Whitney Houston was an American success story and a tragedy. Her rise in the 80′s and early 90′s was based on her talented voice. Then she married Bobby Brown and got into Coke. It was truly tragic and now she’s dead at 48.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Whitney Houston, who ruled as pop music’s queen until her majestic voice and regal image were ravaged by drug use, erratic behavior and a tumultuous marriage to singer Bobby Brown, has died. She was 48.
Houston’s publicist, Kristen Foster, said Saturday that the singer had died, but the cause and the location of her death were unknown.
News of Houston’s death came on the eve of music’s biggest night – the Grammy Awards. It’s a showcase where she once reigned, and her death was sure to case a heavy pall on Sunday’s ceremony. Houston’s longtime mentor Clive Davis was to hold his annual concert and dinner Saturday; it was unclear if it was going to go forward.
“I am absolutely heartbroken at the news of Whitney’s passing,” music producer Quincy Jones said in a written statement. “I always regretted not having had the opportunity to work with her. She was a true original and a talent beyond compare. I will miss her terribly.”
This is a tragedy and a sad waste of talent. Rest in Peace Whitney Houston.
(Hat Tip: Macker)
Tags: Whitney Houston
My age
Last year Amy Winehouse now Whitney Houston.
Now this is how you sing the national anthem at the Super bowl (Jan. 1991 -- Tampa Florida).
Speranza wrote:
Too bad it wasn’t that POS Roseanne Barr.
Bob in Breckenridge wrote:
Thank God it was not Roseanne Barr.
h/t Zip
Bobby Brown done her wrong.
This tragedy is an all to common occurrence in the Music industry. Of all the individuals I have personally known who passed long before their time (hell, who have died at all) a genuinely disturbing percentage of them were professional musicians. It was in fact the deaths of band members from my last band that led me to retire from the music industry.
Whitney made an incredible impact on the music world, but there is no one who can honestly claim that the Music Industry didn’t make an even larger impact on Whitney Houston. Whitney will be remembered for a long time to come, sadly nearly as much for the lifestyle that drove her from the music industry and most likely will eventually be disclosed as responsible for her untimely death as for her talent.
@ darkwords:
@ Bunk X:
Sorry.
I never did get why she didn’t just tell Bobby Brown to go fuck himself. I mean, good god, this is Whitney Houston here. It’s not like she needed to aim low.
Oh, that and Don’t Do Drugs. Not coke, anyway
Whitney was shunned by the “black community” for her success in “white music” and with “white audiences.”
It was widely surmised at the time that her marriage to Bobby Brown was, at least in part, to quell some of the backlash.
Brown, in turn, introduced her to crack. Crack became so popular in poorer settings because it was cheap. Also highly powerful and addictive, but it was propagated to get poor folks able to afford cocaine. Period. It maximizes profit and expands the customer base.
Hence it became a symbol of the “ghetto.” Along with ghetto culture, of which Brown was eminently more popular in and with whom Houston in particular had trouble with early in her career, largely due to a perceived lack of “blackness.”
I am an addict, and am in no way absolving Houston of her responsibility not to poison herself.
But I would be intellectually dishonest if I didn’t lay a small part of the blame on racism within the black community.@ Zimriel:
Bumr50 wrote:
Bobby and Whitney were never in my circle of professional Musicians, but I did have friends who knew them. Bobby Brown is guilty of a lot of things, but from what my friends have told me, introducing her to crack was not one of them. Whitney had a freebase problem when she met Bobby, for those who don’t know Freebasing Cocaine is the predecessor to crack. My understanding is that you can blame Faye Resnick (Nichole Simpsons best friend) for introducing Whitney to freebasing.
The other thing that I have been told is that despite the appearances of their troubled marriage, Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston genuinely loved each other. While many in the African-American community may have believed that Bobby and Whitney’s marriage was some act to make Whitney more acceptable to the African-American community my friend, who was a Legal Counsellor for Suge Knight’s Death Row Records, assured me that it was definitely not the case. And I assure you, he was in a position to know.
Prescription drugs found in Whitney Houston’s hotel room, report says
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/02/12/whitney-houston-dead-prescription-drugs-drowned-autopsy/
Either accidental or suicide….
