viz.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

By this point most people—at least the ones reading blogs or The New York Times—have heard about Whitney Houston’s death last Saturday. As it so happened, Houston passed away the night before the Grammys, turning that celebration into a kairoitic moment of mourning. Singer LL Cool J opened the Grammys with a prayer for Whitney and Jennifer Hudson performed her most famous hit, “I Will Always Love You.” Since then, LeAnn Rimes and the television show Glee have offered performances of this song in tribute to Whitney. Likewise, her family is allowing her funeral to be streamed on the Internet. I’d like here to consider further the function of these institutionalized tributes. How can (or should) we remember the dead?

The Jennifer Hudson performance occurred after the Grammys showed video of Houston singing her hit “Saving All My Love For You” at the 1986 Grammys. Hudson sang part of the song while placed under images of the vibrant young Houston in red.

The performance’s visual rhetoric of mourning is clear: the blue light behind her encodes the seriousness of the moment; her black dress makes visual the grief she expresses through the song. The styled hairdo might almost be an allusion to Houston’s hair in the video. Hudson’s voice has some of the same gospel sound that Houston was herself trained in, but her register and tone are lower and deeper than Houston’s, both turning what in Houston’s performance was a divaesque number into something sadder. She ends her performance not in a repetition, “Darling, I will always / I will always / I will always / Love you,” but in “I will always / Love you / Whitney, we love / we love you.”  The choice to sing “I Will Always Love You” is a natural one, not only because it’s Whitney Houston’s greatest hit, but also because the song is about saying goodbye to a loved one.

Originally written by Dolly Parton about her split from a partner, Houston’s performance of “I Will Always Love You” for the movie The Bodyguard changed in into a parting from the man who saved her life (as played by Kevin Costner). The music video made for the song, which featured scenes from the movie, showed a lone Houston in an empty theater, singing as she recollected her experiences with Costner. It is thus not just a song of parting in her voice, but one of departure.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

Her performance of the song, described by Joe Levy, is “monumental, undeniable and, as many of her recordings were, a triumph of vocal ability that presents itself as human indomitability.” In fact, memorializing her through reference to her most famous and popular performance is to remember Whitney at her best.

Image Credit: The Mirror

However, Whitney Houston, like the deceased singer Michael Jackson, lived a life of controversy. As her personal struggles with drugs overtook her musical career, she took part in the reality show Being Bobby Brown. Certain phrases she said on the show—like “hell to the no,” “kiss my ass!,” and the infamous “crack is whack” from a Diane Sawyer 2002 interview—gave her a secondary notoriety. She became the subject of humor for comics, with Maya Rudolph doing imitations of her on Saturday Night Live. However, what Whitney can be remembered at this time?  As Rudolph is preparing to host Saturday Night Live this weekend, a number of websites are speculating whether she’ll attempt to do her impersonation again. Many suggest it’s “too soon” to remember her such—but who has the right to memorialize her?  Her family and friends, like Rev. Marvin Winans, are “seriously grieving” and “want to do this with dignity.” The Whitney they remember is as much a young girl as a famous singer. Her fans and the music world at large pay tribute to her vocal gifts. Others might treasure her almost-campy afterlife on Bravo and The Soup. Decorum suggests that the dignified or proper thing is to preserve her in an orderly—and ordered—fashion. Yet fans on Twitter connect to her death through hashtags varying from #iwillalwaysloveyou to #crackiswhack as they attempt to come to terms with her death. In such case, the public’s memory and public memorializing practices can’t be disciplined, though hopefully all such actions are done out of fondness and love.