We Have a Problem in Houston

Chris Lemler | February 12, 2012
It's so sad to hear about Whitney Houston's death. She will be missed

Scott Hardie | February 12, 2012
People are quick to blame drugs for Whitney Houston's death, but I think it's understandable. Drugs weren't to blame for Amy Winehouse's death, which I think turned out to be alcohol poisoning, another form of substance abuse, but I think any reasonable person would jump to that conclusion.

One memorial that I read made a good point: For years now, we've kind of always expected Houston to bounce back and put out another album that achieved the same heights as her early work. She seemed to put Bobby Brown and the drugs behind her. Apparently her last album in 2009 sold well (the news today was the first I'd even heard of it), but now we'll never see that comeback, and it forces us to re-evaluate what we thought of her for many years now. We have a way of forcing the larger-than-life people in our culture to fit certain narratives, and it's difficult when the myth is disproven by reality.

People are going to compare her death to Michael Jackson's, since they both showed tremendous talent early in their careers and slowly faded away, dying before making the comeback that we kind of always expected of them. And really, before anybody denounces Houston as a drug addict and a poor role model in spite of the years of very hard work that it obviously took her to get to the top, I would like to express my wish that we could accept complex public figures for their better qualities AND their worse ones. When Jackson died, some wanted to reminisce about his singing talent and forget the accusations of child molestation, while others wanted the opposite. When Joe Paterno died, it was the same. Can he not be a brilliant, beloved, championship-winning coach AND a scumbag who allowed more child rape to occur through his negligence? Why is there not room for both facts in the way that we remember him? To me, Whitney Houston is and will continue to be both the amazing post-gospel pop singer that I grew up with (a friend's mom played her cassettes every day when driving us to and from school), and the scary husk of a woman who foolishly exposed the extent of her decline to Diane Sawyer. She left us a while ago, but it's still a shame that she's gone.

Chris Lemler | February 12, 2012
Yeah she did a really good job with the song I will always love you in The Bodyguard. That fit the movie just perfect