{"id":2854,"date":"2012-02-13T07:12:02","date_gmt":"2012-02-13T13:12:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/?p=2854"},"modified":"2015-03-13T15:03:13","modified_gmt":"2015-03-13T21:03:13","slug":"she-made-opera-out-of-oprah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/","title":{"rendered":"“She Made Opera out of Oprah”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=m46nvic8VIA<\/a>\n<\/p>

When I was an undergrad, I sometimes chanced to meet up in the Student Recreation Complex weight room with a kid named Raul. Raul suffered from what I now realize was Tourette\u2019s syndrome, snorting and jerking his head in mid-sentence before going on to complete his thoughts. Spotting him on the bench or military press felt like defusing a bomb. If he suffered an attack in mid rep, my feeble hands would be the only things keeping the weight-laden bar from his larynx or skull. <\/p>\n

Nothing of the kind happened. After we\u2019d known each other a few months, I worked up the nerve to congratulate Raul, in so many words, for functioning so well despite his disability. He explained \u2014 I think I\u2019m getting this right \u2014 that the concentration required by weight training temporarily neutralized the mechanism that made him twitch. Working out had thus assumed a double importance for him: not only had it made him objectively cut, it made him feel normal.<\/p>\n

It was in the spirit of auto-empowerment, he said, that he chose his workout music. Whereas the PA system in the weight room blasted out hair-band stuff \u2014 Poison, M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce, Cinderella, Skid Row \u2014 Raul inspired himself (through a Sony Walkman) with \u201cOne Moment in Time,\u201d the single Whitney Houston had recorded for the 1988 summer Olympics. I won\u2019t swear he said, \u201cI couldn\u2019t have done it without Whitney,\u201d but he gave the impression of thinking so.<\/p>\n

Well, Whitney\u2019s gone \u2014 dead at 48. I\u2019m feeling the same survivor\u2019s guilt I always feel at the passing of a celebrity to whom I\u2019d managed to form no very strong attachment. She sang Gospel-flavored R & B, the kind of music my ears have always refused to appreciate. Or maybe the blockage is in my brain. My mother has always been a passionate fan of jazz divas like Billie and Ella. Growing up, watching in impotent rage as she invaded the sanctuary of my room to scrub the snot off my walls, I noticed she was always singing \u201cDon\u2019t Get Around Much Any More.\u201d My puerile mind derived a slippery-slope argument: If you start liking big-voiced black women, you\u2019ll start liking Bette Midler and Maria Callas. And then, one day, you\u2019ll come home in a dress. <\/em> <\/p>\n

I found affirmation in the work of scruffy white guys with behavioral problems. To this day, you\u2019ll have a hard time convincing me that Johnny Cash, Mike Ness and Shane McGowan aren\u2019t three Persons \u2014 distinct, yet consubstantial \u2014 forming a single rockabilly Being. By the time Whitney introduced herself to the world with \u201cHow Will I Know,\u201d<\/strong><\/a> I was already ruined for her.<\/p>\n

For that reason I\u2019ll humbly farm out the task of eulogizing her to others. On Saturday, Salon<\/em> re-ran \u201cDidn\u2019t She Almost Have it All?\u201d,<\/strong><\/a> an essay written in 2006 by Rebecca Traister. At the time of the piece\u2019s initial publication, Whitney was already lost beyond recall, the photos of her home drug den too squalid even for Us Magazine<\/em> to run. Her image had sustained such damage that watching her say, \u201cI\u2019ve got to poop a poop\u201d on reality TV struck Traister as \u201crefreshingly real\u201d compared to the alibis and doublespeak she\u2019d dealt out in her infamous interview with Diane Sawyer.<\/p>\n

To a point, Traister cleaves to rise-and-fall-of conventions by presenting Whitney\u2019s career as a morality tale. One of her sources, University of Wisconsin\u2019s African-American studies department chairman Craig Werner, explains her decline in terms that might resonate with today\u2019s conservative cultue warriors. Thanks to the loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector, religious leaders\u2019 declining influence and the war on drugs, Whitney emerged during \u201can extremely chaotic period in African American culture,\u201d Werner told Traister. \u201cCelebrity culture replaced the culture of community that had nurtured soul music and early rock \u2018n\u2019 roll,\u201d creating \u201ca perfect storm of how to screw up somebody\u2019s life.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something seedy, a kind of barely concealed prurience, in the urge to reduce the complex life of a complex person to an occasion for finger wagging. Happily, Traister resists it. Unable to determine just who Whitney Houston was, and unsatisfied with speculating what she\u2019d done to herself or what others had done to her, Traister salutes what she managed to do for the general culture. She quotes music journalist Danny Alexander to the effect that Whitney, along with Madonna, Tina Turner and Janet Jackson, \u201ccarved out a space for women to come close to dominating pop radio in the early \u201990s \u2014 as not simply producers\u2019 pawns \u2026 but serious artists demanding artistic control and respect and, in Whitney\u2019s case in particular, with a vocal talent to rival anyone else on the radio.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s Jody Rosen who wins the Best Epitaph Award. In Slate,<\/em> she writes<\/strong><\/a> that Whitney, \u201cmade opera out of Oprah\u201d by codifying \u201clate 80s therapy culture\u201d in songs like \u201cThe Greatest Love of All.\u201d As far as 21st-century Catholics are concerned, that \u2014 not the crack \u2014 might be the final word and the final straw. Why, I can hear the objection now: If self-esteem were estimable, then Chesterton wouldn\u2019t have mocked it at the beginning of <\/em>Orthodoxy. So there!<\/em><\/p>\n

