Welcome to Pop Pantheon, the podcast where we completely overanalyze all of your favorite pop stars and then rank them in the official Pop Pantheon.

This is your host, DJ Louis the 14th.

Gorgeous, My Queer Pop Party has a party coming up in New York on March 20th at the Salton Room and Bushwick. You can grab tickets for that by clicking the link in the show notes of this episode. Before we get to the rest of that, don't forget to rate review and subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening to it now. follow us on social media at PopPantheon pod by our merch at Poppantheon.com and subscribe to our Patreon, pop pantheon, all access by going to patreon.com slash Pop Pantheon, or you can get the audio only directly in the Apple podcast app. All right, you already know what it is. In the past two weeks, we've been digging in to the

career of Whitney Houston. Our first episode covered her early life and work through 1990s. I'm

Your Baby Tonight. And last week, we talked about Whitney's indomitable run of soundtracks and films

in the 90s. This week, we have a difficult task of talking about some of Whitney's last career

triumphs. And and then of course

the difficult last few years of her life up until her death in 2012. This was a hard conversation

to have. I won't lie, but I also think a lot of beautiful things came out of it and it's an

important part of the story and legacy of this artist. And I hope everybody has enjoyed listening

to the series, The Storing High, some of the lows. I think Whitney's life encapsulates all of it.

And that is the human experience in its totality. And she really lived a life. And I think in many

ways, really achieved a lot of the things that she had set out to do. And we get into that

on the podcast. And yet at the same time, it's obviously so hard not to keep wishing that she had set out to do. And we get into that on the podcast.

And yet at the same time, it's obviously so hard not to keep wishing that she was still with us and wondering if had things gone differently, would she still be?

Anyway, that and more in this week's episode, Whitney Houston Part 3.

While Whitney Houston had sold millions of records throughout the 90s, by 1998, it had been eight full years since she'd released a proper solo album, nearly a lifetime in pop music.

Some of this was owed to her monumental success in Hollywood, and some, it turns out, may have been connected to her spiraling personal life, including increasingly public conflict with husband Bobby Brown and her ongoing

battle with drug addiction.

But under pressure from Clive Davis and her label, beginning in mid-1998, Whitney re-entered

the recording studio for her fourth solo album, My Love Is Your Love.

For the new music, Whitney corralled some of the most innovative, forward-thinking producers of the moment, including R&B, avant-futurist Rodney Darkchild Jerkins, hip-hop extraterrestrial Missy Elliott, and an imperial era, Lauren Hill, along with some trusted hands like Babyface and David Foster. My Love is Your Love became Whitney's most consistent and idiosyncratic

...