Dancing with Whitney

If you read this blog, or if you read my posts over on Tunesmate, you surely realize by now that I have a fondness for popular music. For over two decades now, I've been formally studying popular culture, and in the process I've examined film and television, I've done a lot of research on sports, I've look at advertising and consumption, and I've analyzed popular literature. Yet, the impetus for studying popular culture really came from my interest in music.

When I started college, I even thought about studying music. Upon entry at Bowling Green State University in 1990, I was accepted into the College of Music, largely on my music theory knowledge, while being told that I was going to have to spend the summer between high school and college learning how to play my tuba much more effectively if I was going to cut it.

On the way home from my audition, while sad over the results and not sure what to think or how to feel, my dad told me about something else I could study at BGSU: Popular Culture. And the more I thought about it, the more this seemed like a match. I had, after all, spent my last couple of years of high school playing bass guitar, watching MTV, and pouring over Billboard magazine when it came in the mail each week. (I used to spend almost $200 of my own money each year for that Billboard subscription.)

I went into my first year at BGSU undecided, having enrolled in the Introduction to Popular Culture course to see what it was like. By November -- just three months into my first semester of college -- I was hooked. I declared Popular Culture as my major, and I've been studying it in some form or another ever since.

On the surface, that may seem to have little to do with the passing of Whitney Houston, which is ultimately the subject of this post. Yet, that journey was at least in part inspired by Whitney.

While I'm sure the interest in popular music had been latent within me for years, it was the summer of 1987 that really made me recognize it. Following Dial MTV every day that summer, typically while hanging out with my friend Glen, I had a full blast of songs like Heart's "Alone," George Michael's "I Want Your Sex," Bob Seger's "Shakedown," and Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)," among a host of others. Houston's song in particular made me love pop music. I thought she was so beautiful in the video, and the song had such amazing energy that it made me crave the joy of singing, dancing, and playing and listening to music.

By the end of that summer, between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, my whole outlook had changed, and popular music was now as big a part of my life as anything. I built my schedule around making sure I listened to Rick Dees' Weekly Top 40. I watched MTV as much as my family would let me have the TV set to do so. And I was writing lyrics with a good deal of my spare time. That following spring, while Whitney Houston was setting the record for most consecutive number one singles (as I’ve written about this evening on Tunesmate), I was getting my first bass guitar and dreaming of life as a pop star.

Obviously, I didn't become a pop star, but I did become a pop culture scholar who still deeply loves popular music and who still writes music when I have the time. And, I don't know that I would have done any of it without dancing with Whitney back in the summer of 1987.