Whitney Houston’s nephew Gary Michael Houston does not have a problem with Kanye West’s decision to use a photograph of her drug-strewn bathroom on a Pusha T’s album, People is reporting .
As previously reported by the Inquisitr , rapper Pusha T (real name: Terrence LeVarr Thornton) recently released his latest album , Daytona , which features a controversial image on the cover. That image shows the bathroom at Whitney Houston’s home, with drugs and detritus strewed about. The image was taken secretly by a Houston family member in 2006, years before Houston died from complications related to a drug overdose.
Kanye West, who produced the album, reportedly paid “a lot of money” for the rights to the picture. Further, according to Pusha T, the decision to use the picture was an 11th-hour choice made by Kanye. Pusha, for his part, insists that he didn’t want to use the controversial photo, which served as the cover photo for a 2006 edition of the National Enquirer, nor did he want to pay for it (Kanye picked up the tab). He told The Angie Martinez Show that the decision to use that photo was all Kanye.
“One a.m., my phone rings. No caller ID. [He says,] ‘Hey, yeah, I think we should change the artwork. And I like this other artwork. And this other artwork is 85 grand.’”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the use of the picture has generated plenty of controversy, with most of the ire directed at Kanye, who’s been acting a little strangely – to put it mildly – these past few weeks.
One person who doesn’t have a problem with Kanye and Pusha’s use of the picture, however, is Whitney’s nephew, Gary.
Speaking Monday on Good Morning America , he says that he kind of gets where Kanye and Pusha are coming from.
“I get it. I get the correlation (sans my aunt but the photo itself).”
To be fair, Gary isn’t pleased that the photo exists. He made it clear that whoever took the photo a decade ago violated the trust of my aunt by taking the photo and selling it to the tabloids. He says that if anyone wants to be mad about the photo, they should direct their ire towards that person, not Kanye and Pusha.
Whitney Houston died in 2012 at the age of 48, having drowned in the bathtub of a Beverly Hills hotel. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office later determined that Houston’s death was caused by drowning and the “effects of atherosclerotic heart disease and cocaine use ,” as CNN reported at the time.
