarked on similar projects of transmuting the traditional music of Black churches and communities into saleable commodities; the real difference between her music and its closest equivalents in previous eras, such as Motown, is the prevalence of electronic music technology. Gilroy sensed a historical irony in the fact that in an age when many traditional bonds of community were dissolving, artists such as Houston were looked to with greater insistence than ever before to provide communities with a tangible sense of belonging, even as technology became available to extricate artists more thoroughly than ever from the limitations of place. The 808, a musical instrument developed in Japan, which within five years of its release would create hit records in India, the UK, mainland Europe, and the United States, is also an emblem of globalisation. It’s a context which makes questions about an individual artist’s authenticity, or artistic motive, or social role, more difficult to answer with confidence than almost any of Houston’s contemporary critics were willing to grant. But globalisation - characterised by its supporters as the greatest vehicle for freedom yet devised - is also a suggestive context to view her work in, as well as her life, which would increasingly be defined by some of the essential qualities of a globalised world as outlined by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in 1990: a ‘world … of rootlessness, alienation, and psychological distance.’

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In 2018, the American author Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing on the pressures he encountered on becoming a literary celebrity following the publication of his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me, commented that ‘My sense of myself as part of a community of black writers disintegrated before me … What I felt, in all of this, was a profound sense of social isolation’. He describes, with great clarity, the dissociating process by which fame distorted his interactions with what had been his most basic emotional foundation: his friends and his community. Clearly, from everything we now know about her, we can think of Houston experiencing similar alienation during her career, perhaps significantly more intensely than Coates, who himself says that the extent of the exposure his fame subjected him to was tiny compared to the scrutiny faced by Black superstars of music and film. Houston’s isolation, thanks in part to developments in music production technology, would also have been more complete than that of famous Black artists of previous eras. The reason usually given why Clive Davis was able to so completely mould Houston into a supreme pop music product is that she was so young but it was also facilitated by the way the whole of her sound was able to be shaped by a professionalised and remote production team with access to synthesisers and a drum machine. Even Motown, which had also focussed on creating a marketable brand of R&B, were not able to do away with music-making practices like having a band, which required rehearsal, live studio recording, and, to some extent, songwriters who were part of the social world which contextualised those practices. The sudden ubiquity of electronic music technology went some way to eliminating that social aspect which previously had been unavoidable. Paul Gilroy, in the same essay on authenticity in Black music in the 1990s, had already noticed this, adding that ‘Producing music without an element of performance to mediate its creation and its social use feeds the privatization of cultural production and can isolate … music-makers from the social exchanges and disciplines of the alternative public spheres which have nurtured black musical sub-cultures for so long’. 

And we might also think of Houston when Coates goes on to describe how he survived the disorientation of his sudden fame: ‘I did not drown’, he writes, ‘[fame] revealed securities as sure as it did insecurities … I really did love to write—the irreplaceable thrill of transforming a blank page, the search for the right word, like pieces of a puzzle, the surgery of stitching together odd paragraphs … that really was me.’ This relief in the doing of what he loves, which reconnects him intimately to his sense of who he really is, was for Houston, of course, found in singing, and, even more directly than writing, this was something which linked her back to her ‘pre-fame self’ of community and the church. She mentions it many times in interviews: ‘The memories of singing in church are ones that I cherish most’, she says in one;  ‘When I used to watch my mother sing,’ she says in another, ‘which was usually in church, that feeling, that soul, that thing - it’s like electricity rolling through you. If you have ever been in a Baptist church or a Pentacostal church, when the Holy Spirit starts to roll and people start to really feel what they’re doing … it’s incredible.’ Elsewhere she describes the moment she realised she wanted to be a singer; the setting, of course, is the church, and the occasion was her first public solo: ‘“I was so afraid, so scared, that I closed my eyes and just began to sing … When I opened my eyes, it was like the Holy Spirit had come to the church. People were just shoutin’ and happy and praising God. I started thinking then, if this is what I can do with what You’ve given me, then I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna take it all the way. I’m gonna be a singer.”’

What I find so moving about these descriptions, these heartfelt and often beautifully-articulated memories of hers, is how the participation of all the people around her is central to the significance of the performance: ‘people start to really feel what they’re doing’; ‘People were just shoutin’ and happy and praising God’; the memories are not, as might be expected, primarily about demonstrating her singular talent as a performer but about the active participatory response of the rest of the congregation during the music. Writing in 2005, the economic geographer David Harvey wrote that in societies such as the US in the wake of the Reagan revolution, where the principle of ‘free enterprise’ has been held as sacrosanct, ‘A contradiction arises between a seductive but alienating possessive individualism on the one hand and the desire for a meaningful collective life on the other.’ This is what we hear in Houston’s music: an emphatic example of pop as a process of pure enterprise but which would be utterly empty without its manifest connection - which we intuit in her singing, even if unconsciously - with the intensely interconnected, communal world it emerged from; it’s even there in ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’, as a yearning, perhaps, rather than as explicit expression, but think of the sheer commitment of her delivery in the song’s chorus, or the sense of her excitement almost running over in the rapid vocal repeated phrases - ‘Don’t you wanna dance, say you wanna dance’ - in the outro. Narada Michael Walden, the song’s producer, described those lines being improvised in the studio: she was ‘so happy … all those riffs and stuff, having fun - just pouring outta her … [like] she’s got the spirit, she got hot with the spirit, so out it flies. That happened on every song’. In a 1990 feature for Life magazine, she’s described on tour with the gospel duo BeBe and CeCe Winans: ‘whenever they all ended up in the same town, without a producer within miles or even a microphone, Whitney would sing with BeBe and CeCe … It was like throwing off a straightjacket. “They sing from such a pure place,” she says. “It brought me back to where I started. I could be free, to express the real core of me.”’ There’s something of Coates’ thrill in ‘transforming a blank page’ about this description of Houston’s deep, bodily joy in singing, but this point - that it brought her back to where she started - reminds us that, for her, singing meant little without its intimate link to where she came from and the wider world embodied in it, and that it was in this moment of singing that she felt herself to be most free.

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Next time on the Secret Life of Songs I’ll be talking about Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Streets of Philadelphia’. Written as the theme song to the first major motion picture about the AIDS crisis, 1993’s Philadelphia, I’ll explore why this icon of American heterosexual masculinity was picked to accompany a film about a gay man dying of AIDS - possibly the first sympathetic leading gay character in the history of Hollywood - and ask, what does this directorial sleight-of-hand do to the meaning of the song?

This episode was produced by Paul Wierdak. If you're enjoying the series please consider rating and reviewing it wherever you get your podcasts.