Whitney Houston's Role-Call
In the September 6th 2010 issue of The New Yorker, Jill Lepore’s review of Isabel Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration recounts the movement of almost 2 million African Americans from the deep-south and the oppression of Jim Crow Laws, northward into the cities: Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia. Wilkerson’s goal was to find surviving African Americans who had taken that trip, and eventually to recount a largely forgotten history through the lives of three people. The review tells the story of Ida Mae Brandon, born in Mississippi in 1913, married to sharecropper George Gladney, and their journey north in 1937 to Milwaukee and then Chicago, because of racial oppression, lynching at home.
The migration helps to define African American cultural identity through the final two thirds of the 20th century; and we can hear in those journeys and those cities, in their music especially, the sound of the Negro past colliding with the realities of the future. Billie Holliday’s Strange Fruit is on lynching; Tony Morrison’s Beloved is about the guilt and exorcism of a racist past. John Coltrane’s Love Supreme is in love with the gutters and skylines. To the roll-call we might add, as Samuel L. Jackson’s DJ character does in Do The Right Thing, a list of characters who have helped document and define the African American experience through their art over the century: Robert Johnson, Mahalia Jackson, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye, Gill Scott Heron, James Baldwin, Stevie Wonder, Donnie Hathaway, Chuck D; all of whom, in one sense or another, made that journey. A large number never really survived, and are recalled, with little exception, not because they were black, but because they had soul.
The first time I heard Whitney Houston I was twelve and her video for Saving all My Love For You was on television. She was incredibly beautiful, framed mainly in shadow, at night, or between doorways and rooms and in the recording studio. The video wasn’t modern, but doesn’t seem outdated now; Whitney was offered as a summation of the journey taken before by per peers – she was a plateau and a queen. Her rise - as was suggested in the video - was not through the jazz canon, but through modeling and the popular music scene, her incredible voice and her gospel heritage. This was the first era when pure talent - through the commercial range of MTV - could be recognized for what it was, encapsulating the hope in Nina Simone’s exhalant Young Gifted and Black, without being burdened, for the first time, by that last word.
Whitney Houston was not the best songwriter and neither did she have the best songs; those she did have were not necessarily personal or revelatory, and as her star rose she embodied much of the sheen of that popular era, and was not always liked (she doesn’t make the Do The Right Thing roll-call mentioned above). But she was the best singer. She was the first and the last African American woman to embody true superstar status in the old sense of the word.
By the release of her fourth studio album the parameters had shifted so that as much as My Love is Your Love was up-to-date, it was also a prelude to genre shifts (Lauren Hill’s amongst them) that made good R&B music more assertive and complex. Her iconic status endured not because of any of her songs, but because of how she sang songs, and then because of who she was and had been.
Of course, the hoped for consummation was an ill-founded construct; the continuing problems of the city and the Rodney King riots: hyper-segregation, diminishing industry, poverty, the protracted ghetto, the stigma of the past and hurricane Katrina, Mike Tyson and O.J Simpson; black people on welfare not getting out of bed; the cynical temptation was to think the black girl who discovered the pot of gold found it wanting.
In Isabel Wilkerson’s account, she refers to a notation on Aida Mae Brandon. It’s 1996 and she’s sitting, at aged 83, in her window, looking down at the street below at the third generation of Chicago’s blacks:
A man is selling drugs out of a trashcan. She can see, plain as day, where he puts them and how he gets them out of the trash can for the white customers in their SUVs with suburban license plates. Another hides his stash in his mouth. And when customers come up, he pulls a piece of inventory from his tongue.
At President Obama’s inauguration in 2008, the narrative of African American history is consummated again: Aretha Franklin (Whitney Houston’s god mother) sings My Country 'tis of Thee and later at the inauguration ball it's the beautiful Beyonce with Etta James’ At Last. Whitney’s not there, though if we recall her live rendition of the national anthem or NBCs Olympic Song, and have somehow missed the news the last fifteen years, we’d be mystified as to why. Obama channels Al Green in his acceptance speech, can someone remember when we bought long players, the chocolate color girl with pearly-white teeth;: the first album to debut at number one, 200 million albums and singles sold worldwide. Lepore’s article concludes with a quote from Richard Wright; it talks of those who are missing, who were part of journey but somehow couldn’t make it through:
“We watch strange moods fill our children, and our hearts swell with pain,” Wright wrote. “The streets, with their noise and flaring lights, the taverns, the automobiles, and the poolrooms claim them, and no voice of ours can call them back.”
The migration helps to define African American cultural identity through the final two thirds of the 20th century; and we can hear in those journeys and those cities, in their music especially, the sound of the Negro past colliding with the realities of the future. Billie Holliday’s Strange Fruit is on lynching; Tony Morrison’s Beloved is about the guilt and exorcism of a racist past. John Coltrane’s Love Supreme is in love with the gutters and skylines. To the roll-call we might add, as Samuel L. Jackson’s DJ character does in Do The Right Thing, a list of characters who have helped document and define the African American experience through their art over the century: Robert Johnson, Mahalia Jackson, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye, Gill Scott Heron, James Baldwin, Stevie Wonder, Donnie Hathaway, Chuck D; all of whom, in one sense or another, made that journey. A large number never really survived, and are recalled, with little exception, not because they were black, but because they had soul.
