In Which We View The Lady From Afar

Cover Art

by BRITTANY JULIOUS

Last year, I browsed a small record collection at a vintage store. In the bins I found early Grace Jones singles and Nu Shooz albums, but she was nowhere to be found. "Do you have any Whitney Houston?" I asked. I had been thinking about her more than normal. It is only lately that I can begin to break down the people, places, and moments that shaped my existence. An overwhelming sense of nostalgia shapes my actions. I am discovering what I’ve always known, but never appreciated. Houston fit in nicely.

I went home disappointed. Later I pulled up her album covers.

On one, Houston is front and center. Her hair is pulled back from her face and she wears a Grecian gown. It is her self-titled debut, and atop the photograph of Houston are the words “WHITNEY HOUSTON” written in a straight-forward and conservative typeface. The cover art suggests a maturity far beyond her 22 years. However, songs on her LP such as “Saving All My Love For You” and “Greatest Love of All” correlate more closely to the image on the album. This is a voice that is front and center, a voice that demands the seriousness of its power.

The one anomaly of this time period is the single “How Will I Know.” The song is both a clear departure that first garnered attention for Houston and a necessary step to gain a newly-powerful audience: fans of MTV. Whereas her earlier cover art was muted in shades of blue, white, and black, “How Will I Know,” is an eager grab for the teen set. “How Will I Know” was released prior to “Greatest Love of All,” a true-to-form Houston ballad. The release of the latter single was a pointed reminder that despite wanting to branch out to other “markets,” what truly set Houston apart was the power to silence thousands with one note.

Whitney Houston is average. I say this not as an insult, but as an observation of her earlier appearance and demeanor. She was not overtly sexual or crass. She existed beyond what it meant (and means) to be a black woman making music. She had an image that was never transient. When I look at old photographs of her now, I am reminded of the black women I see on the streets, the ones who exhibit the sort of vulnerability and curiosity that is typically ignored. Houston was never an “angry black woman.” She was brokenhearted and troubled and hopeful. This much was apparent.

The apartment my family lived in when we first moved to the suburb of Oak Park was small, with low ceilings and a tiny bathroom that could barely fit more than one person at a time. But it was also well lived-in and even now, eighteen years later, I can clearly picture the space. I remember early evenings and my mother fixing dinner on the stove. She listened to Houston’s music. It was never a big deal, but merely what she did after a hard day at work. Whitney was routine and day-to-day. She was always there.

Like a lot of people, I began listening to Whitney’s music again last Saturday evening, focusing on her earlier albums. These, to me, stood out the most. Once “I Will Always Love You” had its moment, it was the music from her earlier LPs that radio stations continued to play. This was the music that I grew up with, the music that ultimately shaped me into the woman I am today. It was the music of my middle class black life.

Fully immersing in early Whitney for a lot of young women like myself began and ended in long car rides. Like the soothing comfort of quiet storm, songs like “Saving All My Love for You” were the soundtrack for the here and there. I can’t recall where we were going, but I can remember the cool breeze blowing in from a cracked window, the light golden glare from street lamps, and the radio as “I’m Your Baby Tonight” played again and again.

For a brief period of time, Houston represented stability. Her music was comfort food. It always sounded nice. If the time was right, if the speakers were loud enough, we would know those songs from beginning to end. The music only settled somewhere skin deep. She was always there for us with little fanfare. But when we pulled her out or when she graced our speakers, we paid attention. This was my informal education. My parents did not need to introduce me. To have a car, to have a long commute, to have parents of a certain age meant her music was constant and normal. This is who we listened to. It’s just what we did. It's just who we were.

Brittany Julious is the senior editor of This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about Party Girl. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Secret Message" - Nu Shooz (mp3)

"Goin' Thru the Motions" - Nu Shooz (mp3)

"You Put Me In A Trance" - Nu Shooz (mp3)

In Which We Hang Out With Our Friends From College

Where White People Come Together With Other White People

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Big Chill

dir. Lawrence Kasdan

105 minutes

The cinema of the the world we were born into holds a strange fascination, unless you were born the year American Beauty came out. When The Big Chill arrived in theaters in autumn of 1983, director John Sayles was made very angry, since the film seemed to be basically a revamp of his Return of the Secaucus 7. Why anyone would claim the idea of a reunion of college friends as their own invention is beyond me; and thanks to various technological vagaries, we are now never parted from those we supposed we loved.

Alex (Kevin Costner) is the kind of adult that was never around when I was a kid. Suicidal, angsty, even angry, and totally irresponsible. He took a hard-earned education/drug binge from the University of Michigan and did not turn it into very much – his scientific career flamed out, he tried manual labor, and he was eventually forced to depend on the kindness of his friend Harold (Kevin Kline). Harold did the opposite of Alex: he focused on a sporting goods business in South Carolina and purchased a lovely house for himself and his college sweetheart Sarah (Glenn Close). Five years before I was born, Sarah slept with Alex, probably as some sort of karmic punishment for her husband's success. He forgave her.

