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The oddest tribute to Whitney Houston has to be American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman’s monologue about her self-titled debut album:

It’s hard to choose a favorite among so many great tracks, but “The Greatest Love of All” is one of the best, most powerful songs ever written about self-preservation, dignity. Its universal message crosses all boundaries and instills one with the hope that it’s not too late to better ourselves. Since, Elizabeth, it’s impossible in this world we live in to empathize with others, we can always empathize with ourselves. It’s an important message, crucial really. And it’s beautifully stated on the album.

What’s particularly odd, to me, about this speech is that it was fully true of Houston in the novel’s cultural setting of a decadent America in the late 80s.  Bret Easton Ellis is, of course, fucking with us: Houston, for whatever else she ultimately represented, was the queen of soft, unoffensive pablum custom built for hits.  But what’s tragic about it, of course, is that it doesn’t prefigure Houston’s series of mental and physical and spiritual collapses.  By the late 90s, Houston had become a parody of divahood, a tragic case study in superstardom and substance abuse.  Though she had become a grotesque shell of her former self, you always got the sense, like with Michael Jackson, that she still had enough innate talent to wangle some kind of comeback.

And, my God, that talent!  There’s a cynical way of reading Houston’s career—i.e. her vapid pop was so slick and dull and commercial that it scarcely seems human.  And though I’m a little sympathetic to that reading, it’s impossible to ignore this woman’s voice.  Just listen to the captivating acapella version of “How Will I Know” that is being bandied about on a lot of the online tributes and remembrances.  And that voice will forever and always be that note from “I Will Always Love You.”  You know the note: it’s the show-stopper, the one that raises the hairs on your arm, the one that prevents even a casual listening of the song.  That single sustained note carries Houston’s entire career: everything Houston ever was and could have been is embodied in that single note.  But like Bateman’s monologue, there’s nothing in that note that suggests anything like the genuinely tragic mess at Whitney Houston would become.  In that sense, then, that note is a cliché, an overly familiar narrative trope whereby someone with startling talent squanders and wastes it after allowing it to flower for the briefest of moments.  It’s the oldest, most boring story in pop culture, and this latest chapter is just as dead sad as any of the dozens of others.

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Nate Dogg was never a solo star in the ways like his South Central brethren Snoop Dogg or Dr. Dre or Ice Cube.  Nonetheless,  he did manage to be an integral player in some of the most important gangsta rap of the early and mid 90s, including The Chronic, Doggystyle, and All Eyez On Me.  He also played a staring role on “Regulate,” the smoothest single the movement ever produced.  Last week, no joke, I heard “Regulate” on the radio while driving through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and I got this giddy feeling of nostalgia for a song that I probably haven’t heard in a decade.  He died of a stroke yesterday, and a small piece of my teenage years went with him.

The White Stripes have officially closed up shop.  And so ends a 12 year reign of rock’s most vital band.  While I was pretty lukewarm about their last record, I will certainly miss the opportunity to hear any new music from Jack and Meg.  Even though I thought they fell off a bit toward the end, I always got the sense that they probably had plenty of great records left in them: a stripped down acoustic affair, a dusty country album, a late career blues punk revival.  There was still a lot that I wanted from this band, but it looks like that’s never going to happen now.  In a way, that’s fine because what they’ve left us with is an unparalleled string of albums that remind even the most jaded listeners that an amplified guitar and thumping bass drum can, even after all these years, move mountains.

By the time that The Stripes showed up in the late 90s, I think most serious people agreed that rock was pretty much dead as a commercial art form.  Radiohead’s OK Computer sounded like a totalizing endgame for all guitar-based music (who has the balls to ring a single note on a Rickenbacker after listening to that record?), and the artistic fiasco of Woodstock ’99 (Limp Bizkit, Korn, Buckcherry, Oleander, The Offspring) seemed like the template for all forthcoming rock.  Rock also wasn’t helped by the fact that poptimism, the idea that pop music is as relevant of critic inspection as rock, had replaced rockism as the dominant critical paradigm.  While Rolling Stone continued to operate as an editorial anomoly, most serious critical outlets were ignoring mainstream rock in favor of unheralded corners of the music world: German minimal techno, New York freak folk, British dubstep, underground hip hop, stateless online musical entities.  By then, the internet had democratized music to such an extent that listening exclusively to rock music seemed naive and socially limiting.  Who wants to seriously talk about a new Green Day record when there’s a producer in Bristol who is making sounds that only existed in your nightmares?  The world into which The White Stripes released their first couple of albums was a world where rock sounded silly and antiquated.  And against all odds, the band made silly and antiquated sound like a thunderous lightning crack of primal honky-tonk-white-boy-soul-blues.

And here fer yer listenin’ pleasure is the meanest of the mean, brokenhearted blues that a white boy ever layed to analog tape.

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While Solomon Burke, who died today at age 70, was never the brightest star in the Atlantic Soul firmament, he will always have a place beside Otis Redding and Percy Sledge and Sam Cooke as one of my favorite soul singers of all time.  If a good soulman can wringe a complex brew of emotions out of a single note, then almost no one squeezed harder than Burke.  Listen to practically any of his singles from the early and mid-60s and you’re likely to hear him working harder than his colleagues.  Both Redding and Cooke had a certain natural grace about their voice that allowed them to effortlessly pour out a song. Burke had to work a little harder, which is probably the reason he never quite translated to a larger audience like Redding.  But that extra juice he had to put in his songs was what made Burke such an endearing singer.  Like many other soulmen of his generation, Burke was able to bridge that gap between pop and gospel in a way that radio singles sound like nothing short of the revealed word of God.  [mp3]