I Will Always Love You, or Love at the End of the Digital World
By Reg Zehner
From The Bodyguard (1992)If I told you I didn’t listen to love songs until a year ago, you may not believe me. Like, yes, I’ve heard Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love,” or Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road,” but I didn’t really listen to songs like those and feel what they were talking about. Not that I didn’t believe in love, but I wasn’t moved in the same way I saw others tear up, or share cherished memories over. I believe that in order to truly hear such a song, you have to be able to feel it. The moment I truly felt love songs is when I was engrossed in loss. In many attempts to navigate life post-loss, I realized that love songs and songs capturing love feel different. I don’t really know when that switch happened, or how exactly it happened, but regardless, the songs that before I would say sounded good now well an emotion so deep, I sometimes have to take a minute.
In their essay, “808’s & Heartbreak,” Dr. McKitterick and Alexander G. Weheliye state, “Heartbreak captures, at least a little, those injuriously loving emulations of what it means to be Black and human within the context of white supremacy. Heartbreak works with and in excess of the bio-mythological heart, the hollow muscular organ and its narratives of affectively variegated tenderness and loss. Heartbreak represents the reverberating echoes of our collective plantocratic historical pasts in the present. Heartbreak elucidates how the violence of racial capitalism inaccurately reproduces black life.”[1]
Heartbreak captures the past-present-future pain of unnamable loss, and no matter the time-spatiality of the event that sparked the pain, you will always feel something. Such travesty is akin to living ‘in the wake’, a lens for viewing Black and African peoples and our navigation in the ongoing white-supremacist-patriarchal violence of the global world, coined by Dr. Christina Sharpe. [2]
Heartbreak, then, can be the emotional accumulation of the wake; the way the heart heaves in the sorrow of violence and loss. Even with the wake, with heartbreak, some degree of love survives.
From The Bodyguard (1992)You see, here is a thing about the heart and yeah this will be like a ‘duh, I know this already’, but bear with me: to know pain, you must know joy and to know heartbreak, you must know love. Heartbreak cannot be heartbreak without love and to feel love, is to feel loss. I do believe there is a degree of separation between loss and love, but not by much. In order to recognize the type of pain you are having, to recognize it as heartbreak, it must be tied to love.
Love, in all of its bad and good, is also a descriptor for the Black and human experience; and Black love especially is not only cherished, but is one of the hottest commodities in the market. Our current market, driven by algorithms and selfies, are entrenched with emotion. Rage sells, pain sells, and most importantly, love sells.
Black love, though not talked about as much as Black rage or Black pain, is so intrinsic to almost every type of industry, if not the very fabrication of some. Especially if you look at music–from gospel, to jazz, to R&B, Black love is the sun that everyone wants to feel. Because in a world that tries so hard to make you objectify or memeify every aspect of your identity and your life, it feels good to subscribe to your monthly Spotify-Apple-Tidal-music app for $12.99 and listen to a song that makes you feel your heart a little more clearly.
“…Black love especially is not only cherished, but is one of the hottest commodities in the market. Our current market, driven by algorithms and selfies, are entrenched with emotion. Rage sells, pain sells, and most importantly, love sells.”
So, let’s talk about Whitney Houston.
Many, many, people have talked and written about Whitney Houston the Superstar, the Singer, the Dancer, the Actress (so I am not any different.) I point to Whitney because 1. She is one of many love song queens and 2. “I Will Always Love You” can be considered one of the top love songs of all time. And yes, Whitney has a lot of pop songs, but she also ballads, which crosses into R&B and also dance music. She embodies what it means to cross genres and is also one of the artists I felt a little bit too late, if there is such a thing.
Outside of billboard charts and statistics, I consider “I Will Always Love You” as the love song because of its mass relevance in the love songs category. It is the epitome of the genre. And even though I am barely scratching the massive selections in Houston’s love rapport, poet-author Hanif Abdurraqib states it best in his 2019 essay, “On Summer Crushing” where he engages with Houston and her song “How Will I Know.” He writes “...But where Whitney and I meet is this: the idea of falling in love over and over again within an endless loop of uncertainty.” [3]
Even though Abdurraqib talks about Houston in a sense of crushes, I am here to talk about the pain and beauty of the throes of love, and the fact that whenever we sing our hearts out, we don’t know how much it will cost to get it back.
