Babyface Rewrites--And Improves--Exhale
Waiting to Exhale
by Armond WhiteKenneth “Babyface” Edmonds’
Waiting to Exhale soundtrack album is the superb work of art on female experience that no one this decade could achieve in print or put on screen--though novelist Terry McMillan and director Forest Whitaker probably dreamed something like Babyface’s exquisite accomplishment.
Babyface has access to the Black woman’s
voice--at least 14 female recording artists perform his compositions on this Arista/LaFace album whereas McMillan entertainingly transcribed women’s most superficial, banal thoughts and Whitaker has put four talented actresses through dull paces. For Edmonds, the voice is an emotional template. He conducts a chorus, not a gripe session (like the “war council” in
Jungle Fever); each soundtrack song is an exhalation articulating what women feel about love and life--bigger subjects than simply “men.” Babyface understands this and conveys it in his rewrite of the book of love.
In the first single, the hit “Exhale (Shoop),” Babyface summarizes recent pop statement of female intent and vision--Salt ‘N Pepa’s 1993 hit “Shoop,” itself an update of Betty Everett’s 1963 “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss).” (Babyface may also have gotten the idea from Michael Cooper’s 1993 “Shoop Shoop [Never Stop Giving Good Love]” a title that already implicated Whitney’s 1984 debut in the term’s history. Also, the song’s thematic idea was previously tested in Toni Braxton’s “Breathe Again.”) Continuing a pop legacy where male producers and writers often provided an expressive forum for female singers, Babyface follows the tradition behind the great ‘60s girl groups. These creations--male projections of female sensibilities--were perhaps the most audacious in all of pop. They proved miraculously faithful to the way generations of Black women feel about romance. From the magnificent “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” to Babyface’s Madonna composition “Take a Bow,” the tradition establishes the legitimacy of women’s desire as well as justifying their irritation.
All this background comes through in the good sound of “Exhale (Shoop),” in how the onomatopoeia “Shoop” classically expresses the inexpressible. Both sensual and comical, the word suggests a good-natured attitude toward one’s feeling, a healthy sign of self-knowledge. That Babyface tailors this slang to a singer as vaunted as Whitney Houston lifts the word’s status as it also remakes Houston’s artistry. Her singing was often, eerily, both virtuosic and impersonal--a climb up bank and musical notes. Until now this buppie ambition lacked soulful insouciance; “Shoop” provides Houston with the R&B plangency, the intuitive gospel-like sensuality her audience has for a decade waited to hear. And three lyrics hit home truths:
Everyone falls in love sometimes -- Houston begins impatiently. It’s a jolt just when you’re ready for the record to start ‘cause the ways of the heart are learned suddenly, cataclysmically. Houston is playful and seductive with this wisdom, friendly rather than pedantic. This “girlfriend” conviviality makes the listener a silent partner in an emotional duet. And Houston’s high-low “
SHOOP, shoop,
SHOOP, shoop” gives the back-and-forth of fond exchange--turning homilies into nuances that announce, agree and understand.
Sometimes you laugh / Sometimes you cry / Life never tells us the whens or whys -- With these awesome pop-soul fundamentals sung rapturously, “Exhale (Shoop)” stays light, but not shallow; it conveys the ease and confidence of group camaraderie. Babyface and Whitney pull off an unexpected feat of communication-as-connection (what pop music is all about) setting out the album’s range through the contradictions, upheavals, second-thoughts, pain, ardor, devotion and disappointment of loving. When Houston reprises “Exhale” on her masterful appropriation of Toni Braxton tropes (saying “It makes me want to shoop you!”), she confirms a contemporary linguistic conceit, playfully twisting slang meanings with youthful effrontery and confidence.
But when you’ve got friends to wish you well -- As sung this verse has the sound of a pat on the back; as glorious as Flavor Flav’s giggle on “Can’t Truss It” showing his support of Chuck D’s ire. “Exhale (Shoop)” never wears out no matter how many times it’s played because its an imaginatively performed distillation of the cultural habit of loving--the constant theme of Black pop.
Babyface’s imaginative coup is to repeat the classic female lessons of longing and heartache. Each guest vocalist does a particular tale of the work involved in love, written simply, with an array of tuneful styles covering pop traditions, fulfilling them and on the album’s first half, enhancing. Like Stendhal’s
De L’Amour, it’s an emotional encyclopedia, each song a chapter in the book of love:
Why Does It Hurt So Bad? -- Whitney seesaws the word “ease” going from friendship to pain to express the need for men and women to communicate.
Let It Flow -- Toni Braxton and a guitar float a body-melody about love lost and life going on.
It Hurts Like Hell -- Aretha Franklin’s thoroughgoing howl of misery felt of personal history become art--so universally recognizable, it’s a motif. The album’s anchor.
Sitting Up In My Room -- Brandy’s self-defining question “How can one be down?” is the sweetest pop solipsism since Brian Wilson.
This Is How It Works -- TLC knows: the drama of sex (like its mechanics) is as funny as it is difficult.
Not Gon Cry -- Mary J. Blige hits the notes and lays down the law. Everybody’s mantra.
My Funny Valentine -- Chaka Kahn finally achieves jazz--so what it’s not Babyface! Rogers & Hart are worthy.
And I Gave My Love To You -- Despite Sonja Marie’s make-out poesy, Patrice Rushen’s gentle keyboard fingering hit the spot.
