www.classicwhitney.com - Archive Newsfile

The Sun: Whitney At Her Whit's End...

UK Tabloid newspaper The Sun has published a story alleging extensive drug abuse by Whitney Houston as told by Whitney's sister-in-law, Tina Brown. The news report is accompanied by a photograph alleging to be of Whitney's bathroom that is littered with drug paraphernalia.

The Sun - Whitney At Her Whit's End.
New York Daily News - Houston, you got a problem...crack!

National Enquirer Pictures...

The National Enquirer has published photographs reported to be of Whitney Houston's bathroom evidencing her continued abuse of drugs according to her sister in law, Tina Brown.

Unheard Whitney Remixes To Surface From RCA Vault...

[365 Report]

Dance, Dance, Dance

Review by Duave Wells

Dance music fans have a new reason to cheer thanks to the recent launch of the new RCA Dance Music Vault on iTunes.

For the first time, many of those elusive DJ mixes and out-of-print classics that dance fanatics have lusted after for a lifetime are finally available on iTunes in what can only be described as a groundbreaking move by the always cutting edge RCA Music Group.

“It’s a very good day today!” Said RCA Music Group Vice President of A&R Hosh Gureli speaking from his office in New York last week on the day the iTunes catalog went online. “It’s like a mental day for the dance world I think…and also for the gay community as well.”

And truth be told Gureli is not even exaggerating. Not only can you now download previously unreleased mixes of contemporary hits like Kelly Clarkson’s “Because of You” and Heather Headley’s “In My Mind”, you can also download classic alternative 80’s tracks like Icicle Works’ “Whisper To A Scream” and legendary 70’s disco tracks like Odyssey’s “Native New Yorker”. It’s really a bit like being a kid in a dance music dream store, especially when you consider the fact that RCA is seemingly holding back nothing…even releasing new mixes of current songs like yet another Clarkson hit “Walk Away” that are as little as three weeks old!

“The days when a DJ got a 12-inch and held onto it forever and it wasn’t widely available are over,” said Gureli describing the new day in dance music this new venture heralds.

And best of all, this is just the beginning. Each month RCA plans to roll out new additions to the vault, ultimately creating what could well become the face of dance music on the web. Next month, look for the floodgates to open on mixes of 80’s dance chart toppers like Jermaine Stewart’s signature hits “The Word Is Out” and “We Don’t Have To Take Our Clothes Off”…everything Expose …a whole lot of Taylor Dayne …maybe some Lisa Stanfield…the late Phyllis Hyman’s “Riding The Tiger” and even The Blow Monkeys’ “Digging Your Scenes.” Then just in time for gay pride in May and June get ready for what can only be described as a summer of divas.

“What I think is really going to resonate in the gay community is when we concentrate on months May and June,” says Gureli. “I have enough material between Deborah Cox and Whitney Houston to fill pages and pages in the vault and we’re just going to let it out. From exclusive Junior Vasquez remixes to stuff that I could never fit onto a 12-inch because you can only fit so many mixes on a 12-inch. There’s so much extra stuff and I can put it all up there for the world to get…and not just DJ’s but actual fans.”

Can you even handle it? Hey if we can’t get a new Whitney album we can at least get to hear ‘The Voice’ as we’ve never heard her before on iTunes this summer.

When I asked Hosh what inspired this new project which is stirring up all kinds of excitement across the dance community, his response was simple and personal. “I was on iTunes over a year ago and I looked up ‘Native New Yorker’ being a native myself and I didn’t see it up there,” he says seemingly stunned by the revelation. “I thought, ‘My god this is one of the all-time classic records and it’s not on iTunes. Then I started looking for other titles like ‘Disco Nights’ and ‘There For The Grace of God’ and certainly the longer club friendly versions were not up there. So I said, it’s going to be my mission, now that we are the RCA Music Group…to put a destination for dance music up on iTunes at least from a group perspective.”

From that kernel of an idea, RCA Music Group’s Dance Vault has come to fruition in what we can all only hope will be ground zero in a revitalization of dance music across the board. No matter what happens, one thing’s for sure.. iPods across the globe are going to be gettin’ awfully groovy in the very near future. Yeah baby!

NEWSFILE: 29 MARCH 2006

Mary On Whitney...

In a recent interview with Attitude magazine, Mary J Blige responds to a reader's question about Whitney Houston:

You've been through your fair share of drama and come out of it the other end. What advice would you give to Whitney?
[Bernard Thwaite, Lancaster]

To Whitney? I really can't even say anything about that. I wouldn't know what to say to Whitney. I honest to God don't know. I guess you gotta love yourself. You gotta want to admit that you got a problem, first of all. Then start to deal with why that is. It's probably more than just drugs. You get addicted to drugs and alcohol because you want to drown out all the problems in your life. So it's about cutting to what those problems are. You gotta figure out what the problem is. That's what I had to do. I had to learn about processing those things like my father leaving that left me all messed up as a child. We were raised by my mom and it hurt really, really bad because she couldn't nurture us properly. The society we lived in our neighbourhood that was like a prison, honey. So you got to dig for the root of the problem and then the bigger problem, the cause, will start to look after itself. I don't think people are inevitably gonna fall from fame, but I do think that people are inevitably gonna fall if there is something deep in there that is wrong from childhood. So many things happened to me as a child I haven't even spoken candidly about. But it all stems from what the hell happened as a child that would cause you to be so insecure that you would have to put yourself down to that level. It's something deeper than fame that messes people up real bad. Fame just magnifies it. OK, you're insecure, right? Then you get in this business, the music business. You get all this money and attention. And the attention is not real because nobody is really happen for you because you ain't happy for yourself. You're just putting on this air that you're very confident, then you buy all these clothes and all these wigs and all this jewellery and buy all this stuff and you think all that stuff is going to kill the pain. And it never goes away until you deal with the matter in hand. You have to almost give all that stuff back and get yourself together.

[Thanks Jason]

UK Chart Update...

UK Chart For Week Ending 1 April 2006:

WHITNEY THE GREATEST HITS
Top 75 Album Chart - Up to No.61 (from No.72)

NEWSFILE: 26 MARCH 2006