I guess she was a 60s kid to the very end: she sang like them, lived like them, and then, ultimately, died like them. The saddest thing about artists dying so young is that you can never stop wondering what they could have done, what heights they could have pushed their arts to.
I have only listened to one song by Amy Winehouse, but she seemed like a woman who loved music, who enjoyed it. Simple and corny though it may be, I think this sort of relationship between musicians and their music is hard enough to come by in an age of Rebecca Blacks and ‘indie’ bands. And I am sorry that she is gone, just like I’ve always been sorry Janis Joplin was gone before she could do more and be more (and Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix etcetcetclonglisthere).
I don’t know why I’m so disturbed by her death, but I am. For one, I find the Internet an absolutely terrifying place to commiserate, mourn, grieve in - because it is so constantly shot through with the traces of its own past. Amy Winehouse’s obituaries on all the e-paper editions appear with numerous links to related articles at the bottom – links to articles written in 2007, announcing her Grammy wins or her catapulting success. And the contrast, the irony, etc, are all too palpable and tragic. The Internet forces you to confront a past moment in time and sometimes the sentiment and ethos of that moment are all, sadly, as now, overturned entirely. The Internet forces you to look at Facebook pages whose long-departed owners play Farmville even from the other world.
And it is also terribly, terribly tragic that every day people are destroying themselves in the most public of ways – such that even when the whole world and innumerable strangers are party to one’s publicized, videotaped, recorded, documented, photographed self-destruction – and that despite this, the world is only an observer, a by-stander, and utterly unwilling, or incapable, of helping. I would like to believe it is the latter, but I am wondering if really it is the former – people like Amy Winehouse are transmitted and translated almost so entirely through the news and paparazzi photographs, and they become unreal, spectacles; narratives the reader plays no part in. It happens with celebrities all the time, you could say, but I feel it particularly tragic now with Amy Winehouse; I feel it particularly tragic with Charlie Sheen, whose oh-so-public insanity drew millions of Twitter followers but not a soul who could help. A world of readers, observers and spectators (harking back to my earlier thoughts about the media and its role) is perhaps not a world in which people who say ‘no’ to rehab can survive in?
I would like to think that if someone had knocked on her door maybe yesterday, and given her a hug and a shake and said, “Please stop,” it might have all been different. But of course that only happens in movies.
