(Houston sang the song live not long after, in a hastily arranged TV special, which quieted any doubters.) When Houston was initially asked to sing the anthem, weeks before, she told her longtime bandleader and arranger Rickey Minor that the only version of the song she liked was Marvin Gaye’s performance at the 1983 N.B.A. The difficult chord changes, the cumbersome phrasing, and the unpredictability of the weather made it standard practice for singers performing the anthem at the Super Bowl to sing to a prerecorded track. There was a controversy at the time over whether Houston had lip-synched. Its hold on us, however, can be attributed, ultimately, to a single powerful effect: the startlingly beautiful sound Houston makes when she sings the word “free.” This was a sound for the ages. In its way, the performance remains as influential a moment in television history as Elvis on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Houston’s rendition of the anthem is studded with vocal gems and remains a master class in vocal prowess. It was this knowledge of how a song should be shaped and her bodily understanding of where her voice should fall that Houston brought to her famous performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 1991, at the outset of the first Iraq War, twenty-five years ago today. (Houston had missed the first day of rehearsal and had shown up so late the next day that her run-through with Carey was pushed to the end of the session.) With none of the musicians in the hall (including Bill Conti, the longtime conductor of Oscars ceremony) able to riddle out a solution, Houston identified the offending chords for the orchestra and created a new arrangement on the spot. I worked for the choreographer Debbie Allen at the Oscars in 1999, when Houston and Carey sang their middling hit “When You Believe,” from “The Prince of Egypt.” Late into a night of rehearsals on the evening before the broadcast, it was discovered, by Houston, that the arrangement wasn’t working, and the rehearsal ground to a halt. Despite Carey’s caricature of black stylistics and her mixed racial background, the skin-color difference between her and Houston managed to bring out America’s racism. Houston was subject to the singer’s version of the black athlete’s curse: as the daughter of the gospel great Cissy Houston and a cousin of Dionne, Whitney was regarded as all instinct and natural gifts, whereas Mariah, arranger and songwriter, had a brain. These were habits that Houston-having been shaped by traditional gospel and its conservative nature, and by her cousin Dionne Warwick’s elegantly restrained performance style-largely eschewed. The first challenge to Houston’s legacy arrived in the early nineties, in the form of Mariah Carey, who, from the very beginning of her career, with her constant vocal runs and obsessive flurry of hands, took certain “black” singing habits to extremes. And the woman who was once the most famous singer in the world was an incomparable artist. Brown’s book may threaten Houston’s legacy as a mother or as a friend, but the “Star Trek”-style hologram threatens her legacy as an artist. What’s remarkable is how seamlessly (almost invisibly) each gesture is built into the performance. There is a video of Houston performing a medley of her hits in which nearly every rhythmic gesture has a meaning: a subtle nod of the head signals the start of the song a purposeful strut upstage and a drop of the arms alerts the band to proceed to the next number yet another drop of the arms tells the band how long to hold a note a slow undulation of her left hand tells it to quiet down. But no non-dancer moved among the four corners of a performance stage with more elegance or musical intent than Whitney Houston did. With their mostly rhythmless gaits, their barely there two-steps, rappers have nothing to fear from herky-jerky virtual projections of themselves synched to a vocal track. So far, the digital smoke and mirrors has been used primarily to summon rappers back from the dead. But it’s the spectre of a hologram that is more unsettling. If half of what has been rumored about Houston’s more unpleasant behavior is true, Brown’s revelations will no doubt be shocking (if anyone is still capable of being shocked by celebrities). & B. bad boy Bobby Brown, is due out sometime in June, and a hologram performance of Houston singing her greatest hits has been promised by a billionaire financier from Greece. Photograph by George Rose / Gettyįans and admirers of the late singer Whitney Houston are in for a difficult year. A memoir by her ex-husband, the R. Whitney Houston performs the national anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl.