There are singers, and there are singers.
Mariah, Celine, Aguilera, are amazing technical singers.
But one mention of the name Whitney and Mariah and Celine and even Aguilera all stand aside.
Whitney Houston is untouchable.
Her emotional expression is amazing.
But just now, listening to Whitney sing 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody', I realized that Whitney has a technical skill way beyond even the likes of Mariah Carey.
Mariah can hit the notes.
Celine can hit the notes- and hit them hard!
Whitney can hit the notes too.
Whitney can belt it out.
But Whitney Houston has a technical skill beyond any of the other divas.
Her control.
Whitney Houston's control is just frickin' mindblowing.
No one has her control.
Listen to her sing, and she is fine-tuning every micron, every atom and microvibration of sound that comes out of her.
Listening to Whitney sing 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody' is like witnessing someone bring the power of a powerful supercomputer to a simulation that you can run on your Iphone.
The incredible, awe-inspiring power of Whitney's control on that song is incredible.
Control so powerful, so skilled, that you don't even feel it- it simply feels effortless!
It does not feel like control- it feels like effortless magic!
It's like looking at a photo taken with a camera with 40 megapixels of resolution- you don't see the pixels, you just see an incredibly sharp picture!*
That is part of why she sounds so sublime, so staggeringly, thrillingly perfect and sublime in everything she sang from her debut album through the Bodyguard soundtrack.
Incredible skills with feel and emotion- and that incredible, awe-inspiring control.
Listening to her sing is like watching a professional driver driving a Ferrari in a race with teenagers driving souped-up hot rod Model T's.
The control that she brings to her power is incredible.
When you put her next to Mariah Carey... the difference is astonishing.
Especially as Mariah Carey herself is no slouch in control.
By normal standards Mariah Carey has incredible control.
But put even her next to Whitney... it's a whole different level.
It's astonishing.
And put that control in an artist with the emotional expression and narrative skill of a Whitney Houston... the result is just incredible.
She could sing the phone book and it would sound like Verdi.
She didn't sing the phone book.
She sang the finest songs of a great- no, legendary- era in pop and r&b songwriting.
The songs of such staggering masters as Michael Masser, in the age of songs like From A Distance, Somewhere Out There, and the most sophistocated hit pop song ever, Never Gonna Let You Go.
Many of the songs on the level of Somewhere Out There ended up going to her, that's how much the songwriters, producers, and even executives were in awe of her talent.
It must have taken her so many years to develop that control.
I mean, Whitney was singing in church choir from age five- and that's real gospel choirs, the real thing, legendary gospel church, where Elvis discovered it on a church on the other side of the tracks so long ago.
That's the kind of practice she had from age five.
You aren't born with that level of control.
You are born with the potential.
It takes many years to develop it.
With tips from early childhood from the likes of Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin.
By the time she became an adult, Whitney was a seasoned veteran as a singer.
I can imagine her as a young child, practicing for hours a day, and then wowing them in church as part of the choir on Sunday.
That's Whitney's most amazing technical skill.
Her phenomenal control.
Listen to her recordings, and be in awe of the master!
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson
*Note to future- one day very soon (as of 2023- perhaps they are already common?), 40 megapixels will be commonplace. This is a comparison. Ever see the gorgeous photos of Saturn's rings by the Voyager space probes of the late 1970's? That's One megapixel. 40 megapixels is rediculously high, even when it becomes commonplace. Our digital cameras are incredible!