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When I was a lad of 26, in the winter of 1985, I was a regular at Carol's Speakeasy and Paradise in Chicago, when I wasn't working on my master's degree at Northwestern. Of course, it was in the clubs that we heard Whitney Houston's 1985 dance hit "How Will I Know." But it was in the more private moments that often followed a night of dancing in those young days that Whitney's music soon became the preferred soundtrack of the after-hours.

Tunes like "You Give Good Love" and "All at Once," singles off the 1985 album Whitney Houston, set the right mood. That first album also set Whitney on her way to superstardom, selling 25 million copies worldwide, the best-selling debut album of all time by a solo artist.
By the late '80s, a new Whitney Houston song was an occasion. For a lot of us back then, Whitney's music -- and the dance clubs in general -- helped us blow off steam. And there was a lot of pent-up steam in those days, as our friends died from AIDS and we lived through the twilight zone of a deadly epidemic that our nation's leaders thought would go away if they ignored it long enough.

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