Still wanting to help the man who had fucked his wife, Harold let him in a company secret: he was about to sell his sporting goods company to a larger chain (say, Dick's, or the Sports Authority, if either existed in the early 80s). With the expectation of this money in hand, Alex and his girlfriend (Meg Tilly) purchased a cabin nearby his college friends, where he could try to be happy, since it is what they required of him. Not so graciously, he slit his wrists rather than succumb to this act of charity.

That is where The Big Chill begins, and its opening montage is the first of 16,000 in recorded history set to "I Heard It Through the Grapevine." Alex's friends across the country hear of his passing and come to mourn him, and have a party with their fellow Michigan alums at Kline and Close's mansion. The funeral itself is never the act of mourning, what follows is.

My college advisor went everywhere with her Alaskan malamute, whom I called Sandy. (For some reason she never told me the creature's name. This was probably wise, since it might have come when I called.) She blithely informed me that I would never believe what all the people I knew at school would become, and she was right, because I can't believe it. Neither can the graduates of the University of Michigan.

Student protests over some teensy tuition increases made waves across Europe recently. It was a laugh for Americans, because we cannot imagine anything as content as an American college student. The University of Michigan in the 1960s, according to Lawrence Kasdan, was a very hopeful and idealistic liberal sort of place, and everyone in The Big Chill is extremely upset about how jaded, adult, and in some cases, parental, they have become.

Meg (Mary Kay Place) thought she would use a degree in law to help the accused; instead she finds them as disgusting as her last twenty of years of unsuccessful dating. In a Tina Fey-esque take on middle age, she requires a child more than a successful career now that she is in possession of the latter. Michael (Jeff Goldblum) abandoned his ideals to become a reporter for People. His time spent teaching the youth of Harlem was so revolting he jumped into a more commercial life without a second thought.

None of the people I knew at college were like this. They were the children of the adults in The Big Chill, and they had to lay in the bed their parents made. Now AARP-age, the men and women Kasdan imagined are dedicated to ensuring that their grandchildren will have no bed to lay in at all. The cavalier attitude towards insider trading, the amorality, narcissism, and lack of concern for others is evidenced by that generation's love of entitlements. It may be the thing they really do love, because money is the only thing they feel they truly deserve.

As the never married singles in the group, Goldblum's Michael and William Hurt's Nick are particularly perfect representations of this sort of callousness, and they have the two most entertaining parts in the movie. (The Big Chill had the best casting of any comedy until Flirting With Disaster.) Karen (JoBeth Williams) is especially radiant as the only other married member of this clique. She married her husband Richard because she knew he wasn't the sort of man who would cheat on her, and despite three beautiful children, she is unhappy. Richard, meanwhile, is astounded by the entire group: "They're nothing like you described all these years!"

In the film's best scene, Richard – the only stranger at the party – tells Nick why their friend Alex killed himself. Not surprisingly, Dick is an advertising executive. He informs them that "there's some asshole at work you have to kowtow to, and you find yourself doing things you thought you'd never do. But you try and minimize that stuff; be the best person you can be. But you set your priorities. And that's the way life is. I wonder if your friend Alex knew that. One thing's for sure, he couldn't live with it. I know I shouldn't talk, you guys knew him. But the thing is... no one ever said it would be fun. At least... no one ever said it to me." Waaaaah.

William Hurt tries very hard to steal The Big Chill as Nick, a drug-addled psychologist who for some reason became impotent in Vietnam. Like Frasier, he hosted a psychology talk show on Pacific northwest radio and advised people on their problems until he became so overcome with guilt he absconded from the gig. When he is pulled over in his Porsche by a local South Carolina cop and abuses the cop verbally, Kline turns on his friend, telling him that the cop had prevented robberies at his store and was a good man. The implication is clear: they're on our side now.

Pauline Kael called The Big Chill shallow, overcontrolled and contrived. She saw the characters as spoiled and perhaps more than a little unlikeable, but my generation holds the opposite view. The attitudes of the characters of The Big Chill are perilously relevant, because they haven't really dated at all. They just grew older and became more self-righteous – they lecture us from op-ed pages, they lost their money to Bernard Madoff, they took out an ad complaining that the Grammys didn't pay enough attention to Justin Bieber. They inherited the world.

There is actually something quite wonderful about these people, of having friends who know you even after so many years have passed. It is not that this generation was full of those who didn't know how to do the right thing, or idealists who couldn't live up to the sacred cows of their youth. Kael said that The Big Chill would be "hated by anyone who believes himself to have been a revolutionary or a deeply committed radical during his student demonstration days." The entitled attitude that the men and women of The Big Chill demonstrate is a natural consequence of those days, not a contradiction of them. When we expect to receive something, and do not it receive it, we think of something else to expect.

What the people you know will turn into is the eternal open question. The world that the University of Michigan ejaculated these hopeful young people into does not resemble ours today. Then the fullness of America's service economy in no way foretold economic collapse, whereas we have paid for the sins of our predecessors. If a company is bankrupt, it can no longer compensate its employees; if a person is morally bankrupt, he might want to think of killing himself before depending on the kindness of others. It's the right thing to do.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about the HBO series Big Love. You can find an archive of his writing here.

"You Can't Always Get What You Want (Soulwax remix)" - The Rolling Stones (mp3)

"You Can't Always Get What You Want" - Locomotives (mp3)

"Waiting for the Day" - George Michael (mp3)