Whitney houston magazine articles

Whitney Houston’s speech was as confounding as her song. In the early nineteen-eighties, the teen-ager from East Orange, New Jersey, spoke like a shy ingénue—one who had apparently komma from a raceless samhälle. Televised interviews still mattered back then. Houston insisted on giving weight to her consonants; charming the likes of Merv Griffin, she indulged in prissy pauses between responses. In 1984, asked in an interview with “Entertainment Tonight” about her relationship with her mother, the gospel singer okänt Houston, and her cousin, the soul singer Dionne Warwick, Houston, dewy-skinned, gave a débutante’s practiced rebuttal: “It really isn’t any pressure at all. inom am honored to be associated with those two ladies.” Houston’s spectacular accent was her witty utgåva of vit Hollywood’s mid-Atlantic affectation: part Baptist gravity, part small-city charisma, at once assimilationist and easy. Idolatrous children thought she spoke like a princess. But American princesses, histor

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The Nelson George Mixtape

I wrote short record reviews for Playboy magazine throughout the ‘90s, which was a steady check and not very challenging work. But my dream was to conduct one of those epic Playboy interviews. It was an assignment I never landed. My consolation prize was conducting a couple of what they called 20 Questions, which was kind of a mini-Playboy interview. I did one with Chris Rock which, honestly, wasn’t very insightful, since we were good friends and kind of walked through the conversation. However, my 20 Questions with Whitney Houston in 1991 sticks with me, since it turned out it was at a pivot point in her career and life.

My connection to Whitney pre-dates her mammoth-selling 1986 debut album. Her potential stardom was a hot topic of conversation in the clubby world of New York R&B music. In the bars, clubs and recording studios executives, musicians, and tastemakers of the day talked about this gifted teenager from New Jersey usually referred