Happy 35th Anniversary to Whitney Houston’s eponymous debut album Whitney Houston, originally released February 14, 1985.
When I started to gather my thoughts to begin writing a 35th anniversary tribute to Whitney Houston’s 1985 self-titled debut album, I was blocked—big time—on how to craft an article that hasn’t been written before when the album celebrated its 30th, 25th, 20th or previous anniversaries. It’s one of those albums by an iconic artist that’s always rediscovered and memorialized every fifth or tenth year that passes.
Moreover, Houston’s life and career have already been penned, documented, fictionalized and opined about endlessly in all forms of media. She’s a celebrity who was written about constantly while she was in the spotlight. And so much more has been published or produced about her life story and career path since her unglamorous and untimely death in Room 434 of the Beverly Hilton, on the night before the 2012 GRAMMY Awards ceremony, at the age of 48.
Sure, I could provide context in numerous paragraphs—as other writers have eloquently done—about how Houston’s upbringing in a Baptist church taught her how to sing. Under the watchful eye of her mom, Cissy Houston—a top-notch background vocalist and gospel-soul recording artist herself—Whitney learned how to manipulate and master the pliable multi-octave vocal instrument God blessed her with.
I could also outline—just like other writers before me—how Arista Records president Clive Davis stopped Houston from signing a record deal with rival Elektra Records in 1983 so that he could sign her to his label with the goal of molding the nineteen-year-old into Arista’s first “pop icon.”
Perhaps I could even explain in great detail—as previously accomplished by others—how it took almost two years and a pile of money (more than was normally spent on making pop albums at the time), to produce, record and package Whitney Houston.
Or maybe I should chronologize how more than a year had passed before her debut (released on Valentine’s Day in 1985) finally reached the top of the Billboard 200 album chart in March of 1986. It spent fourteen weeks looking down over the other 199 albums until Janet Jackson’s Control kicked it down to the #3 spot. But, that story has been told a million times, too.
Honestly, you can hit up Houston’s website (it is a surprisingly detailed resource), Google any number of Houston obituaries or long-form examinations of her life and death, read Davis’ 2013 memoir The Soundtrack of My Life, or watch the recent Whitney or Whitney: Can I Be Me documentaries to absorb all of this information.
But, as any writer with a looming deadline does, I continued to try to write something new, meaningful and informative about an artist as impactful as Houston was, and about an album as important as Whitney Houston still is. I wanted to truly honor her legacy.
Repeatedly, though, I was still blocked as I kneaded sentences about Houston’s upbringing, the long journey to make the album, and the LP’s songs and successes. Without fail, my gut would always step in and stop me by whispering, “Rehashing old stories is not how you want to write about Whitney and the album that changed her life forever. There’s something else you want to say.”
I was stumped about why this was happening, and became overwhelmed with fear that I was about to let down one of the most important music artists in my life—a woman whose vocal strengths once categorized her as “the pop-gospel equivalent of an Olympic athlete,” who was blessed with a legendary voice perfectly described by esteemed music writer and critic Ann Powers as a “national treasure.”
Powers was on the money with that description—if there was a Mount Rushmore for icons of music, Houston’s face would surely be carved into it.
Confused by my inability to write about the album, I called my boyfriend for some advice. He asked me a simple question, “If you could put into one sentence how you feel when you listen to the album, what would that be?”
My immediate answer was, “I’m angry.”
Hmmm. Ok. I never heard myself say those words about the album before. And I was stunned by their unexpected arrival.
And then, as I held back tears, I added, “I’m mad that she’s gone. And sometimes I blame this album for it.”
Wow.
There it was—the reason that I couldn’t find the words to properly honor Houston and her debut. Then, I realized this is probably why, after all this time since Houston’s death, I’ve barely listened to Whitney Houston. I can put on her other albums like 1987’s Whitney, 1998’s My Love Is Your Love, or 2009’s I Look To You (her final studio album) without having to wrestle my emotions to the ground like I do when I think about Houston’s debut.
So, I pulled out my well-worn vinyl copy of Whitney Houston to take a good hard look at the album—and confront what’s kept me away for so long.
First, I looked at the poised cover photo of Houston in a light salmon-colored Giovanni De Maura gown. Its fabric wraps up over her left shoulder to link up with a strand of small white pearls. Houston looks ready for a very adult evening of opera at New York City’s Lincoln Center followed by a late night dinner in Rockefeller Center at the Rainbow Room.