Very tragic…she had such a beautiful voice. Rest in Peace Whitney!
Zimriel wrote:
Apparently no coke was involved here.
dorian: your sequence of events makes sense.
I didn’t see Brown as introducing Houston to coke, and I *really* didn’t see the racial angle. I had consistently read in the tabloids etc that Brown enabled Houston’s habit, though, and that is where posts #11 & 12 came from.
The media has a tendency to cause more marital strife than it reports. The Penn – Madonna marriage was never what I’d call placid, but I suspect that Penn was right to blame the marriage’s failure upon the paparazzi.
Lily wrote:
Yeah, I read that, but I still stand by #12 that coke ruined her life.
Lily wrote:
Don’t bet on it. The use of prescription tranquilizers is very common among those who use cocaine based drugs like crack or freebase.
@ doriangrey:
I stand corrected then. Didn’t think it about that way…yep they use them to come down from the speed to sleep…..
Zimriel wrote:
Oh I don’t disagree coke ruined her life….
Zimriel wrote:
They dog these people til they have no private life at all…
@ doriangrey:
She became a very unhappy lady in the end….really sad.
@ Lily:
Or should I say a sad lady…….
Lily wrote:
It isn’t even just the media or paparazzi. My heyday as a professional musician was back in 1985, yet by the time I retired in 1996 I was still being recognized on the street on a nearly daily basis. It’s been 16, almost 17 years since I retired and I still am occasionally recognized by people I have never actually met.
I never approached the celebrity status that Whitney held, but I can tell you this, the pressure on celebrities especially musicians to “Party” and use drugs like cocaine and meth is more than you would believe.
It works kind of like this, the average none celebrity want’s to let their hair down, unwind and relax every now and then, and every so often they have something they really want to celebrate. That is reality. Where it stops being reality is, when they chose to do their super high energy celebrating and how they chose to do their super high energy celebrating.
That is where musicians come into the picture. Your average none celebrity person very often picks a day/night to do their super high energy once a year partying/celebrating when one of the favorite musicians is in town. Which means, going to the show.
Going to the “Show” is the night when they do things that they normally don’t do. It’s the night that they impress their friends by getting a little coke or meth or by buying some very expensive alcohol. It’s the night where they take that chance and try to meet their favorite celebrity musician after the show. And when they meet that favorite celebrity, they want two things.
They want to party with that celebrity and they want to impress that celebrity. To do that, they offer to share their drugs and expensive alcohol. For Mister and Miss’s average citizen this is a once or maybe twice a year event. It never seems to really enter their conscientiousness that this is a nightly event for their favorite celebrity.
The higher you get up on that celebrity pedestal, the more people there are constantly trying to party, or even out party you on a regular basis. Not only is the access to drugs and alcohol staggering, but the number of people constantly offering it to you is genuinely mind numbing.
Like I said, John and Jane Q Citizen never even remotely face this level of social pressure, even your regular everyday drug addict or recreational drug user never faces this kind of pressure to use.
Now don’t get me wrong here, as Bumr50 said, it is the individuals and only the individuals responsibility to not poison themselves with drugs. And the fact that professional musicians face this level of social peer pressure does not in any way absolve them of their own personal responsibility to not poison themselves.
I can say this because I have been there. This was my life until 1996. I have been drug free for 12 years now. It took the deaths of a dozen of my friends for me to finally come to my senses. I consider myself one of the fortunate ones, I got out of the music industry to save my life and sanity. Far to many of my friends and professional peers had to die to get out.
Whitney Houston’s death is tragic, but most tragic of all, is just how common what happened to her is in the music industry. Some people survive and prosper in the music industry, most just survive, but for a disturbing number, being in the music industry equals a death sentence. That is the true tragedy of Whitney Houston’s death.
@ doriangrey:
Oh I can understand the pressure….it would be staggering. Everyone wanting a piece of you…..nightly.
I can never say I have been under that mountain of pressure.
The path Whitney took….led her to a tragic end…and in my opinion (just mine) the past few years for her were nothing but sadness for her.