Whitney Houston: I Will Always Love You: The Best of Whitney Houston
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Pros:
A safe, well-calculated, chronological time capsule of Whitney's best tracksCons:
Simply skip the last two tracksWhitney Houston finally gets the “greatest hits” collection she deserves
Whitney Houston finally gets the “greatest hits” collection she deserves
Rhetorically speaking, it took a royal songbird to fall upon a premature death for the industry’s mighty powers to kick out a “greatest hits” collection that appropiately represents her best work. For those who suffered through Whitney Houston’s imbalanced and vainglorious double-disc set, Whitney: The Greatest Hits, God bless you. The set was marred with the same divisive strategy used on George Michael’s Ladies and Gentleman compilation, which separated the ballads from the uptempo tunes. But at least that collection wasn’t cursed with EMD replacements, something explored by Thuderpuss, Rodney Jerkins and Junior Vasquez on Houston’s dance-centric disc. This also meant one disc fell into a sleepy comatose while the other felt like one hell of a non-stop megamix. Houston deserved better than that. Finally, a single disc containing her best musical assignments has arrived that both her beloved fans and discovers of her transcendent soul-pop can really appreciate.
I Will Always Love You: The Best of Whitney Houston does a fine job in assembling sixteen of her chart-topping hits in chronological order, while adding two relatively new ones – making the final total a whopping eighteen in all. The Kashif-produced “You Give Good Love” was Houston’s entrance into contemporary r&b, while “Saving All My Love for You” and the majestic “The Greatest Love of All” lifted her comfortably into the AC rafters, continuing the great succession of international popdom created by her celebrated blood cousin Dionne Warwick. Those three songs kick off this set, along with her Narada-produced dance numbers (“How Will I Know,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”). The disc runs through every studio album up to 1998’s My Love Is Your Love, including her unavoidable motion picture soundtrack submissions (“I Will Always Love You,” “I Have Nothing,” “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)”). There’s a few odd omissions to vent about, particularly additional Babyface wonders like the heart-tugging “Miracle,” and the inspirational sing-a-long “Count on Me.” Even “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay” and “Heartbreak Hotel” is absent from the body, but it seems quite understandable when compiling Whitney’s crowned jewels. The best made the cut, the decent filler didn’t. Unless you want to hear the newly assembled R. Kelly duet of “I Look to You” taken from his ProTools-salvaged musical empire or the Jermaine Dupri-concocted “Never Give Up,” which sounds like a throwaway track from the My Love Is Your Love era. Thankfully, a double-disc version of this posthumous collection – outlined with liner notes by musical mentor Clive Davis – mends the broken hearts with more hits and less misses (“One Moment in Time,” “My Name Is Not Susan,” “Run to You,” “Count on Me” “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay,” “Million Dollar Bill”). And oh yeah, “Miracle” is still missing on Disc 2. Overall, the single disc version capsulate Houston’s finest, although it once again reminds us that her amazing zenith was jeopardize too early in life and that cherubim sound-alikes like Celine Dion and Mariah Carey were far from the problem.
