听力|精读|翻译|词组Whitney Houston 惠特尼·休斯顿Obituary 讣告 Whitney Houston惠特尼·休斯顿 Whitney Elizabeth Houston, pop singer, died on February 11th, aged 48流行歌手惠特尼·伊丽莎白·休斯顿于2012年2月11日去世，享年48岁 THE year was 1985, the scene Whitney Houston's second sellout concert in Carnegie Hall in New York. There were almost 3,000 in the audience, and from somewhere among them, as she launched into “I am Changing”, a voice rang out: “Sing it, Whitney honey! Sing us the truth!” 点击显示翻译▼
那是1985年，惠特尼·休斯顿（Whitney Houston）在纽约卡耐基音乐厅举办音乐会，门票再度一抢而空，全场近3000名观众座无虚席。当她开始深情演唱歌曲《I am Changing》时，观众中间不知从哪儿响起一个声音：“唱吧，惠特尼，亲爱的！把真正的你唱给我们听！”
But what was the truth? Apparently, it blazed before them, a huge, pure, beautiful voice from an impeccably poised young woman who had strode out in an evening gown, radiating self-confidence. She didn't move much on stage: every ounce of power was reserved for filling the hall with spine-tingling ballads of longed-for love. Her fans could see that this was God-given, a gift hauled up from deep inside, as when the little girl in the New Hope gospel choir had closed her eyes tight and soloed “Guide me, O thou Great Jehovah” in church, and the Holy Spirit had rolled out over that congregation. Others, though, could see she was a product of careful packaging by Clive Davis of Arista Records, who had spotted her in a New York night club, signed her at 19 and then waited two years for the right string-lush ballads to come along; who had cut back the frizzy hair, lightened the make-up, changed the dress, and launched her on the world so perfect that by 1986 she was Billboard artist of the year, an instant sensation.点击显示翻译▼
注释:1. New Hope是美国宾夕法尼亚州的一个小镇，坐落于费城与纽约之间。一个美丽的富人居住区。大多数美国宾州的富人居住于此。https://baike.baidu.com/item/new%20hope/7103556?fr=aladdin2. Billboard（公告牌）：诞生于1896年，欧美国家流行乐坛权威性最高的单曲排行榜 Like Cinderella, she said. And, like Cinderella, she claimed her ambitions were small. All she wanted was to go to the mall and find true love, like any other 21-year-old. But as a soul singer her heritage was already royal rather than rags: daughter of Cissy Houston of the Sweet Inspirations, cousin of Dionne Warwick, god-daughter of Aretha Franklin (“Auntie Ree”), all of whom she'd learned from when her braids still got in the way of the microphone. Hard-headed, she had chosen to build her career the way Mr Davis advised her : “Longevity, that's what it's all about.”点击显示翻译▼
注：1. 美妙灵感乐队（The Sweet Inspirations），美国黑人女子R&B乐队，成立于1959年，后于1979年解散；1994年重建，后活跃至今。2. 狄昂·华薇克（Dionne Warwick，1940.12.12-），美国传奇R&B女歌手，有R&B鼻祖之称。3. 艾瑞莎·富兰克林（Aretha Franklin，1942.3.15-2018.8.16），美国流行乐歌手，有“灵魂歌后”之称。 Besides, she enjoyed being a princess—possessor of multiple platinum discs, holder of six Grammys, earner of more money and seller of more records than any female star before her. She would order her entourage around and sack them repeatedly, trusting only her mother not to “talk shit to my ear” or “blow smoke up my ass”. Fame brought her a five-bedroom house in the New Jersey countryside, with a built-in recording studio and an Olympic pool. It also brought a train of big-voiced imitators, from Mariah Carey to Celine Dion to Beyoncé; she never worried about any of them, because “whoever comes got to come after me”. Even after 1992, when she took to disappearing for years at a time, her giant voice went on reverberating. Songs such as “I Will Always Love You”, “I'm Every Woman” and “One Moment in Time” stayed so long in the charts and in wine-bar Muzak that they seemed to get into the bloodstream of the world.点击显示翻译▼
此外，她也很享受成为公主的感觉——拥有多张白金唱片、斩获六项格莱美奖、职业收入和唱片销量胜过所有出道更早的女明星。她会对身边的工作人员发号施令，不断解雇换人，只相信妈妈不会“对自己说鬼话”或者“拍马屁献殷勤”。名望让她在新泽西的乡村拥有了一套五居室的房子，内置录音室和一个奥运标准的游泳池。休斯顿出名后，一大批模仿她唱歌的高音歌手涌现了出来，比如玛丽亚·凯莉（Mariah Carey）、席琳·迪翁（Celine Dion）和碧昂斯（Beyoncé）等等；但是，她从未对这些后起之秀表示担忧，因为“无论谁上来，老娘从未被超越”。即使在1992年之后，她有好几年没有露面，但她洪亮的歌声仍在乐坛来回激荡。休斯顿的很多歌曲，诸如《I Will Always Love You》、《I'm Every Woman》和《One Moment in Time》都长期位列各大排行榜和酒吧助兴歌单，时间长到这些歌曲似乎融入了世界的血脉。
Sweetheart dethroned甜心陨落 For some years she held the post of America's Sweetheart, pretty, God-fearing and patriotic. She went to the White House to discuss youth projects, and set up a foundation to fight illiteracy. Her rendering of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Superbowl in 1991, during the Gulf war—cuddly as a teddy-bear in a white tracksuit—was so joyously rousing that it was reissued in the wake of the September 2001 attacks. But she was bad, too. She liked to shock and cuss, saying that anyone who claimed that recording songs was creative, rather than commercial, was a fucking liar. Her private life grew raunchy, with marriage to bad-boy Bobby Brown in 1992 propelling her into a whirl of boastful sex, violent rows and cocaine. Her sequinned act was just a performance, she said; Bobby, by contrast, she could be real with. As for what “real” meant, she was either her own best friend or her worst enemy, she said once. “The biggest devil is me.”点击显示翻译▼
很多年来，她被视为“美国甜心”，美丽动人又虔诚爱国。她曾前往白宫讨论青年项目，也建立了旨在消除文盲的基金会。1991年，她在超级碗献唱美国国歌《The Star Spangled Banner》；当时正值海湾战争，她身穿白色运动服，就像一只可爱的泰迪熊。当时的表演是如此令人兴奋激昂，以至在2001年美国911事件发生后，这首歌又一次重新发行。但“甜心”也有不甜的时候。她时有惊人举动，还经常出口成“脏”，表示那些声称录歌是为了创新而不是逐利的人都是扯淡的骗子。1992年，她嫁给了坏男孩鲍比·布朗（Bobby Brown），自那以后卷入了招摇的性爱、暴力争吵和嗑药的漩涡，私生活变得混乱不堪。她说，自己光鲜亮丽的演出只不过是一场表演，和鲍比在一起却不同，她能做真实的自己。至于什么才叫做“真实”，她曾经解释过：她要么是自己最好的朋友，要么是自己最可怕的敌人，“最大的魔鬼是我自己”。
Through it all, there remained an anodyne constancy about the songs. Miss Houston had placed herself—or been placed—so solidly in the mainstream that she could not easily wriggle out of it. There was a point to this: it allowed her to break onto MTV and the late-night chat shows, forging a new path for black women as Michael Jackson had done for the men. It also proved, to many blacks, that she was not black enough, showing none of their fury and very little of the soulful gospel depths of Auntie Ree and Cousin Dionne. The cutting urban hip-hop of the 1980s she found ugly, like listening to her brothers boast of the women they'd laid. When she tried angrier songs herself—as in “It's not Right But it's Okay”, in 1998—they still seemed as cool and glossy as her blue sheath dress. The scratchy defiance of later albums (such as “I Look to You”, her last, in 2009), owed more to the drug-ravaged thinness of her voice than the miseries of her recent life.点击显示翻译▼
