Whitney Houston (1963-2012)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The coverage of Whitney Houston's death is already annoying me immensely.

People die all the time. And we don't give a shit.

There are countless people in our rich, "civilized" societies living on the streets, hopeless and helpless -- children, too. The homeless and the hungry are everywhere, struggling just to get by from day to day. And we don't give a shit.

Millions upon millions of people around the world, people without a voice, are struggling, too, suffering in degrading, dehumanizing poverty. And we don't give a shit.

A drone strike in Pakistan kills civilians. And we don't give a shit.

And yet a celebrity dies, a celebrity who really hasn't been of much interest to anyone in years, a celebrity with a history of drug abuse and a self-destroying lifestyle, and the world stops. Or, at least, the media do. It's all about Whitney, you see. She, it seems, was important enough, worthy enough, for us to give a shit, or at least to be told to give a shit.

Sorry, am I being too negative? This isn't really about Whitney Houston, this is about the media, and about how we as a society worship celebrities and prioritize the wrong things.

Whitney herself was a beautiful, talented woman. I fell in love with her in the '80s, the way teenagers fall in love with singers or actors. That was when she burst upon the scene and at a young age become one of the biggest stars in the world. I was living in Germany at the time, but it hardly mattered. She was famous everywhere. Her first two albums, Whitney Houston (1985) and Whitney (1987), were two of the albums I listened to most during those years. She was pretty amazing, I thought, and I had a huge crush on her. The second concert I ever went to was a Whitney concert in Frankfurt. It was fantastic.

And then we moved to the U.S., to Mendham, New Jersey, where she just happened to live as well. No, I never met her, but I thought it was pretty cool to be living in the same town as Whitney Houston.

It didn't last much longer. I grew up and away from her music. By the time I'm Your Baby Tonight came out, in 1990, I didn't really care anymore. She still had that amazing voice, but I'd moved on. My Whitney period was over -- two albums, a few years, you know how it goes. I was in college when The Bodyguard came out in 1992. I saw it, as I saw as many movies as I could back then, but found it ridiculously silly -- not that it mattered. And then, of course, her life seemed to collapse, not least because of her idiot of a husband. She sprung up now and then, but not for long and only to remind us of the talent that was still there and of the promise that once had been. She was never really "Whitney" anymore.

And so while her death seemed so sudden, a shock, it really wasn't. Not that I know what caused it, but we all had similar thoughts, I'm sure.

There's nothing wrong, I think, with being saddened by her death, nor with looking back now at the positive parts of her life, at all that she accomplished, on the music that was so much a part of our lives -- way back when.

No, what bothers me is the intense wall-to-wall coverage, the self-aggrandizing media-ization of her death as an event requiring our attention, as so much more significant than anything else going on in the world. I understand that a famous person's death will attract more media attention than any other death, because a famous person's death is a story, but there is such disproportion in the way it is covered, not to mention in the way so many people react to it, as if a celebrity's death is an occasion for some required outpouring of collective grief, as well as of the individual expression of grief that supposedly binds us all together in the group-think the media encourage. It's like we're being told that if we don't profess our grief we're not part of the collective, not part of society, not even fully human.

This is all nonsense, of course. As far as I'm concerned, react to Whitney's death any way you want. Don't buy into the group-think. Don't get sucked into the media's coverage of her death as a not-to-be-missed event. And don't forget that there's a lot going on that isn't getting anywhere near such coverage, if any at all.

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Again, this is not to take away from Whitney's death itself, which, yes, is sad, just as all death is sad in one way or another.

But let's turn from the negative to the positive. Here's perhaps my favourite of her songs, One Moment in Time, which she recorded for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul and later performed at the Grammys on February 22, 1989.