Houston’s modeling experience comes in handy in front of late fashion photographer Gary Gross’ camera as she simultaneously sells to the world a flawless fresh face (for those who hadn’t glimpsed her yet in Glamour, Cosmo or Seventeen), but armed with a sly “around the way” piercing gaze that lets you know she has seen some shit.
Immediately, I think of the word “young.”
And then I shake my head in disbelief that she didn’t even make it to fifty. When she died, she was two years younger than I am now. It’s just not right.
Looking at the photo, I think she must have been so excited to make this album. Even though she performed a song from the musical “The Wiz” on television’s The Merv Griffin Show two weeks after Davis signed her in 1983, the “masses” really hadn’t heard Houston’s pipes yet. So, in the studio there were no expectations of vocal perfection to live up to—that would come later in future albums.
Houston probably just sang during recording sessions for the album like she had done so many times inside New Hope Baptist Church in New Jersey, or in dark Manhattan cabaret clubs with her mother, or in background sessions for Chaka Khan, Lou Rawls and The Neville Brothers. After all, singing is what Houston was born to do. As she summed up in a 1991 interview, “I can’t imagine sitting at a desk with this voice.”
Next, I flipped over the album to look at the back cover. I was immediately reunited with the familiar Christian prayer that's nestled in the upper right-hand corner: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference…”
It sits, unremarkably, above a long list of ebullient thank you’s from Houston that spills downward towards the bottom of the back cover. The list includes Davis, Narada Michael Walden (who produced her massive hit “How Will I Know” using the same players from Aretha Franklin’s Who’s Zoomin’ Who? recording sessions), Houston’s mother and father, and Houston’s longtime secret companion Robyn Crawford.
Now, if there’s a prayer on the back of a debut album from a twenty-one-year-old gospel-trained powerhouse vocalist who was molded and mentored in the church, most likely it wouldn’t draw much attention. Its inclusion would feel personal, spiritual and expected. When I was fifteen in 1985, I doubt I even noticed the prayer on the back of the vinyl album copy I owned then.
But, here I am—thirty-five years later—curiously staring at this Serenity Prayer (as it’s commonly referred to in addiction recovery circles) on the back cover.
Immediately, the first word that comes to mind is “struggle.”
I think of Houston’s public battle with celebrity life, and her private battle with drugs that rusted her heroic voice, dragged down the latter half of her career, and eventually killed her. In hindsight, seeing that prayer just nonchalantly pressed on the back cover of her debut album is eerily prescient.
Then my eyes are drawn to the large, proud photo of Houston that sits in the middle of the back cover. She’s standing tall in what appears to be ocean water, and wearing a white Norma Kamali one-piece. Her shoulders are regally drawn back, her perfectly manicured hands placed on her hips, her chin is held high, and she’s ready to step into her future with the sun on her face and the album as her opening salvo for eventual pop dominance.
How could she have known, though, that almost twenty years later she would tire of living under the magnifying glass of celebrity gaze and disappear from music almost completely? “It was just too much,” Houston revealed to Oprah Winfrey in 2009 about her reclusion, “Too much to try to live up to, to try to be, you know? And I wanted out at some point.” She added, “I just wanted to be normal. I wanted to have fun … I had no normal twenties, I had no normal thirties. My life was filled with making records and doing tours and traveling the world and going every place.”
At that point in her career, Houston was done with trying to keep up the perfect and polished “American Princess” persona that was first launched along with the Whitney Houston album in 1985. In that same year, a bratty, rowdy and sexually liberated “Material Girl” was firing on all cylinders with her second pop album Like A Virgin (1984), but Houston (who was five years younger than Madonna) was the exact opposite—poised, proper, and soft spoken—often seen singing in sequined gowns and high heels.
Yes, Houston possessed innate elegance, but there were other aspects to her personality that insiders have said her label wanted to keep hidden from public view, deciding it was best to keep “Nippy” (Houston’s nickname given to her by her father) under wraps. “You see somebody, and you deal with their image, that’s their image,” she told Rolling Stone in 1993 about keeping up appearances as a “perfect” pop star. “It’s part of them, it’s not the whole picture. I am not always in a sequined gown. I am nobody’s angel. I can get down and dirty. I can get raunchy.”
Next, I look at the list of song titles atop the back cover—ten compositions that checked the boxes of adult contemporary, R&B, and pop with gospel flourishes. The last song on the album, “Hold Me,” a romantic but subdued duet with R&B vocalist Teddy Pendergrass, was actually the first song that got Houston on the Billboard charts. It was included on Pendergrass’ Love Language album released the year prior (and before that in 1982 on Diana Ross’ Silk Electric as “In Your Arms”) and became a Top 5 R&B hit, but stalled at #46 on the Hot 100.
