Age - Both are 46

Record Sales - Whitney - 230 million+
                       Vanessa - 6 million+

Grammys - Whitney - 8
                  Vanessa - 0 * 15 nominations the Susan Lucci of the Grammys

Studio Releases - Whitney - 6
                           Vanessa - 8

Scandals - Whitney - Bobby Brown, rumored drug addiction
                 Vanessa - Penthouse Magazine
 
So why the comparative? Well to paraphrase Marlon Brando in Julius Ceaser I come to both bury AND praise someone.

Whitney Houston is done. Stick a fork in her. It pains me to write this as I am maybe the biggest Whitney Houston fan alive. She has one of the five greatest voices in music history - Ella, Aretha, Barbara territory. But she has not been relevant since the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack in 1995. Fifteen years ago. Let me say it again: FIFTEEN YEARS AGO!!! MTV still played music videos. IPODs and Wi had not been invented. Pre-Monica Lewinsky. Hell Barack Obama was still in his community organizer phase. In other words musically its ancient history. Yeah I know Just Whitney was released in 2002 and sold 4 million copies. So what? Do you know anyone that has it? Better yet if you do do you know anyone that still plays it? Michael Jackson sold millions of copies of Dangerous and it just didnt matter. Whitneys Central Park performance may go down in history as her Waterloo. Painful to watch such unadulterated greatness fall so far. The recently released I Look To You should have been retitled I Just Cant Do it Anymore. She is just a shell of her former self and its hard to witness. Painful. Whitney is in danger of turning into Michael Jackson. For those over 30 MJ is a musical genius without parellel. For those under 30 he is a circus freak.

Vanessa is aging like a fine wine. Remarkably she is just getting better. Almost like she is just hitting her stride. Her just released The Real Thing may represent her most complete work yet. A beautiful complilation of songs delivered almost with perfection. An eclectic mix of music that titillates the senses. Due to the times in which we live it will not recieve its full due if it gets any at all. Shameful. Vanessa got up off the mat after that whole Penthouse imbriglio. Took major guts and major talent to do that. Multi-talented in almost a Sammy Davis Jr mold - sing, dance, act. Tonys and Emmys in her bag. She is on her way to having a Gladys Knight type career where you turn around  and its 30 years after she started and you are still buying tickets to her concerts. Stunning because noone saw this coming, maybe not even her.

Whitney and Vanessa both came into our conciousness in the mid-80s. Whitney is like Barry Bonds and Vanessa is like Tony Gwynn, one was the standard by which all others were judged and the other just kept gettin hits. Turned around and Tony was in the Hall of Fame, Who saw that coming when he started out? I think of Vanessa in the same way. Whitney is almost out of date. An older woman who should have rethought that mini-skirt. Vanessa might be this generations Nancy Wilson. Tortoise and the Hare. We all know how that turned out.