Talk:Whitney Houston

Whitney is a talented singer who has sold millions of albums, but let's not get lose perspective. The soundtrack to the bodyguard was hardly "groundbreaking". See the new draft on the neutral point of view over on meta.wikipedia.com. --Robert Merkel

Sorry, I was reading an article about her, and it said the soundtrack was 'breathtaking' and 'enormously successful'. Well, I just tried not to plagiarise! But I can see where you're coming from- the term 'groundbreaking' should be reserved for research into cancer and stuff like that.

No problem. Music can be groundbreaking - for instance, Bach's "Well-tempered Clavier" was IMHO groundbreaking, as was "Rock Around The Clock" (as the first rock and roll song to reach a mainstream white audience), or Kraftwerk (as a significant inspiration for modern electronic music), or "Shaft" by Isaac Hayes (anticipated the disco sound), or "Heebie Jeebies" by Louis Armstrong as the first recording to feature "scat" singing. There's nothing wrong with the soundtrack to "The Bodyguard", but it's nothing that hadn't been done before plenty of times before. --Robert Merkel

I'm going to have to disagree with Robert here. I believe that the soundtrack to "The Bodyguard" was exceptionally groundbreaking in that it was the first time ever that a soundtrack had had such a huge amount of success. (Success had been seen before in films like "Saturday Night Fever," but never to this degree.) It was the first time music producers realized that they could have an entire market based on soundtrack albums, and it set a precedent for a huge amount of soundtrack albums to come.

Fair use vs. plagiarism

Houston cemented her superstar status on her next album, Whitney; despite the unimaginative title, it became the first album by a female artist to debut at number one, and sold over nine-million copies. [1] (http://www.80smusiclyrics.com/artists/whitneyhouston.htm)

This needs to be either quoted word for word or thoroughly rewritten. We can't just include snippets of text lifted from another websited and still "promise you wrote it yourself", now, can we? --Uncle Ed 01:11, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Relations with Unification Church

Houston is known for her charitable bent, making significant contributions to the United Negro College Fund, the Children's Diabetes Fund, St. Jude's Children's Hospital, and several AIDS-related organizations, and she established the Whitney Houston Foundation for Children, Inc., a nonprofit organization whose work assists homeless children and children with cancer and AIDS. One noncharitable appearance the diva was supposed to make was at "Blessing '97" on Nov. 29, 1997. The event, billed as the largest mass wedding ever, was to earn the diva a cool $1 million for 45 minutes onstage. But when the press seized upon the pending appearance for the Moonies (the controversial Unification Church started by Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han Moon), Houston released a statement declaring that she didn't know "Blessing '97" was a Moonie affair. Two hours before the wedding began, she backed out citing "illness," leaving both the Moonies and her own band, which had already set up, in the lurch. [2] (http://www.netkushi.com/hollywood/whitney_houston.php)