After Whitney Houston’s untimely death last weekend, a lot of weight fell onto the producers of the 54th annual Grammy Awards. The event, which sells itself as ‘music’s biggest night,’ gave the showrunners only a few hours to figure out how to memorialize one of music’s biggest icons.

Their answer was a somber LL Cool J announcing, ‘There is no way around this. We had a death in our family.’ The ‘NCIS: Los Angeles’ actor went on to request a prayer for his ‘fallen sister.’

For LL Cool J and other musicians, a star like Whitney Houston is like a family member. She has inspired pop music in a way almost no one else has and paved the way for so many to follow her.

To those of us who don’t have chart-topping singles, Houston was the singer for whom we always turned the radio up. As long as the car windows are closed, we’re all belting out ‘I want to feel the heat with somebody!’

We forgot that Houston wasn’t our family member, but a voice on the radio. I still remember the now famous 2002 interview she had with Diane Sawyer. The interview focused on Houston’s personal issues, like supposed drug use and inner demons.

After an amazingly rich career, Houston’s was boiled down to ‘crack is whack.’

If we weren’t thinking about the whackness of crack, we were contemplating the singer’s tumultuous relationship with Bobby Brown.

She won the Guinness World Record for most awarded female artist of all time, and all anyone noticed was the emphatic way she would say her ex-husband’s name or how thin she was getting.

We sounded like her grandma.

‘Whitney, you’re looking a little thin there. Are you eating anything? You don’t have to yell Bobby’s name, we can all hear! We should probably make her some soup.’

Even though most people have never seen or met Houston, most of us still felt like we deserved a front-row seat to her scandals.

The view that a celebrity’s day-to-day difficulties belong to the public is a pretty pervasive element of our culture. The pop culture guru herself — no, not me — Lady Gaga dedicated an entire video to it.

In her video ‘Paparazzi,’ Gaga literally dies for the American public. She knows they want to see her decay, so she shows it to them. Instead of letting everyone talk about her eventual failure, Gaga put it all out there.

Viewers of MTV’s 2009 Video Music Award witnessed Gaga’s publicly staged death scene during her ‘Paparazzi’ performance.

Whether we’re ready to admit it or not, everyone loves a good train wreck. Lindsay Lohan. Charlie Sheen. The Kardashians. We’re all like moths to a flame.

Celebrities have a fine line to walk. They want us to care about them enough for their faces to be sprawled across People magazine, but they also want their privacy. Once the spotlight becomes a little too glaring, they want out. Large sunglasses appear in every picture, and the publicist is on double duty cleaning up their image.

This is also when we care the most. Those same embarrassing paparazzi shots celebrities try to keep to a minimum hit viral status within minutes. They become trending topics on Twitter and front-page news.

These controversies disappear just as quickly as they become the hottest gossip — some other starlet has taken too many drugs or lost too much weight. Whatever the issue, it’s big news now, and we need to know. But one thing is for sure: Celebrity downfall will never go out of style.

Ariana Romero is a sophomore magazine journalism major. Her column appears every Thursday. She can be reached at akromero@syr.edu. 

Published on February 15, 2012 at 12:00 pm