Reply to Whitney Houston was the first black woman I wanted to be like....

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[quote=Anonymous]15:06 here. Although I am sure many had different reasons for exactly why Whitney was not "black enough" I was specifically talking about how she was booed while performing "soul train." The criticism of the day was that she stepped too far away from her gospel / soul / r & b roots and stripped too much of the "churchiness" out of her music in a way Aretha Franklin, Deone Warwick and others did not. That sound was poppy back then and a real departure for a black woman (though of course I did not understand that then).

After writing my post I looked at lots of articles today and found this essay written by a black man to be really insightful. He has a whole paragraph about the too white / not black enough factor:

It was because Whitney was a vehicle for integration. She was an image of blackness that white America could buy and in doing so, give us cultural leverage in return. And to the degree she ascended we praised her but felt an unease that it came at the price we ultimately could not pay. During the 1989 Soul Train Awards, she was booed by some of the black audience for what was seen as her abandoning the soul tradition for a bleached pop vocal style. It hurt her deeply. During a Katie Couric interview in 1996 she said, “Sometimes it gets down to that, you know? You’re not black enough for them. I don’t know. You’re not R&B enough. You’re very pop. The white audience has taken you away from them.”

I thought this article was really powerful because basically he says she was an integrator and she paid the price for it. Other posters have mentioned that she married Bobby Brown for street cred (though she personally said "when you love someone you love someone" and told people that she wasn't so different from Bobby after all. The author of this post calls that "double consciousness" and says it is a price black people pay when they appeal to white audiences and then are criticized for selling out their black roots, then they swing the other way, embracing the stereotypical urban black downfalls (crack, etc) in a manifestation of the struggle to stay true vs. appeal to a broader audience. I really shouldn't try to interpret, it is a complex subject. But what strikes me is that in addition to her struggles growing up, and the fact that she was in the spotlight as a very young girl (singing in night clubs in her early teens) and so on, she also had to deal with feelings that she'd turned her back on her roots. That she'd done something wrong by being successful in the way she went about it.

Anyway, here is the article:

http://www.alternet.org/story/154108/why_did_whitney_die_how_double_consciousness_robs_black_america_of_its_artists

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