Holding Lightning by Emily Lordi review – an intimate portrait of Whitney Houston

Since Whitney Houston’s death in 2012, a flurry of books and documentaries have appeared, most of them presenting her life as a cautionary tale. In this new biography, Emily Lordi, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, refuses to reduce Houston’s story to another “good girl gone bad” narrative. Instead she presents a pluralistic take on her life in which Houston’s queerness, drug use and eccentricities are not dismissed as aberrations (as they were in her lifetime) but rather seen in the wider context of her unique talent and the pressures placed on her to embody black excellence.

Lordi describes the unsteady building blocks of Houston’s family (her mother Cissy’s band The Sweet Inspirations were in-demand session musicians who worked with Elvis, as well as on Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl and Dusty Springfield’s Son of a Preacher Man). When Cissy was still a child, Houston’s grandmother had a debilitating stroke following a miscarriage, eventually succumbing to a cerebral haemorrhage during a later pregnancy. The response to this trauma was to bury it. As Lordi writes: “Here was a lesson in suppressing your feelings and getting on with it.” But in a book where the act of singing through the pain is invoked multiple times, it is striking that reports Houston was molested as a child (a pivotal part of Kevin Macdonald’s 2018 documentary, which drew a line between that and her addictions) are not discussed.

After an annus horribilis which included the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, a teenage Houston found comfort in a relationship with a friend from summer camp. The connection began as a sexual one, but deepened as a result of a shared interest in the vocal gymnastics of other singers and eventually Houston’s own music. At one point Crawford is caught on camera lip-synching to every ad lib Houston performs in a song on tour. Lordi calls it a “breathtaking act of attention”. Crawford is mystified by Houston’s marriage to singer Bobby Brown (she says it was like watching a foreign film without subtitles), but Lordi sees them united by showmanship and traditional values.

In a decision that may force some readers to adjust their definition of the term, Lordi brands Houston a musical genius. She was, after all, a non-songwriter in an era of writer/producer/performers such as Prince and Michael Jackson, but the author argues that the choices Houston made in phrasing, tone, inflection and gesture were unique acts of creation. Her melismatic vocal style had a ripple effect, becoming a musical ground zero for everyone from Ariana Grande to Taylor Swift. Lordi’s promise early on that her book would dissect Houston’s “profoundly under-analysed body of work” doesn’t bear fruit, however. There are some in-depth interpretations (she breaks down the unique phraseology of I Will Always Love You and Houston’s pro-black retooling of The Star-Spangled Banner) but too many deep cuts are passed over, an odd decision considering Houston’s relatively slim discography.

The case for Houston’s genius is made most persuasively in the latter half of the book. Instead of seeing her post-Bodyguard work as a descent into a druggy hellscape, Lordi portrays it as the period when her “blackest, queerest, most feminist work” emerges, including Waiting to Exhale and It’s Not Right But It’s Okay. Houston began to nurture younger black talent, offering the kind of musical mentorship given to her when she was starting out. In Lordi’s telling, albums like My Love Is Your Love riff on Houston’s exploitation by the media, presaging albums like Beyoncé’s Lemonade. It’s during this time that she jettisons the “black Barbie” image of the 80s, allowing imperfection into her art in a way that makes it all the richer.

In the end Holding Lightning is the kindest portrait of Houston since Crawford’s book A Song For You. While not quite definitive, it is a consistently insightful, refreshing, restorative portrait of the artist once known simply as “The Voice”.