"She was someone who had such a big heart and loved people and wanted to help people, but sometimes felt caged because of her success and her fame." — BeBe Winans, a Gospel singer
"In my darkest moments, I wonder whether Nippy loved me." — Cissy Houston
"Whitney always sounded alive. She had a voice that was so full of the soul and meaning we searched for in her lyrics. Too bad we just didn’t listen closely enough the first time around." — Gerrick Kennedy
Whitney Houston left several impressions on people. There was the diva, the public brand consciously molded by Arista Records. There was the church girl, whose voice was formed in worship before the world knew her as "The Voice". And there was Nippy — the private self her family guarded like a relic, who wanted to walk around a mall like a normal person, and felt, in the end, caged by the very fame the world assumed she commanded. This combination is not untypical for an IEI, maybe with slight Fe accent, aka IEI-Fe, as some schools notate it.
Houston (1963-2012)'s genius was receptive. She inhabited an emotion and let it pour through her. "I Will Always Love You" is notable in this regard. The famous a cappella opening — her voice alone, unaccompanied, for nearly a full minute — was tender and full of restraint, the melancholy of the lyric allowed to unfurl slowly and land on the listener; the Library of Congress analysis calls that patient, word-by-word opening "straight out of the church." Then the key changes. The song begins in the "inward" IEI register, and climbs into a more dramatic mood. Still, the lyrical quality predominates there. The signature Houston ballad is yearning — "Run to You" ("can't you see the hurt in me? I feel so all alone"), "I Have Nothing," "Didn't We Almost Have It All," "All the Man That I Need" — songs of beautiful melancholy, which fits the type. Even her great up-tempo joy is a song of longing for connection ("I wanna dance with somebody who loves me"), not the seizing of it.
For all the regal command she could project on a stage, the actual trajectory of her life has the quality of someone carried, rather than someone steering. She felt caged and she ran, but she ran home to sleep on a couch, not toward a self she had seized control of. That being-moved-by-forces quality shows the "dynamic" quality of her type (and IEI is far rarer inverted to statics than EIE and even ESE). She was concerned about global issues of life, but had a hard time finding herself in it, as this Guardian article suggests.
It seems that when she chose to assert herself, it had an outward, expressive edge that is more EIE than the typically softer, more wistful IEI. She could be quite cutting, and her wit was sharp, and performance-ready. So the diva was not only a costume stitched on by Arista; there was a real dramatic faculty in her. But it sat on top, deployed in performance and in self-defense. Her addiction was not a type, but itself and should not be read as one; it was a human tragedy with its own causes. But insofar as it touches the question at all, it does point to a fairly weak bodily-homeostatic Si pole.
The "Nippy" everyone protected was a woman who could be both talkative and quiet and wanted nothing so much as to be regular. Many testimonies about her are in this "introverted-extrovert, knew no strangers but valued solitude" register. She herself once stated, "I finally faced the fact that it isn't a crime not having friends. Being alone means you have fewer problems... Loneliness comes with life." This private person — solitary, dreaming, longing, carried along — was the IEI underneath. Her mother's most telling confession is that she sometimes questioned how well she knew her own daughter. That unknowability is the IEI core: the dreamer who always lives partly elsewhere.
Comments
Post a Comment