"There are a few celebrity stories that filter into the white noise category: Paris Hilton breaking up with a boyfriend, Nicole Richie looking stick thin, and on a much more tragic level, Whitney Houston using drugs. "The interesting thing was that when you saw the pictures, you almost wanted to be more surprised than you were," Min continued. When their problems are worse than yours, then you don't want to read about them." And there's no worse buzz kill than a predictable one. "You turn to celebrities for escape and voyeurism. "It's a little tawdry for an Us audience, where celebrities have a nice shiny veneer on them.
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First of all, the story was one hell of a celebrity bummer. "We kind of ignored it," Min explained, adding that she decided against covering it only at the last minute. It's almost too tragic to deal with." Perhaps the surest sign that Houston has essentially ceased to matter is that Min's magazine, whose pages burble and hiss with every plodding plot point in every celebrity soap opera, did not run a story on the Enquirer's "Inside Whitney's Crackden!" scoop. "Now she's not even worthy of 'The Surreal Life.' She's fallen below the entertainment C-list level. "She couldn't have been a bigger or more beloved star, and she was really the first black America's sweetheart," said Janice Min, editor of Us Weekly, about Houston's mid-'80s profile. But in talking and thinking about Houston's story, walking past newsstands where her shiny, bloated face stared up from the tabloid covers, I realized that part of what's so sad about this particular pop culture tragedy is that racism and sexism and celebrity culture only went so far in destroying this woman the rest she seems to have done herself. So I called the kinds of people who could shed light on these possibilities. In 2001, the New York Post reported that MTV has collected B-roll for a Houston obit, an honor normally reserved for geriatrics. I wanted to point out that successful black women get punished, that women's entertainment careers get manipulated to conform to standards they can't maintain, that Houston's thunderous slide was surely precipitated by racism and sexism and a celebrity machine that chews people up and leaves them for dead. Listening to the ugly overtones of her dismissal - "crackhead" just half an epithet away from "crack whore" - I found myself wanting to blame everything that's wrong with American culture. Yes, jarring, even after a decade spent watching her career circle the drain. Hearing someone who mattered to me as a child, who was famous in a daily, first-name-only kind of way, whose voice and face were so very beautiful, get tossed away so unceremoniously was jarring to me. For many black girls, she was the only young female role model presented in lily-white teen bibles or mainstream entertainment who looked anything like them.īut 20 years after her record-breaking debut, and a decade-long dominance of the pop charts, Whitney Houston has been reduced to this: "just another crack head," "a really well-manicured diva" who "just turned a little ghetto." But her impact went deeper than that: Houston's was one of the only black faces that white girls like me who grew up in the 1980s ever saw in magazines in our dentist's office or in video rotation on early Af-Am-light MTV. She won six Grammys and 21 American Music Awards her 1992 cover of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" was the highest-selling single by a woman in pop music history. She was the first American singer to have seven consecutive No. Her first album, "Whitney Houston," sold 24 million copies in 1985, becoming the highest-selling debut for a female solo artist.
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Whitney Houston has sold more than 120 million records. Speaking about the mess on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor," Billboard executive editor Tamara Conniff said, "I think that she was a really well-manicured diva star and she just turned a little ghetto." The photos were taken, and sold to the magazines, by Houston's sister-in-law, who provided an accompanying tale of the singer's cracked-out habits, from hallucinating violent demons, to biting and hitting herself, putting her hand through walls, and locking herself away to smoke rock cocaine and pleasure herself with an apparently prodigious collection of vibrators. The dim assessment came in response to tabloids that on March 29 printed photos of what is supposedly Houston's Atlanta bathroom, littered with crack pipes, cocaine-coated spoons, cigarette butts, Budweiser cans and garbage. But today that woman, Whitney Houston, 42, is just another crack head." Two weeks ago, a story by Los Angeles celebrity journalist Nick Papps began, "It's hard to believe that the drugged, dazed woman staring out from picture was once one of the most popular singers in the world.