The first time I heard Whitney Houston I was twelve and her video for Saving all My Love For You was on television. She was incredibly beautiful, framed mainly in shadow, at night, or between doorways and rooms and in the recording studio. The video wasn’t modern, but doesn’t seem outdated now; Whitney was offered as a summation of the journey taken before by per peers – she was a plateau and a queen. Her rise - as was suggested in the video - was not through the jazz canon, but through modeling and the popular music scene, her incredible voice and her gospel heritage. This was the first era when pure talent - through the commercial range of MTV - could be recognized for what it was, encapsulating the hope in Nina Simone’s exhalant Young Gifted and Black, without being burdened, for the first time, by that last word.
Whitney Houston was not the best songwriter and neither did she have the best songs; those she did have were not necessarily personal or revelatory, and as her star rose she embodied much of the sheen of that popular era, and was not always liked (she doesn’t make the Do The Right Thing roll-call mentioned above). But she was the best singer. She was the first and the last African American woman to embody true superstar status in the old sense of the word.
By the release of her fourth studio album the parameters had shifted so that as much as My Love is Your Love was up-to-date, it was also a prelude to genre shifts (Lauren Hill’s amongst them) that made good R&B music more assertive and complex. Her iconic status endured not because of any of her songs, but because of how she sang songs, and then because of who she was and had been.
Of course, the hoped for consummation was an ill-founded construct; the continuing problems of the city and the Rodney King riots: hyper-segregation, diminishing industry, poverty, the protracted ghetto, the stigma of the past and hurricane Katrina, Mike Tyson and O.J Simpson; black people on welfare not getting out of bed; the cynical temptation was to think the black girl who discovered the pot of gold found it wanting.
In Isabel Wilkerson’s account, she refers to a notation on Aida Mae Brandon. It’s 1996 and she’s sitting, at aged 83, in her window, looking down at the street below at the third generation of Chicago’s blacks:
A man is selling drugs out of a trashcan. She can see, plain as day, where he puts them and how he gets them out of the trash can for the white customers in their SUVs with suburban license plates. Another hides his stash in his mouth. And when customers come up, he pulls a piece of inventory from his tongue.
At President Obama’s inauguration in 2008, the narrative of African American history is consummated again: Aretha Franklin (Whitney Houston’s god mother) sings My Country 'tis of Thee and later at the inauguration ball it's the beautiful Beyonce with Etta James’ At Last. Whitney’s not there, though if we recall her live rendition of the national anthem or NBCs Olympic Song, and have somehow missed the news the last fifteen years, we’d be mystified as to why. Obama channels Al Green in his acceptance speech, can someone remember when we bought long players, the chocolate color girl with pearly-white teeth;: the first album to debut at number one, 200 million albums and singles sold worldwide. Lepore’s article concludes with a quote from Richard Wright; it talks of those who are missing, who were part of journey but somehow couldn’t make it through:
“We watch strange moods fill our children, and our hearts swell with pain,” Wright wrote. “The streets, with their noise and flaring lights, the taverns, the automobiles, and the poolrooms claim them, and no voice of ours can call them back.”
Let the Right One In – 2008
Sometimes horror can provide a descriptive role of societies ills. The Blair Witch Project exemplified the void young people felt in pre-911 America, the absence of faith in the face of complex evils – a take on reality (hand held movie) that closed the existentialist gap between the norm and the not. Good modern movies often close that gap and are made ‘believable’ with an approach that similarly de-mythologizes their subject matter; the look of the films become tighter, leaner. Let the Right One In is filmed like this in its repetitive use of locale, its pauses over snow-swept streets and quiet, matt rooms, and it teases us with the final possibility of being not just descriptive (of adolescent ills and horrors) but also remedial. That it’s not disturbs me, but there’s also that element to horror. Not that director Thomas Alfredson needs to worry about getting away with anything. Let The Right One In doesn’t just rise above horror conventions - bulbous latex or dreaded dissonant chords. Instead, framed like a social drama, vampire Eli (Lina Leandersson) urges 12-year old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) to deal with his tormentors, but it’s something he doesn’t have in him, and there is no rites of passage for either child, stuck at 12: “You have to come down, hard.” Eli’s insistence defines her side of the argument, and we think we know what she means when Oskar fights back. Later we realize she means something different, but by then, like Oskar, we’ve also taken sides. | Cache – 2005
Michael Haneke’s Cache, the reviews tell us, doesn’t leave us with any easy answers – the film is variously described in this way. If a film builds to a conclusion that is compelling and true to it’s self and that wishes not to reveal answers at the end, then I’ll applaud the film. 12 Angry Men is the prime example – the film makes a moral point more forceful by the fact it doesn't tell you what actually happened. Twice in Cache, George Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) has a clear opportunity to ask a question that will provide him and the rest of us with an answer the central question of the movie. Someone has been filming his apartment and meetings, sending him the recordings on videotape with gruesome images that relate back to a traumatic childhood memory. Who is making the tapes? Laurent, even confronting his demons, is blinded by rage and fear, and there’s obviously a lot, despite the overwhelming pain that Cache expresses, which remains in those recesses. But that Laurent can’t simply ask the question is frustrating at a narrative level; it interferes with the logic and truthfulness of the film; surely a television presenter looking for answers that will dramatically effect the whole future course of his life, would ask the obvious one. A work of genius nonetheless, but muted by that problem. |
