Savin' All My Love for... uh... Crack

My personal beef with Whitney Houston stems from the fact that her debut album, Whitney Houston, broke the record for highest-selling debut album ever... a record previously held by Boston's totally kickass and equally eponymous debut. Contrasted with the shaggy, geetar-shreddin', doobie-puffin' everydudes who brought us "Smokin," "Rock 'n' Roll Band," and "More than a Feeling," Whitney's milqeutoast, mom-friendly music-to-get-a-pedicure-to seems all the more unbearably saccharine. The way she says the word "heat" in "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)," or the fact that she had a monstrous hit after ripping off Dolly Parton and "heating things up" onscreen with perennial toilet-filler Kevin Costner just chapped my hide to no end.

Which is why I'm so glad that Whitney has finally come around.

Then:
"First of all, let's get one thing straight. Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let's get that straight. Okay? We don't do crack. We don't do that. Crack is whack." (Whitney to Diane Sawyer, December 4, 2002)

Now:



The new, improved, skeleton-with-a-face Whitney is fine by me. Ever since she married Bobby "Ghostbusters II" Brown, it's been all uphill. Pot busts, crazypants rambling, coke, crack, denial, acceptance, reality TV... like Pete Doherty, Whitney has made a cottage industry out of utterly falling apart in public. (Bobby, too, but no one ever expected great things from Bobby; he wasn't even "the talented one" in New Edition.) Take, for example, today's alleged pictures of Whitney's bathroom during a drug binge. The Whitney Houston with crack, joints, cans of Budweiser, and (puzzlingly) a screwdriver lying around on the bathroom counter is a Whitney Houston I can root for. It makes her way more likable.* Which proves that (for me anyway) rampant self-destructiveness is a highly appealing quality in a celebrity. This is intersting, because the same behavior in, say, the dude next door who sells aluminum siding, or perhaps your kid's second-grade teacher, is decidedly not cool. Then it becomes a "cause for concern" rather than a cause célèbre.

So I guess the moral is this: Crack may be whack, and it certainly plays havok with one's housekeeping skills, but it makes for a richer, more interesting, more compellingly human Whitney Houston experience.

*I still like Boston way better.