All Night Long -- Okay, a misstep into malefantasy but the female emphasis asserts: SWV means Sisters With Vaginas.
Wey O -- An Afro-glot rewrite of “Shoop’s” sensuality, transcribed by Chante Moore in bossa-nova breaths.
My Love, Sweet Love -- If Aretha’s track is art, this is “heart & soul” carried by the strength of Patti LaBelle’s voice.
Kissing You -- If Mary J.’s track is truth, Faith Evans trots out the fantasy-before-the-fall, beginning Babyface’s Naive Trilogy.
Love Will Be Waiting At Home -- For Real sings the callowness of first heartbreak.
How Could You Call Her Baby -- Shanna, a baby Braxton, begins her search for soul and self-respect.
Count On Me -- Harmony as happiness. CeCe Winans’ gospel backs up Whitney’s pop -- an aesthetic demonstration of friendly support.
The album is exceptional for performed eloquence as much as narrative exactitude going from disparate chorus of pain to the Naive Trilogy--rescued by “Count On Me”--providing an almost palpable dramatic curve, stronger than the movie.
***
On the filmization of a literary fluke: McMillan wrote a hilarious page-turner by cataloging women’s complaints to the point of inadvertent comedy. It was fun reading the familiar statements of frustration not as literature, but lively pop junk equal to the ‘80s pop-trash
Bright Lights, Big City for white yuppies. A pop record offers more--group identity, affirmation and emotional play (listening and singing along become an active part of an emotional ritual). Yet movies can’t compete with it. Whitaker’s lovely views of beautiful women and handsome men miss an erotic spark that Babyface captures simply through music and women’s voices (Mary J.’s scold, Patti’s force). Instead, the film plods through the plot without shaking up the emotions or the senses like the record does--without tickling your expectations of the many bad-choice routines as the book did.
Popularity aside,
Waiting to Exhale the movie does little else than highlight the greater frustrations of Black people (women) to see their dreams relayed on screen a fraction as well as they are accomplished in music, on records. It’s a fortunate occasion that the movie gave Babyface the opportunity of the century (one man orchestrating the finest vocal talents of the day to display the feminine sensibility that coheres a desperate world), but it also points out the pitiful inadequacy of film culture--Hollywood in particular--to be more than superficial, cursory, condescending to non-white desire.
Casting Whitaker as a director instead of the more appropriate choice (say a woman, or a male like Sydney Pollack, who accomplished a contemporary soap opera in
The Way We Were--not his current, drab
Sabrina) was an insult to McMillan’s audience and to the scope of Black social relations she meant to illustrate.
The story of Savannah (Houston), Bernadine (Angela Bassett), Robin (Leila Rochon) and Gloria (Loretta Devine), four friends in middle-class Arizona, trying to find a dependable male goes through the routine attraction-disappointment that makes love seem a cosmic joke. Each woman’s plight connects them all--Sisters. The common story becomes a statement on Black American sexual mores where the only no-no is the specter of interracial betrayal.
It’s interesting that the romantic difficulties don’t dominate the women’s lives--they all end up with fairytale-happy adjustments, secure in friendship. Whitaker’s idealization of this disconnects the story from reality--there is no sense of place (the sets look like sets) and besides references to songs on the radio, there’s no sense of culture or heritage. These four women’s iconography (the close-ups look like too-much make-up) may be mistaken for appropriate movie fantasy but none of their experiences are juicy or dramatic enough to define adult experience the way soap operas usually, mythically, do.
Since male characters come and go the male-bashing complaints strike me as a pseudo-controversy. For a movie that takes place largely in women’s heads, the male Other must be phantomic--all the women essentially invulnerable. This works better in song because Babyface sustains the tone of personal contemplation. Most of the movie’s love/hate scenes are too wan to be convincing. (Savannah’s phone fight with her mother, Gloria’s porch fight with Mykelti Williamson are exceptions.) Bassett’s unrequited encounter with Wesley Snipes’ noble masculinity is bizarrely ineffectual and the huffing-puffing scenes of male sexual vanity prepare one for satire that hardly comes. None of this gets beneath the skin or piques one’s romantic dreams or fears. When Bassett sets upon her cheating husband’s possessions she seems on auto-destruct. Only Gloria’s finding a good man across the street stands out simply because Devine, who isn’t allowed to give a nuanced characterization, is the only actress who doesn’t look like a movie star. Her “life” is recognizable. In Hollywood even this much authenticity is a triumph.
***
What’s a phenomenon? The album
Waiting to Exhale, certainly not the movie. But all the media attention given to the film (the female Million Man March stuff in
Newsweek and
The New York Times) is just symptomatic of this insane era when journalism colludes with the entertainment industry to boost each other’s business. Worse, it shows how Black American culture, at least its discourse, is influenced by Hollywood marketing forces--an institution intent on stereotyping and demeaning Blacks however possible.
Waiting to Exhale isn’t worthy of the desire for film art that viewers bring to it. Hearing my own sisters and their friends discuss the movie, I noticed each conversation began with praise and slowly turned into detailed complaints and notes of dissatisfaction. This says how much people want
Waiting to Exhale to be a great experience but deep down everyone knows it isn’t. They’re still waiting--for movies to catch up.
January 25, 1996
The City Sun
