Whitney Houston - She's Still Dead, Right?

A conversation from yesterday.

“Whitney Houston’s funeral is today.”

“Oh…she’s still dead, right?”
“Yeah. I’m taping it. Aretha Franklin and Alicia Keyes are going to sing. Kevin Costner is going to be there too...”
“He’s not going to sing, is he?”
“No.”
“Good. I still won’t watch it though…”

The funeral. A star-studded event, just like the Grammy’s…the Whitney’s? Sure! Why not do this as an annual thing? The only difference between the Grammy’s and Whitney’s funeral is that the Grammy’s had slightly less music and Whitney’s funeral had slightly fewer sermons about God and faith (see: acceptance speeches – “Thank you Jesus!”). Meanwhile, everyone competes for who can be the most tearfully earnest and drop the most references to ‘Heaven’ or ‘the Holy Spirit’ or some variation on the phrase ‘I know she’s looking down upon us right now and smiling.’

Still, I’ll take Jesse Jackson over LL Cool J any day (it’s like choosing between being hit by a car or run over by a bus…but still). I still can’t believe they allowed Sir LL to lead the Grammy audience in prayer, to "our fallen sister, Whitney Houston." "Heavenly father, we thank you for sharing our sister Whitney with us...though she is gone too soon, we remain truly blessed to have been touched by her beautiful spirit." Sure, let’s just assume that everyone here is religious and Christian and wants to pray...where the fuck was God for 15 years when she was smoking crack and killing herself? Better point, where were her friends in the music industry? But no, let's have this self-congratulatory schmaltzy bullshit shoutout to another dead waste of talent on the night where we give each other golden trinkets and pretend we’re all good people.

So…yeah. The funeral was much better than the Grammy’s. Better guest stars. The funeral was like a benefit concert. “With special appearances by…” The social event of the season. Dionne Warwick. Stevie Wonder. Mariah Carey. Chaka Khan. Jennifer Hudson. And for someone reason, Tyler Perry (aka “The Worst Thing to Happen to Black People since Crack Cocaine”). Mostly musicians, playing their instruments, dedicating their songs to her, “Whitney…this next one’s for you.” It was great theater.

And, to explain the title of this post (my intent is not to denigrate the dead but to mock the media), I want to focus on the press coverage. So...it's been a week since Whitney Houston died. She's still dead, right? I only ask because they've been doing news stories every day since, with very little in the way of actual factual updates. It's hard to do 'more on this story as it develops' when your story is about a corpse and it can't get any deader.

And the media stories have been, at best, incongruous. They spin the ‘beautiful martyr’ angle, showing her angelic ‘proud strong black sister’ images singing the national anthem or starring in The Bodyguard…then they say ‘What went wrong?’ and show the Diane Sawyer/Oprah interviews with her crack-smoked hoarse voice ("I don't do crack, crack is cheap, crack is whack!") or and sweaty-breakdown clips from her short-lived reality show with her braying ‘BOBBBAY!” over and over…it doesn’t fit. 

If you’re going to reverse spin and rewrite history, at least be consistent. She’s either artist-extraordinaire-cut-down-in-her-prime…or she’s the good-girl-gone-bad-offa-drug-addicted-toxic-lovin'.

She’s either Selina or Dana Plato…but she can’t be both.

And Whitney just got divorced too. Maybe Bobby Brown was the one keeping her alive (that's a scary thought). But people coming on TV and saying, "It was so shocking, I'm so surprised, I never thought this would happen, etc." Really? The only surprising thing is that she didn't die a decade ago. Is this what we're doing, just pretending that this is a great tragedy which nobody saw coming and couldn't have been avoided (and ignoring the fact that she hadn't released a decent album in over 15 years and her voice was seriously shot and her tours were bombing because people walked out and demanded refunds and she had outlived her usefulness and destroyed her own life)? Apparently so.

The great whitewash has already begun, just like Elvis and Michael Jackson and the rest. Her slate cleansed of all sins. The post-mortem cannonization has already begun. 'She was a saint! She was an angel! She was just a troubled soul seeking acceptance!'  Painting her not as a victim but as a martyr to the music industry. Death washes away all your transgressions and leaves you shiny and new. Now all of a sudden she was the greatest musical artist in the history of the universe and her untimely death was an unforeseeable shocking event that nobody could have predicted.

Sad fact is...Whitney Houston looked at Tina Turner's life with Ike and said, 'I want me some of that!" And so she married Bobby and smoked her crackpipe and threw away 15 years of hard work. And now the media is dining out on this story, intent on squeezing every drop of news juice from the rind and sucking every bit of gossipy marrow from the bone, elevating from 'another pathetic celebrity death' to 'national tragedy on par with JFK or Elvis.' Does it matter? Of course not. But it's a nice distraction. To most of us, just like with Elizabeth Taylor or Michael Jackson, we assumed that she was dead already...because technically, in terms of artistic output and celebrity profile, she already was.

I'm sure the toxicology reports will come back with a prescription drug overdose from many mixed medications, along with a little weed, a little coke, and a lot of alcohol. But just like with Anna Nicole and Heath Ledger and all the others, this big-top media carnivalé will continue at least until the toxicology reports come back (probably later still) and will be resurrected and repackaged again when the next celebrity drug addict dies ‘tragically and unavoidably before their time.’ 

That’s the circle of 24-hour news. The circle of life.