Whitney Houston
So, friends, the final result of the poll was that 32% of respondents wanted me to trash the oeuvre of Shania Twain, who, it turns out is Canadian and therefore ineligible for a trashing. Damn. She’s so ripe for a kicking. Actually, she’s ripe for a titty-basting with man batter first, then a kicking - but that's quite enough about my sexual predilections.
That leaves us with a tie between blonde haired pop-muppets Hanson and crack-faced, singing Skeletor look-a-like, Whitney Houston. Of the two I veer towards Houston because this blog isn’t so much about bad music as bad taste in music - and Whitney is both terrible and one of America’s most successful recording artists. Hanson are just an insipid bunch of hairless little cock monkeys - like albino mice with guitar flavoured farts.
But first, I suppose I should defend The Clash from Bart’s previous savaging. If I remember it rightly it went like the this: “The Clash , blah blah, fake, blah blah, London Calling has a great cover, blah blah, not punk blah etc…”
Sigh.
The Clash are not the greatest of punk bands, admittedly. They’re not even really a punk band - more of an agit-prop pub rock combo with dub pretensions. But, who among us has not chicken danced to “White Riot” or scratched their chin in awe at the lyrical majesty that is “London Calling”?
What’s that? Is that a resounding “No” that I hear our American readers cry? You’re saying that you hair brush mimed to “Sweet Child O’ Mine” instead? Well - I’m sorry but that makes you officially GAY.
And, when I say “gay” I mean “gay” in the modern sense - meaning “lame”. And also in the old fashioned sense meaning, you like it up the sphincter from a 1980s hair rocker wearing leopard print spandex.
Anyway enough casual and ironic homophobia, and onto the subject of this week’s brief tirade; Whitney Houston.
Poor Whitney. Poor, poor Whitney. She’s like the Judy Garland of Generation X - except Judy could still belt out “Over the Rainbow” at 55, when a diagrammatic cross section of her stomach looked like the shelves behind the counter at your local drug store. Whitney hasn’t done anything for years except smoke crack, get smacked in the face by Bobby Brown and scratch her vagina. Live, on television.
This is much better, of course, than what she was doing before; making records. Houston belongs to a class of performer that we British like to call “a pile of shite”. Americans call them “divas”. A diva is a female performer convinced that her meagre talent is so huge that they can get away with performing the vocal equivalent of a trapeze act whenever they’re let loose on stage; the kind of gymnastic antics that usually end with a leotard wearing Eastern European face down in the sand, a spatter pattern of blood and teeth radiating from their broken head.
Surrounded by compliant lackeys, no one dare tell Houston that it really is better to just sing the melody as it was written, and not always try to stick seven more notes into every one that appears on the page.
The zenith of this was, of course, the day Whitney chummed up with Mariah Carey to sing some fucking Disney song I can’t be arsed to Google. YouTube it. There’s a live version that's the vocal equivalent of two pigs being slaughtered with a rusty coat-hanger. Incapable of picking a single note, each of the preening prima donnas criss-crosses frenetically over the other’s performance, canceling out any musicality inherent in either, producing the musical approximation of an 18 car pile-up on the motorway. Sorry, “freeway”.
It’s not enough for Houston that she has made some of the world’s cheesiest films either - showcasing “acting” skills that rival her vocal “talent”. In “The Bodyguard”, they put her next to Kevin Costner and she still looked like a hat stand with wheels. When she appeared in “Waiting to Exhale”, British people prayed to their pagan Gods that Houston would forget to exhale altogether, turn purple and drop dead. But it’s her singing in these pictures that makes most sane people (i.e. Europeans) want to stick a steel spike in both their ears and stir vigorously.
It’s not enough for her that she gave the world “One Moment in Time” - a schmaltz-fest archetypal of her back catalogue that builds insincere platitude on top of fake sentimentality with layers of soup and syrup, until it explodes into a gratuitous grandstanding fog horn of a key change that screams “LOOK AT ME! I’M SINGING! I’M SINGING! THIS IS THE BIT WHERE YOU SHOULD CRY NOW!”
And then they wheel on the mentally handicapped children and all the Americans come in their pants.
No - none of this history of dreck and drugs is enough to make her want to give up. It’s rumoured that Whitney has put down the “alooominnum” foil and Zippo and is now, finally poised for a comeback. And where did she choose to make her first live appearance for five years?
Kuala Lumpur. Kuala. Fucking. Lumpur.
You know what? She could have chosen Timbuktu and no one east of New York or west of LA would have given a flying fuck. Houston is everything that makes American musical taste shit; she’s overblown, insincere, saccharine and dumb as fuck; a big-mouthed shiny bauble; a spastic limbed show-off with absolutely nothing to really show off about. Like, for example, America.
And that brings me to the end of my evaluation of Whitney. I'm so glad that I resisted the urge to call her "Shitney Pukestain". That would have been childish.
Meanwhile, any Hall and Oates fans still tuning in should check out this video from time index 0:35. You may learn something shocking and disturbing about your heroes. Normal people, the kind who don’t need slip on shoes or a special device to open jars for them, will simply have their suspicions confirmed...