Whitney Houston, 1963 — 2012

In an interview with Steve North, Houston's mother said of her daughter's voice:

It’s like déjà vu sometimes, certain licks that she does. It’s uncanny … even scary. Whitney’s so much like me when I was younger. Same size, same mannerisms, that kind of stuff. I’m actually amazed sometimes. She just goes, she soars. And hearing her sometimes just gives me chills.

The New Yorker's music critic Sasha Frere-Jones concluded her reflection on Houston's life by saying:

The ballads in Houston’s catalog reveal the most about her, like “I Have Nothing,” which is ostensibly a ballad in the way many of her ballads are. Houston begins in a mode that seems cowed, maybe sad or wearied, and then the voice takes over and she becomes entirely invincible, at odds with any lyric that hints at weakness. Watching her decline, in public, was especially hard because she was someone who had so little use for musical fragility or any songs that trucked in self-pity. Her biggest late period hit was possibly her hardest, thematically. Houston tended towards the uplifting, as a song picker, but by 1998, Houston’s troubled marriage to Bobby Brown and substance problems had come into view. So “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay,” which exonerates an unfaithful lover, was about as close as Houston would come to claiming she’d accept a loss.

Was this a form of magical thinking, then, this pose of invincibility? Her last album, “I Look To You,” avoids expressions of power, implicitly acknowledging that there are forces that might just prevent her immortality. She settles for being cheerful, and “Million Dollar Bill” served as a reasonably fun piece of retro disco. But her voice is heard multi-tracked over and over—we rarely hear the instrument all by itself, doing what only it could do, breaking the sung note into infinitely small and mobile units. No, by the end, she’s mostly comforting herself, as if she knew what was coming.