经历了这一切之后，她的歌就显得平淡无奇了。休斯顿把自己——或者说是被别人——深深地扎根于社会主流文化当中，令她后来很难挣脱这样的枷锁。不过这样的处境也有其意义：她借此得以进入MTV，并参加深夜访谈节目。这为黑人女性开辟了一条新道路，如同迈克尔·杰克逊为黑人男士所做的那样。对许多黑人而言，她还不够“黑”：她从未表现出和他们一样炽烈的怒火，也不能像她的教母瑞阿姨和狄昂表姐那样深情地唱诵福音。她觉得80年代刻薄的城市嘻哈音乐很难听，就像听她的兄弟们吹嘘自己睡过的女人一样。当她试着自己去演唱更愤怒的歌曲时——如1998年的《It's not Right But it's Okay》——这些歌听起来仍然和她的蓝色紧身连衣裙一样酷炫。她后期的专辑（例如2009年发行的最后一张专辑《I Look to You》）透出了嘶哑和叛逆，这要更多地归因于她受毒品祸害而变得细弱的嗓音，而不是对近来苦痛生活的感悟。
注释：1. MTV: is an American cable channel that launched on August 1, 1981. Based in New York City, it serves as the flagship property of the MTV Entertainment Group, part of ViacomCBS Domestic Media Networks, a division of ViacomCBS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV2.Auntie Ree: Aretha Franklin and Houston shared an extraordinary friendship full of love and support. Whitney Houston grew up around Aretha Franklin and was inspired by her voice and music. Aretha encouraged Whitney in her talent and their friendship grew as Whitney established herself as an artist.https://www.smoothradio.com/artists/whitney-houston/aretha-franklin-friendship-timeline/3.Dionne: Delia Juanita Warrick (September 25, 1942 – October 18, 2008), known professionally as Dee Dee Warwick, was an American soul singer. Born in Newark, New Jersey, she was the sister of Dionne Warwick, the niece of Cissy Houston, and the first cousin of Whitney Houston. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dee_Dee_Warwick Who she was, and what she really wanted, remained as unclear as her bathtub death in a Los Angeles hotel on the night before the Grammys—at which Adele, another big belter in the Houston style, carried away most of the prizes. She needed the give and take of an audience, Miss Houston said. Besides, God had given her this gift to use. Yet told by Oprah Winfrey in 2009 that her voice was a national treasure, and that some people thought she had squandered it, she could only whisper, terror-struck, “That's heavy.” Too heavy, was perhaps the truth.点击显示翻译▼
2012年2月11日，一名美国著名女歌手因服用过量药物导致意外发生，巨星就此陨落。她为音乐而生，用灵魂吟唱，她就是惠特尼休斯顿。曾经一直以为惠特尼是天生歌者，她从来都应该是站在那一方舞台上歌唱的。每一次的高音、转音，她都从不费力。从high f开始，在她的声音里，世界好像就这样安静下来。你会停不下来似的一首接一首听下去，在一些复古的节奏中，慢慢品味她的声音。用灵魂歌唱的人，他们的歌声也会感染更多的灵魂。就好像平静湖面上泛起的涟漪，微澜过后，湖面重归平静，但石块沉入湖底，它已然在听众的心底留下了抹不去的痕迹。2012年2月13日，洛杉矶斯台普斯中心，感伤之调弥漫在第54届格莱美颁奖典礼的现场。主持人Cool J带领到场嘉宾一同祈祷时，主舞台适时响起了惠特尼那首经典代表作《I Will Always Love You》，珍妮弗哈德逊在演唱时也是几度声音哽咽。这晚惠特尼本该站上这个舞台，这也是曾经属于她的舞台。30座公告牌音乐奖，22座全美音乐奖，10座灵魂列车奖，6座格莱美奖，5座世界音乐奖等等，惠特尼一生共获得过400多座奖项，她是打破吉尼斯世界纪录、迄今为止获奖最多的黑人女歌手。她在音乐领域的建树其实不必我再去赘述，她是名符其实的天才、是被上帝宠爱的音乐之女。共鸣来源于艺术本身，也来源于人们的一些共同回忆。惠特尼的声音是来自上帝的礼物，她唱歌时又带着特有的、只有岁月能够打磨出的技巧，而尤为动人的是她的歌声中传递的力量，自信且笃定的力量。然而，面对那场名利的游戏，她却甘拜了下风。她用生命与撒旦做赌注，灵魂与力量在放浪形骸中逐渐枯竭、萎缩。2002年她在接受ABC采访时曾说“最大的魔鬼是我自己。我不是自己最好的朋友，就是自己最大的敌人。” 如今看来，她分明知道自己走在哪条路上，也知道那条路会通向何方。不论世俗如何评判，她永远都是一个奇迹。终于，她又站上了只属于她自己的的舞台，只不过这方舞台是在生命之途的终端。灵魂与天籁，名利与欲念，亦或是放浪与期望，一切已是过眼云烟。歌声随风飘散，生命随风而逝，属于惠特尼的一切都永远定格在了2012这一年，生命之火从点燃到熄灭只消一瞬。我好像突然看到了贝弗利山上，那支黑色的郁金香，在初春的风中摇曳、绽放。她的陨落注定会令她一步步离开大众的视野，人们不会再听到她的新歌了，或许也不会再时常想起她了。但音乐一直在，音乐带给你我的力量也一直在。惠特尼在九年前悄悄离我们而去，但她的歌声从未远离，不管此刻的你是否在听，when you believe，Whitney’s musicwill always love you. She hopes life treats you kind, and wishes you joy and happiness.
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