Sweetheart Dethroned
For some years Whitney Houston held the post of America's Sweetheart,
pretty, God-fearing and patriotic.
She went to the White House to discuss youth projects,
and set up a foundation to fight illiteracy.
Her rendering of "The Star-Spangled Banner"
at the Superbowl in 1991, during the Gulf war-
cuddly as a teddy-bear in a white tracksuit-
was so joyously rousing that it was reissued
in the wake of the September 2001 attacks.
Music allowed her to break onto MTV and the late-night chat shows,
forging a new path for black women
as Michael Jackson had done for the men.
It also proved, to many blacks,
that she was not black enough,
showing none of their fury
and very little of the soulful gospel depths
of Auntie Ree and Cousin Dionne.
The cutting urban hip-hop of the 1980s she found ugly,
like listening to her brothers boast of the women they'd laid.
When she tried angrier songs herself-
as in "It's not Right But it's Okay", in 1998-
they still seemed as cool and glossy as her blue sheath dress.
The scratchy defiance of later albums
(such as "I Look to You", her last, in 2009),
owed more to the drug-ravaged thinness of her voice
than the miseries of her recent life.
Who she was, and what she really wanted,
remained as unclear as her bathtub death
in a Los Angeles hotel on the night before the Grammys-
at which Adele, another big belter in the Houston style,
carried away most of the prizes.
She needed the give and take of an audience,
Miss Houston said.
Besides, God had given her this gift to use.
Yet told by Oprah Winfrey in 2009
that her voice was a national treasure,
and that some people thought she had squandered it,
she could only whisper, terror-struck, "That's heavy."
Too heavy, was perhaps the truth.