Closing Thoughts on Whitney Houston’s Legacy

“The Voice” is no longer with us. As widely reported, Whitney Houston was found dead in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Ca., just a day before the 2012 Grammy Awards. Houston cannot be said to have left us without significant achievement: as it stands, Houston has been one of the most successful female singers of all time.

Her name has been sold worldwide on over 200 million albums and singles. The Guinness Book of World Records has anointed Houston the most awarded female singer ever, with 415 career awards as of 2010, including six Grammies and 22 American Music Awards.

All deaths are meaningful, but some seem to unleash an outpouring that betrays a vast network of influence. And I think that influence, whatever the context, is one of the most immediate measures of a musician’s life and career. And the influence from a singer like Whitney Houston—one so obvious that it seems under-expressed during her lifetime—has been simply staggering.

It has been said that Whitney Houston played a huge factor in legitimizing African-American female artists in pop music during a time in which black artists were vastly underrepresented on mainstream outlets such as MTV, a vein similar to Michael Jackson’s effect for future black male artists. Houston’s seamless tight-rope walk between pop, gospel and R&B genres, gelled together by her virtuoso vocals of leviathan power, made this important musical crossover possible.

Houston has long been acknowledged as one of the most significant progenitors of the modern female pop star. Female artists as diverse as Rihanna, Christina Aguilera, Toni Braxton and LeeAnn Rimes (in a list that could fill up the entire space of this article) have gone on record stating the huge influence of Whitney’s oeuvre on their singing careers.

As Whitney Houston is remembered here in the Tampa Bay area, we can at least reflect on the fact that our city factored heavily in one sphere of Houston’s multi-faceted circle of influence.

Houston’s famous Super Bowl XXV rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was performed at the now-demolished Tampa Stadium. Tampa Bay’s Florida Orchestra performed behind Houston.

The Super Bowl XXV version of the anthem, uniquely approached for its time, became so successful that it was later released as a single in its own right, and it ever-after spawned numerous imitations for opening game anthems afterward, for good or for ill.

Some NFL officials reportedly feared that the unorthodox arrangement of the national anthem may be taken as disrespectful given the ongoing Persian Gulf War. How off base those voices turned out to be. And this fear, along with the risky complexity of the anthem’s arrangement itself, are said to have factored into the decision for a prerecorded “protection copy” to have been broadcast over the live performance. Does this matter now? It’s not the time to debate, though, again, influence becomes the key: the impact of Houston’s “Star-Spangled Banner” is undeniable. However the sticky details fall, the effect remains.

We don’t yet know the whole circumstances of Houston’s death, or whether her long-rumored drug troubles played a part.

But the influence of the life of Whitney Houston is as palpable as ever, and perhaps even more so, given that her death has jolted us back into awareness of how much her music has mattered.

Mikey Angelo Rumore can be reached at michaelangelorumore@gmail.com.