Today's Song: Whitney Houston featuring Jordin Sparks 'Celebrate'
On the heels of last night's poignant and composed appearance of Bobbi Kristina Brown at the Billboard Awards comes a poignant and composed musical preview of Sparkle, the upcoming remake we're really excited about that will feature Whitney Houston's final movie role. "Celebrate," an R. Kelly-produced stomper is a little disco, a little gospel and a whole lot like something that would have appeared in a '70s artificial sweetener commercial. It's almost too catchy (check that momentary key change that concludes every chorus on the "You celebrate me" line). Whitney's still got her I Look to You-era hoarseness, which you can read as a soulful reflection of a hard-lived life (as I choose to) or as a tangible record of just how hard she fell (her duet partner/Sparkle co-star, Jordin Sparks, sounds utterly gymnastic in comparison).
Still, it's nice that this first Sparkle taste is so...well, nice and not swathed in melancholy for the sake of prolonged mourning (it's sad enough that Whitney's gone, as it is). Still holding out for that cover of "His Eye Is on the Sparrow" you can barely hear Whit sing in the Sparkle trailer, still hopeful that the words Sparkle director Salim Akil recently told Vanity Fair come true:
"All the questions that you ask people as you do this story, I feel she answers in this movie...The answer is: 'All the good things, all the beautiful things, that you ever thought about me are true.' Her performance is consistent with the gifts that she gave us consistently. Isn't that enough?"