“You have to find happiness in yourself and know who you are before you start,” Whitney Houston replied in 1996 when asked about the pangs of fame. “Otherwise, adds the American singer, you will end up being someone else, someone you may not even like. »
“Can I be me?” (“Can I be me?”), she often asked those around her and her musicians. Will she have had time to belong? She was found dead at the age of 48 in a hotel in Los Angeles on February 11, 2012, on the eve of the Grammy Awards. His only daughter, Bobbi Kristina, will survive him only three years, also victim, in very close circumstances, of an overdose at 22 years old.
British director Nick Broomfield teams up with Rudi Dolezal, director and producer of popular clips in the 1990s, and author of a documentary on the group Queen (Freddie Mercury. The Untold Story), to return to the dazzling journey of that nicknamed “The Voice”. A voice that got more number one chart hits than the Beatles. And who will immortalize, in 1992, with her divine interpretation, the original version of I Will Always Love You (written in 1973 by Dolly Parton) for the soundtrack of the film The Bodyguard, in which she plays herself alongside Kevin Costner .
Influential Advisor
From a producer’s point of view, Whitney Houston is dead from not being able to be herself: in the studio and on stage, she is the marketing product, malleable popstar, of record label Arista Records and its boss, Clive Davis, who want to seduce white America. With his family of musicians and singers, where the Church occupies a central place, no deviation is allowed. Her mother, a backup singer for Aretha Franklin or Elvis Presley, trained her to have “the career that she herself would have liked to have”.
Impossible, too, to live in broad daylight the romantic relationship that would have linked her to Robyn Crawford, a childhood friend who became an influential advisor. “For them, enlightens the friend of singer and writer Allison Samuels, homosexuality was a bigger problem than drugs. Whitney’s mother coldly confirms this to host Oprah Winfrey.
The toxicity of those around her and the music industry – many of which thrived at her expense – doesn’t stop at gay taboos and racial issues: Long before she was a star, Whitney Houston was already consuming cocaine in the inner city of suburban New York, where she grew up. An addiction also hidden, which will only grow alongside Bobby Brown, the “little rebel of R’n’B”, whom she will marry in 1992 and with whom she will share fourteen years during a life plagued by doubt and pressure. She loses her overwhelming crystalline voice several times.
The directors show how the singer entered into resistance and leave her the final word. His chorister, composer and singer of R’n’B and gospel Pattie Howard is the one who speaks about it best. We can only regret the absence in the credits of Robyn Crawford, author of the book A Song for You. My Life with Whitney Houston (Dutton, 2019).
