Or so the royalist history goes. There are always revolutionaries in the realm, people who don't believe in the benevolence or utility of the monarchy. The cruelly ironized use of her image and music in Bret Easton Ellis's spiteful satire American Psycho came to stand in for an entire subcultural critique of the hyperpolished, precision-engineered music of the '80s mainstream, against which white men who considered themselves disaffected intellectuals raged. In their reading, the bounding, whirling joy of "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)" or "So Emotional" falsely papered over the injustice, violence, and destructiveness of American society, and she was a convenient figurehead propping up a corrupt system—a reading borrowed from British punk's attitude towards an actual Queen.
Whitney was not a literal queen, but the theory of monarchy—that while most people are contingent upon the world, there are some people on whom the world is contingent, who define the world, and on whose sufferance the rest of us exist—isn't a bad metaphor for the feelings that Whitney Houston inspired in many of my generation. Whether we were adoring pop-dance royalists (which as often as not meant that we could see ourselves in her; we were women, or black, or queer), or raging indie-punk roundheads (which as often as not meant that our own structures of power were threatened by her metaphorical realm), we understood her as a constant, to be done homage or to be fought against, but always, eternally, there.
Her voice allowed no other understanding. It not only "filled the room" in the ordinary sense of being easily heard—especially when she pushed into her belting range, hard-edged and indomitable—but in the sense that there was no space for anything else; you felt crushed against the walls by the dominating, obliterating power of her voice. This could be ecstasy, or it could be intolerable; not unusually, as in the operatic grandeur of The Bodyguard soundtrack, it was both.
She had multiple voices, of course—she was a performer, not a monolith—and it was the elasticity of her voice, which allowed her to make the jump from the just-above-a-whisper longing of the opening a capella verse of "I Will Always Love You" to its cliff-drop, pummeling final chorus, that made her so overwhelming during her decade of dominance. None of her peers or competitors, from Madonna and Janet Jackson to Mariah Carey and Mary J. Blige, had her almost inhuman control, her eerie command of technique and precision. They might outthink, outdance, outcharm, or outemote her, but they could never be as totalitarian as Whitney at her best: Her technique was ruthless and impregnable, cutting off all avenues of escape, bending the listener to her will.
And then, as all monarchs do eventually, she declined. She had achieved the height; she could afford to be retiring for a season. The world shifted under her; and the multiplicity of voices encouraged by hip-hop assimilated only uneasily into her totalitarian ethos. Her post-Bodyguard soundtracks tended to retreat into older soul or gospel forms, and starting with 1998's My Love Is Your Love, she sounded less and less indomitable and more and more complaisant, singing duets and riding beats and being remixed, increasingly another functioning part of her productions rather than the still jewel in their active setting. By 2009's I Look to You, even the smooth marble voice had grown audibly fissured with age and use; while her technique was still profound, her songs were not, cheerfully going through retro paces rather than setting new benchmarks.