Ain't It Shocking What Love Can Do...

I'm going to go ahead and throw out a bit of personal opinion right here at the beginning of this installment that will surely have some folks throwing things at me (in a purely virtual way, of course). I was never a huge Whitney Houston fan. Oh sure, I definitely recognized her talent, and cannot deny her huge contribution to pop music in the 80's and 90's. However, I never really gravitated toward her songs. I would much rather have listened to Aretha Franklin or Chaka Khan. Still would. I'll go ahead and admit something else about Ms. Houston while we're at it; her death really didn't come as much of a surprise. Now I'm not saying that I was rooting for her demise, or that her name was on my dead pool ballot, but given the last decade or so of sadness that seemed to engulf the singer, I really can't say her death surprised me.

That famous interview with Diane Sawyer where Whitney declared "Crack is whack!" Keeps getting played on the cable news outlets as they milk this latest entertainment tragedy for all it is worth. Whether or not she had a crack habit at the height of her alleged drug abuse problem really isn't the point. What matters is that, like the late King of Pop Michael Jackson, there were likely people/handlers that knew what she was allegedly taking and who had the power to try to stop the alleged madness. No one did. Why? Mostly because even in a career in decline Houston was a meal ticket for those folks. The doctor who allegedly killed Jackson was reportedly making $150,000 per MONTH supplying Jackson with his "milk," and you can bet that Houston's entourage was being paid handsomely from the publicists down to the bodyguards (where was Kevin Costner when she needed him?).

Of course now that Houston is gone there will inevitably be a run on her music, both online and in stores. A news report earlier this week said that her record company had jacked up prices for her online songs 30% the day after her death, but the record company later said it was a mistake.

I was attending a concert at the North Charleston Performing Arts Center the night Houston passed. Although no official announcement was made during the show, one could almost see the ripple effect as the news started rolling into the audience member's smartphones via text message, Facebook, and Twitter. By the end of the show everyone knew.

While I was never a huge Houston fan, I do have fond memories of watching her videos on MTV as a teenager in the 80's, you know, when Music Television actually played music. During the years surrounding those first two albums Houston was the cute girl next door, bouncing sassily through videos for songs like "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" and "How Will I Know." It was safe 80's radio pop at its finest. I never watched the reality series Houston filmed with her now ex-husband Bobby Brown a few years back, but from the clips I've seem played on the news, it appeared that the sensationalism of that look into the private lives of two very public people may have been the beginning of the end. Now Houston is gone from this earth. It's pretty sad that she never saw the age of 50, which is an age milestone that I myself am less than a decade from. Who knows what could have been had she not taken that bath Saturday night. Didn't she almost have it all?