When the first single from Whitney Houston, “Thinking About You” (co-written and produced by the late R&B artist Kashif), flopped, the album’s smooth opener “You Give Good Love” was released and properly introduced Houston, and her bell-ringing voice to the world. Immediately it showcased her natural ability to stretch notes beyond their perceived limits and cleanly climb up octave mountain ranges without ever dirtying up a note—or her heels.
“You Give Good Love” set the table for how Houston would be forever be associated with a clean, glass-like vocal delivery that could easily pivot between sensual and spectacular, despondent and driven, or playful and powerful emotions within a single verse. Although the song didn’t reach the top of the pop charts (it peaked at #3, thwarted by “Shout” by Tears for Fears and “Everytime You Go Away” by Paul Young) it did become a #1 hit on Billboard’s R&B singles chart where she’d eventually score seven more #1 hits throughout her career.
“Saving All My Love For You” was the third single released from the album. The mid-tempo bittersweet ballad about being “the other woman” was originally recorded by ex-5th Dimension vocalist Marilyn McCoo for 1978’s Marilyn & Billy. Even though it features a more jazz-inspired backbone, “Saving” became Houston’s first #1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 (beating out Stevie Wonder’s “Part Time Lover”).
I’ve always felt that the arrangement of the song and her vocal interpretation of the lyrics were unusual, given the lyrical topic of “Saving All My Love For You,” because she sang like she was kinda “whatever” about the pains of being a mistress. With a spot-on observation, a former Billboard critic hailed it as “the least-conflicted Other Woman song ever.”
Rightfully so, it landed Houston her first GRAMMY award in 1986 for Best Pop Vocal Performance (Female). It was also nominated for Best R&B Vocal Performance, but lost to Aretha Franklin’s “Freeway of Love.” Traversing both R&B and pop genres, but with a heavy emphasis on pop that would resonate with more of a white audience (which would bring in more money to the label), were the main goals of Davis and his Arista team when they were soliciting songs for Houston to sing on her debut.
“Anything that was too ‘black-sounding’ was sent back to the studio,” former Arista executive Kenneth Reynolds revealed in the 2017 documentary Whitney: Can I Be Me. “To say ‘black-sounding,’ in case you have a problem with that, is to say that it’s too George Clinton, too Funkadelic, too R&B. We want Joni Mitchell, we want Barbra Streisand,” he added, “We don’t want a female James Brown.”
There’s a moment in the song’s bridge at the end of the line, “You said be patient just wait a little longer / But that's just an old fantasy,” where, for the first time on the album, Houston digs down into her church-honed gospel grit for a fleeting moment on the word “old,” and then ascends through the first two syllables of “fantasy” to finish the “-sy” way up above the clouds. It’s only two words in a song, but it proved to the world that Houston was not your ordinary vocalist—she was a bionic belter with the power to shape and stretch her vocals as if they were liquid glass.
When I scan the rest of the titles on the back cover of the album, while listening to them in my headphones, it’s the trio of the forever colorful “How Will I Know” (another #1 pop hit), her acclaimed anthemic cover of George Benson’s “Greatest Love of All” (#1 as well), and the official “shoulda been a hit single” tearjerker “All At Once” (only released in the Netherlands) that I remember playing repeatedly when I was a teenager.
Those three songs really captured what I loved most about a good “Whitney song” (when she was in the pocket): her shiny steel vocals that could slice the solar system in half, the way she’d confidently crescendo the emotional high point of a lyric, and her effortless church runs that kept endnotes holding on for their lives.
It may come as a surprise, but the critics didn’t unanimously love Whitney Houston upon its release. Although her voice was praised as “one of the most exciting new voices in years,” many came to the same conclusion that some of the songs on the album didn’t have enough meat on their bones to properly showcase her vocal abilities. “For all its strengths, one senses that her debut album merely scratched the surface of a massive talent,” wrote The New York Times. Robert Christgau, then the Village Voice’s music critic, was harsher in his assessment, labeling most of the songs on the album as “schlock.”
In a 1985 MTV interview, when a producer read to Houston a press critique about the album that said her “voice was so good it shouldn’t be wasted on pop clichés,” Houston pointedly, but politely, responded with, “I did not go into the studio wanting to make a pop album. I went into the studio wanting to make good music.”
