Eleven Things About Whitney’s “I Believe In You and Me” (written for the Singles Jukebox)

1. This is a song that comes from text that had an explicit church context, and so the song and the film collapsed the preacher and the husband in fairly conventional ways.

2. This being between the lover and the Lord is very much part of Whitney’s inheritance — there was Dionne Warwick on one side, Cissy Houston on the other, and Aretha pushing up through the middle.

3. The interesting thing about this tension is that it is very rare that Whitney ever gave us full church — but it was not a rejection of the church, or an attempt to make secular through sex and longing the incorporation found in traditional black churches.

4. Houston’s best work is not the rejection of the church, it was an almost refusal of incorporation itself.

5. Her voice is perfect. Her body is perfect. Recall that famous Oprah interview where she suggests “the hair, the gowns, the performance” got in the way of an authentic voice — and what is assumed is that the voice would have the sweat of Sunday morning or Saturday night — and in her best performances Whitney doesn’t sweat. Oprah, in her continual claim for an authenticity that might or might not exist, refused to acknowledge the hermetic seeking of perfection is as good as those two sweat boxes.

6. She brings in melodrama, and there are stories about the filming of the Preacher’s Wife: of Denzel being angry, about showing up past 3pm for 8am calls, of her not knowing her lines, of calling in Cissy to talk sense into her. For all of this mess, that was perhaps the first indication that we had that there was a pre-cocaine and a post-cocaine Whitney — that her stainless steel voice could tarnish.

7. You cannot see the trauma of the performance in the mediocre movie — a rehash of something that might have been too sentimental in the 70s, but even in this. For a song about crisis, longing, needing—it has the simulacrum of longing, but the scratch or hunger of it.

8. One of my favorite things in Christian pop music, is where you are trying to figure out if they are talking about Jesus or lover, or constructing Jesus as lover inadvertently. This is not a Jesus-as-boyfriend song; for a song in a movie called Preacher’s Wife, one would actually expect it to be more about Jesus.

9. What is it about? It is not really about the boyfriend either; though from the breathy first moments, and the call for eternal devotion, can it be anything but a boyfriend song? She even talks about love!

10. The song is about Whitney’s singing, the song is a perfect showcase for everything that she can do with her voice” with the sheen, with the perfection of tone, with something more than Jesus or a lover. How the whole song opens into pure blue when she sings sea; or the Cathedral swoops when she sings “miracle” or “dream” or even “believe.” The tightness of the first chords, and then how that tightness explodes, further, wider, but never wild, and almost robotic.

11. There are genuine Jesus songs that she has done, even songs on this soundtrack; and there is the odd song that sounds like she might have gotten laid — though nothing as wonderfully, filthy as the sex she hinted she was having with Bobby — but the best thing about Whitney was the marshaling of full and uncanny gifts to give operatic power to statements that were mostly clichéd — that the marshaling resulted in high art and low kitsch, but did not result in Christian idolatry was perhaps her unique gift (or maybe not unique — but it meant that she shared more with Grace Jones and Donna Summer than she shared with her mother and aunt).