Gerrick Kennedy: ‘Didn’t We Almost Have it All: In Defense of Whitney Houston’

The Treatment

KCRW

Arts

4.6 • 639 Ratings

🗓️ 15 February 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

This week on The Treatment, Elvis welcomes back writer Gerrick Kennedy whose newest book is “Didn’t We Almost Have it All: In Defense of Whitney Houston.” Kennedy is also the author of “Parental Discretion is Advised: The Rise of N.W.A. and the Dawn of Gangsta Rap.” His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, GQ, and The Los Angeles Times. Kennedy tells The Treatment that one of the misconceptions about Whitney Houston is that she didn’t have agency in creating her music and her image because of Clive Davis’ heavy influence. He says Houston was subjected to near constant and deeply invasive questioning about her personal life by a mostly white press in a way that few other celebrities have experienced. And he says he was deeply moved by her return to her gospel roots in the last years of her life.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.
0:14.4	Welcome to the treatment, the home edition. I'm Elvis Mitchell. The last time my guest,
0:19.0	critic, cultural commentator, and author, Eric D. Kennedy,
0:21.9	was here as for his book, Parental Discretion, is advised, The Rise of NWA, and the Dawn of Gangster Rap.
0:28.6	His new book is about somebody who, let's talk about her belief in self from an anecdote I was told once by somebody who almost worked with her.
0:37.3	She was offered a chance
0:38.5	to be a star in a TV show. She was auditioning for a show in the early 80s. And when she's a teenager,
0:45.2	she said, I can't do it. I can't sign this contract because I have my music. And the director said,
0:51.6	well, have your son before professionally? She said, no. Who told you could sing? She said, well, my mother and my aunt.
0:57.8	He says, you're going to turn down the possibility of being on the show, which may be a big deal to go and maybe be a singer.
1:03.9	She goes, well, yeah, I need to be able to tour. Can you let me out? We can't do that. And so she walked away. The show she walked away from was The Cosby Show, and we're talking about Whitney Houston.
1:13.3	My guest, Garrick D. Kennedy, just wrote a terrific new book.
1:16.3	I think it's a personal essay and an incredible cultural history of the phenomenon, Black women and pop.
1:22.4	The book is called, Didn't We Almost Have It All?
1:25.6	In defense of Whitney Houston, Garrick, welcome back. Thank you for
1:29.4	having me again. There's a line, a perception of book that I think could actually also have been
1:33.7	the title of the book. Whitney's mother said to her heart, mind, and guts. And the book is really
1:41.3	about the battle between these three poles in her life, isn't it?
1:46.0	Yeah, it is. Yeah. In such a way, too, I think that, you know, so much of our
1:51.8	misunderstanding of Whitney is really rooted in what we expected of her to be and what we wanted
1:59.9	her to be based off of the presentation that she gave to us,
2:03.7	but also we know that that was a presentation that wasn't entirely hers, right? And we've spent so long,
	...

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