Okay, the call to self-healing in Whitney\u2019s songs might not have worked for Whitney herself, but it did a thing or two for Raul. By the time we parted company, he could have cracked a walnut between his delts and his traps. If that helped him find the confidence to grab a girl and a degree, maybe start a business, I certainly won\u2019t begrudge him it. Where were you, Matt Maher?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was an undergrad, I sometimes chanced to meet up in the Student Recreation Complex weight room with a kid named Raul. Raul suffered from what I now realize was Tourette\u2019s syndrome, snorting and jerking his head in mid-sentence before going on to complete his thoughts. Spotting him on the bench or military press […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[49,335,170,334],"class_list":["post-2854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-catholicism","tag-matt-maher","tag-music","tag-whitney-houston"],"yoast_head":"\n"She Made Opera out of Oprah"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When I was an undergrad, I sometimes chanced to meet up in the Student Recreation Complex weight room with a kid named Raul. Raul suffered from what I now\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""She Made Opera out of Oprah"\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When I was an undergrad, I sometimes chanced to meet up in the Student Recreation Complex weight room with a kid named Raul. Raul suffered from what I now\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Diary of a Wimpy Catholic\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-02-13T13:12:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2015-03-13T21:03:13+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Max Lindenman\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Max Lindenman\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/\",\"name\":\"\\\"She Made Opera out of Oprah\\\"\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2012-02-13T13:12:02+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2015-03-13T21:03:13+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/#\/schema\/person\/f28642d6ff756d058ed6ff35f876e355\"},\"description\":\"When I was an undergrad, I sometimes chanced to meet up in the Student Recreation Complex weight room with a kid named Raul. Raul suffered from what I now\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"“She Made Opera out of Oprah”\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/\",\"name\":\"Diary of a Wimpy Catholic\",\"description\":\"A Hedonist Contemplates Heaven\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/#\/schema\/person\/f28642d6ff756d058ed6ff35f876e355\",\"name\":\"Max Lindenman\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/2823340b259acd6c04cbc8d94213ca58?s=96&d=mm&r=r\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/2823340b259acd6c04cbc8d94213ca58?s=96&d=mm&r=r\",\"caption\":\"Max Lindenman\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/author\/maxlindenman\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"\"She Made Opera out of Oprah\"","description":"When I was an undergrad, I sometimes chanced to meet up in the Student Recreation Complex weight room with a kid named Raul. Raul suffered from what I now","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"\"She Made Opera out of Oprah\"","og_description":"When I was an undergrad, I sometimes chanced to meet up in the Student Recreation Complex weight room with a kid named Raul. Raul suffered from what I now","og_url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/","og_site_name":"Diary of a Wimpy Catholic","article_published_time":"2012-02-13T13:12:02+00:00","article_modified_time":"2015-03-13T21:03:13+00:00","author":"Max Lindenman","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Max Lindenman","Est. reading time":"5 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/","name":"\"She Made Opera out of Oprah\"","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/#website"},"datePublished":"2012-02-13T13:12:02+00:00","dateModified":"2015-03-13T21:03:13+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/#\/schema\/person\/f28642d6ff756d058ed6ff35f876e355"},"description":"When I was an undergrad, I sometimes chanced to meet up in the Student Recreation Complex weight room with a kid named Raul. Raul suffered from what I now","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2012\/02\/she-made-opera-out-of-oprah\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"“She Made Opera out of Oprah”"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/","name":"Diary of a Wimpy Catholic","description":"A Hedonist Contemplates Heaven","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/#\/schema\/person\/f28642d6ff756d058ed6ff35f876e355","name":"Max Lindenman","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/2823340b259acd6c04cbc8d94213ca58?s=96&d=mm&r=r","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/2823340b259acd6c04cbc8d94213ca58?s=96&d=mm&r=r","caption":"Max Lindenman"},"url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/author\/maxlindenman\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/192"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2854\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}