I've been meaning to respost a few of my columns but hey, things have been a bit hectic lately. In the spirit of better late than never I shall post the April Celebrity Musing offering, which asks the question of whether or not Whitney Houston was overwhelmed by the enormity of the vocal gift she was given. Feel free to comment but please be gentle... I'm a delicate flower.
If you feel so inclined, you can link to the InsideToronto.com column directly. If not, here it is:
Was Whitney Houston predisposed to a burden too great to bear?
It's been conveyed to me that some people crash headlong into the world loaded down with more than any one person is meant to endure. Is it possible that some of us have to carry a load in excess of what one person can sustain, and if so, is the ensuing fall inevitable?
I have a friend who believes with every fibre of his being that his heart loves well in excess of the love that one heart is meant process. At first I scoffed at this, but through self examination realized this was a plausible affliction. To that end, when I heard the news of Whitney Houston's death, my initial reaction was to extrapolate the theory.
Was it was written in the stars before her birth she was going to have too much put upon her for one soul to manage effectively? The question loomed larger several weeks later as the results of the toxicology reports on her body were made public.
Her voice literally had to explode (albeit a beautiful, otherworldly explosion) in order for it to leave her body. That voice - her voice - might have been too much for one person to handle. In that her soul could not bear up under the weight of an unprecedented gift, her heart tried to pick up the slack, but paid a huge price, and it would appear that eventually her body, spread too thin after years of coping, could not tolerate one last grievance and gave up.
This is not an attempt to gloss over what has been documented as a troubled existence, nor justify anyone's insatiable appetite for a destructive lifestyle. It was her life to live and on the surface it would appear she lived it by her own design. But some people are inherently weak. Conversely, some are strong, but not strong enough when given too much to manage.
Houston, like many before her, appears to have been given too much to manage. Her musical legacy will be sterling in perpetuity despite recent falls from grace at the hands of a failing voice and erratic public behavior. But her personal legacy will now be given over to a sad, never-ending debate: Was she weak or was she reckless?
It no longer matters. It's fair to say that a voice so strong that it resonated on some level with virtually everyone hid the presumably weak will of a nice, exuberant kid who didn't stand a chance against the goodness she chose to defy in relentlessly pursuing her perhaps ill-conceived, bad-ass self-image.
As the shock of her death subsides, the media will continue to pay tribute to her musical legacy while speculating she died as a result of not being strong enough to beat down her demons. But are any of us that strong? A simple analysis reveals we're surviving, but is it because we're strong or because we aren't faced with intensely public-private legacies?
I wonder if any of us knows how resilient we truly are? Houston woke up every day of her adult life and faced relentless scrutiny related specifically to the size of her heart and the depth of her soul - and she handled it her way.
I don't own any Houston recordings, but I'm familiar enough with her music that when I hear it I can see a 25 year old with a huge smile, a youthful exuberance and an overburdened soul letting go of a load so huge that one person alone could not sustain it.
No comments:
Post a Comment