Before she became a cautionary tale on the dangers of cocaine abuse, Whitney Houston was, to an entire generation of young girls growing up in urban India, just like her character in Bodyguard, a 1992 film with Kevin Costner as her co-star: a beautiful superstar and music royalty. I was nine when I Will Always Love You took over radios everywhere; the Bodyguard soundtrack is the first music purchase I remember making (rather, pressuring my parents into buying it for me). It would play on loop on our remarkably-antiquated-in-retrospect boombox. When my parents had had enough, it was time for my hairbrush to emulate a mike while I crooned into it in front of a mirror, imagining that I was the pop star being rescued by a handsome bodyguard (Hollywood colonises young minds early, but that’s another story. When I got a little older, I dreamed of Lloyd Dobler wooing me with Whitney, not Peter Gabriel).
In this 22 November, 2009, file photo, Whitney Houston performs at the 37th Annual American Music Awards in Los Angeles. AP
Whitney was my entry into the wonderful and bewildering world of English popular music. It wasn’t that I was unaware of such a thing’s existence – my parents had a regrettable affection for Abba, Boney M, the Bee Gees and other relics from the seventies – but that I had never felt the need to explore that world before then. I discovered Michael Jackson and then Elvis Presley; later, I felt compelled to investigate what ‘R&B’ meant. That led me to hip hop, which scandalised me so much that I went right back to the power ballad and didn’t explore other genres for a good many years until I became just old enough to realize that Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On was not an expression of musical genius. But love for Whitney introduced me to other divas: Mariah Carey, for one, and a whole host of other female power singers: Vanessa Williams, Toni Braxton, Janet Jackson, the aforementioned Celine Dion, Tina Turner and Dolly Parton.
But I also read about Whitney’s godmother, Aretha Franklin. If Whitney was my introduction into the world of English pop music, Aretha was the window to a world of music entirely unlike anything I had ever heard before. I experimented with so many different sounds between the ages of nine and 14, when the dictates of “good taste” meant nothing to me and I was unashamed to admit to a love for Boyzone or Whitney. Having grown up on Whitney meant that I never learned to be dismissive about the whole of pop music, though my engagement with it did morph from outright fannishness into a more cultivated, ironic (amused) detachment.
With puberty came new realisations – though Whitney’s voice was as magisterial as ever, I suddenly saw schmaltz where previously there was romance; I was “growing out” of my Whitney phase. This coincided with her slow deterioration into drug addiction, and later reports of her abusive marriage were a sad but unsurprising reminder of how difficult fame can be. I admit that I lost some respect for her for staying in an abusive marriage; for not living up to my ideal of what a female icon should be like. She never claimed to be a feminist, but the 9-yr-old girl in me was disappointed with what I perceived to be her lack of courage in ensuring that she escaped a bad marriage. Over the years, even that faded. Apart from a vague sense of sadness at her troubles, the intermittent reports of her downward spiral didn’t make too much of an impact. I had moved on, and Whitney was a relic of the past.
But when I read about her death I couldn’t help but remember the girl I’d been, and how much she’d meant to me then. I hadn’t thought about her or her music in a long time, but I downloaded some of her more popular songs (I Wanna Dance With Somebody, The Greatest Love of All, Saving All My Love) only to discover that I remembered just about every word. That wasn’t just a sign of how much her music had meant to me, but also of how, at one time, she was everywhere, transcending language and culture.