From The Bodyguard (1992)The first time I saw the movie The Bodyguard [1992] I was ten years old and my sisters and I watched the entire movie (with commercials), from start to finish. There was drama, action and everything you could’ve asked for. Looking back on the film, even with its cheesy lines and over-the-top plot, I still think it’s a decent movie. Obviously the movie was impeccable with Whitney as the lead actress, but what makes it memorable is when you get to witness her sanging the song during the height of the plot. Re-listening now, I think of how impressive silence can be; like the moment right before thunder breaks across the sky.
“I Will Always Love You” is a three minute ballad originally written and recorded by Dolly Parton, who wrote the song for her mentor and business partner. No matter where you are, or how old, the moment you hear the the first words, “If I should stay, I would only be in your waaaay…”, captivates you to pause long enough until the next verse and until you’re crescendoed into the entire chorus. [4]
“I will always love you” is a statement that is repeated a few times in the ballad. In the height of the song Houston throws not only her impressive vocal range, but her e-mo-tion! so you’re drawn back towards that one person, or that one memory you will always love, because love recalls what is closest to us. And I think when I listen to Houston’s voice reaching across social-spatial-temporal portals, I feel love.
Again, my connection to love is ever-changing. Especially now in my mid-twenties, my heart has grown much fonder of the aspects of love and its material and digital embodiments. I think this can be a tether to “I Will Always Love You” because the song wasn’t written by Whitney Houston, but it became Whitney Houston’s™ song. Dolly Parton’s version is a sweet and loving gesture, don’t get me wrong. Her version captures the idea of letting go (for Parton, it was ending a relationship with a business partner) so she can continue her career in a different way. But it’s Houston’s version you think of whenever you name the song. It’s her voice that takes us to a new register.
“Under capitalism, love only has to be material enough to sell, and in a digital world, digital love is a Youtube thumbs up, and a Spotify playlist away.”
Somewhere in Houston’s voice lies a hook that pulls a deeper tug in my heart. It’s a voice I know all too well, coming from a lineage of Black women (and being a Black femme myself), with their own stories of love and heartbreak. It’s something that, despite not knowing Whitney myself, is familiar in its love and that I have felt before. “I Will Always Love You” is a song that not only lives, but also loves again in a much deeper way, like it was meant for me. After my own heartbreaks, I do sometimes feel the need to shout the way Whitney shouts—like you need the whole world to hear you.
Regardless of how much life you live, love is like a warm hug you’ve desperately needed, a longing wrapped into warmth until it’s gone. At some point, we all crave it (whether that is now, or later), which is how capitalism starts the fire before we realize it’s too late.
Under capitalism, love only has to be material enough to sell, and in a digital world, digital love is a Youtube thumbs up, and a Spotify playlist away. Materiality is nonsensical to NFTs, and we’ve bought love online enough times on dating apps that I wonder if it is truly ours. Even though sharing is caring, I’m selfish enough to know I too must own a piece (even if it is just a little.) Because yes, we can feel it in movies, we can feel it in art, but when I hear a song that speaks to my heart, in its most painful and beautiful version, I think I will have to listen to the song at least 200 times. You think I’m joking (I’m not.)
And to my disappointment, I can’t think my way out of how or why love costs so much. It is worth more as an immaterial object than any flowers can buy. And yet, I still like the Youtube video of Whitney Houston singing her heart out in 4k, because it is the only thing I can do. I know that Black love songs sell; I see SZA screaming into the sky, I see Ravyn Lenae softly caressing love whispers out her lips, and Ojerime echoing love that makes me believe maybe other planes of existence do exist and we’re trapped in the wrong one.
Especially as capital destroys the world, and tries to take love too, with its overbearing algorithms and Hollywood spectacle movies, I do think there is something special about how Black love will be able to live on. It’ll live on in the same way Black music broke itself into existence in this dimension and keeps breaking itself anew. So as we are all breaking our phone screens, breaking our bank accounts, breaking our environments, and breaking our own hearts until our hearts can’t take it anymore, love…will always find us.
From The Bodyguard (1992)Notes:
Hanif Abdurraqib, "On Summer Crushing," The Paris Review, 2019: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/06/12/on-summer-crushing/
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), pg 15.
Katherine, McKitterick and Alexander G. Weheliye , "808’s & Heartbreak," Propter Nos, 2017.
Whitney Houston, “I Will Always Love You,” from The Bodyguard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JWTaaS7LdU