As much as Houston would say in early interviews that she never recorded any song she didn’t like for the album, I have a hard time believing that she could actually tell Davis she wouldn’t sing a song that was secured for her—especially given the amount of money and manpower being poured into her debut.
But, what I can imagine Houston doing was deliberately half-heartedly performing the songs she didn’t care for—after all, the success of each song was dependent on her interpretation and delivery of the emotion behind the lyrics.
After spending some time with these Whitney Houston songs again, I’ve come to the realization that listening to the album is an aurally enjoyable but emotionally bruising experience for me. Sometimes I wish this album were half as good—and half as successful—so that Houston could have had some time to grow into celebrity life.
Perhaps, by ramping up to superstardom over the course of a handful of years with the release of two or three albums, she would have been better prepared to handle the rumblings within Black radio, and the Black community in general, that the songs she was singing, charting and selling weren’t “Black enough.” “The perspective in the community was that Whitney had sold out,” recalled former Arista executive Doug Daniels in Whitney: Can I Be Me.
In 1989 those rumblings surfaced publicly during her third visit to the Soul Train Awards. After she was announced as a Best R&B/Urban Contemporary Single nominee for “Where Do Broken Hearts Go”—from her record-breaking sophomore effort, Whitney—she was booed by the audience and called nicknames like “Whit-ey” and “Oreo.” Reverend Al Sharpton and his National Youth Movement called for a boycott of “WHITNEY 'WHITEY' HOUSTON," saying she didn't hire enough Black promoters and Black musicians.
“For some reason, she became the target,” Houston’s friend, the singer Cherrelle, recalled in a Vanity Fair interview, “People ridiculed her and talked about her and forgot about her songs. She was human, and that hurt.”
I’m always stunned when I watch the Soul Train Awards clip on YouTube. How could Houston have not been surprised and saddened by this cruel turn of events? Especially as a child who was raised in a predominantly Black Baptist church?
“That moment was devastating,” said Houston’s touring saxophonist Kirk Whalum in Whitney: Can I Be Me. “I don’t think she ever recovered,” he added, “When the boxes are ticked on why she perished, that was a big one.”
Although, I love listening to how fresh, free and forceful Houston sings on her debut, I also (perhaps irrationally) still blame it for the mega-success it thrust upon Houston at such a young and impressionable age—how it forced her to live two different lives, and how it dropped her right in the middle of a controversial cultural conversation about artists whose music wasn’t “Black enough” or catered “to whites.”
But, because I’m a mature adult who’s both an analytical thinker and an emotional creature, I’m able to hold both of these conflicting narratives about the Whitney Houston album within me. Yes, the album honored her instrument and shared her gift with the world, but it also set up goal posts of perfection (both personal and professional) that Houston forever had to aim for after its release. It initiated her struggle to contain fame, to live an authentic life, and to not have to always be so perfect.
“Having to be someone else—to play the ‘Whitney character’—was something that became impossibly difficult,” director Nick Broomfield told The Guardian in 2017 upon the release of his documentary Whitney: Can I Be Me. “From an early age, she had very little control over her life.” By coming out hot in 1985 with the perfect voice, the perfect look, and the perfect behavior all perfectly controlled behind the scenes, the world expected her to be that at all times.
So, during the only season of a troublingly exploitative 2005 Bravo reality show about her life with husband Bobby Brown, when the world saw Houston being “regular” just like the rest of us —a loving soul prone to insecurities, bad decisions, and sometimes self-sabotage—for many, that revelation was too much to bear. And they turned their back on her.
At that time we expected pop stars and megawatt celebrities to be better than us. They were supposed to be infallible. They were supposed to not battle with addiction or mental illness. They were supposed to be happy so that fans could be happy watching them perform or listening to them sing. And if a star was troubled behind the scenes, well, fans would rather see all that kept under wraps—especially if the star in question was a woman. Thankfully, that’s changed today.
In summing up Houston, her debut album, and her life path since its release, I’m constantly reminded of the Prince lyric, “The beautiful ones / They always seem to lose…” Although her canon is filled with triumphant recordings, her story is still a tragedy. And, obviously, I still haven’t gotten over how it all ended.
But, with an upcoming hologram tour, an album of unreleased tracks (including some from Whitney Houston), and her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame all around the corner, I guess now is the time for me to finally make peace with her death and her debut.
Maybe listening to this album and writing this article about Nippy is a start.
LISTEN: