For a stint, that very fact was too much for R&B fans, like the ones who famously booed Clive Davis’s golden girl at the 1989 Soul Train Awards. Less than enamored with her brand of smoky adult contemporary balladry and buoyant synth pop, black popular culture would wait until the Clinton ’90s, would wait through The Bodyguard tsunami to embrace Cissy’s daughter wholeheartedly and with open arms as she eased her way into an R&B universe transformed by hip hop and Terry McMillan novels. The reconstructed Whitney who “exhaled” and told her man that “it’s not right, but it’s okay,” had found a way to wed a little bit of Newark, New Jersey, swagger with diva elegance and gospel conviction. Slipping effortlessly into Chaka’s “everywoman” shoes, she stepped into the decade in which black popular culture most fully became global popular culture and musically asserted her breezy mastery of dance pop, hip hop soul and Wyclef Jean–diaspora carnival. The Whitney of the ’90s was an Afro-pop cosmopolitan whose voice, at turns astonishingly supple and formidable, sinuous and striking, evoked an increasing fullness, warm sophistication and playful maturity—all the more heartbreakingly ironic given the ways that her personal life began to come undone at that time.
— I’m Every Woman: Whitney Houston, the Voice of the Post–Civil Rights Era | The Nation
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