Salon and many other outlets are rolling around in the mud that they loved to shovel about Amy Winehouse when she was alive. Most of these writers are clueless, knowing little about making music and everything about wrapping themselves in borrowed celebrity while they dissect her life for pay.  Especially now that she’s dead, she’s a handy tool for forwarding their agenda, no matter what it is. 

The truth about Amy is the same truth about every other musician who took a drink or a drug or fucked a groupie. Whether that musician died or not is not the issue. These are real people with real backgrounds and complex reasons for getting in front of an audience.  Whether that musician is singing about sunshine and lollipops, like Karen Carpenter, or about junk and addiction, like Cobain or Winehouse, the bottom line is the same. They are young, and exploited and ultimately trapped. The media and the music labels do their fair share of that entrapment, but the coping skills brought to the table by the musician are often poorly developed - did I mention they are YOUNG? 

Pain is powerful, and we all feel pain. The dominant theme of most authentic music is loss and pain, after all. Those young musicians who express that pain become popular with young audiences since most of us at that age are unable or unwilling to deal with life in an “adult” way. For that matter, being an adult these days isn’t that attractive, so excess is a good way to escape the whole issue.

When a young musician ‘hits,’ he/she becomes a business franchise with whole teams of music label flunkies organizing their life, fans trying to get a piece of them to succor their own pain, media from zines all the way to the New York Times reporting on their every move.  Their world becomes filled with bullshit, and no wonder they turn to the easiest escape. They are NOT doing it for street cred, or to connect with the audience, or whatever stupid reason the media thinks. It’s not calculated, and it’s often just desperation to just be left alone. Oblivion, even to the point of death, looks pretty good in that case.  But success is often just as strong a pull, so the musician is caught in the middle of two competing imperatives. That some percentage chooses the path of destruction is logical, and likely the same percentage of everyday citizens that makes bad choices in their lives without the added strain of celebrity and fame. 

I’m also sick of the whining about lost legacies. Whatever Winehouse accomplished in her lifetime was exactly what she had to give, before it ran out. Her addiction and her music went hand in hand, and it’s that way with most of the lost talents we like to put on a pedestal. Janis Joplin comes to mind in this case.  If your music is about burning a candle at both ends, it stands to reason that it will burn out.  Neither Janis nor Amy were ever going to sing about mortgages and children and in-laws and all the stuff the rest of us reluctantly made the center of our lives, since we figured out how to suppress our suffering. That we get self-righteous about their deaths says more about us than it does about them. 

I had a punk music magazine during the Nirvana years, with many very young musicians  as the subjects and the authors of many of the articles. Doing smack was cool back then, and lots of these kids were “unavailable” on a business schedule. I didn’t worry about it, since I understood. I had hung on to my anger and pain even into my thirties. These kids made music that expressed what I was unable to say, what only came out in the mosh pits, and thrummed along with my hormones, a unintelligible cry of rage and accusation. Without that theme in music, the scene in the late 80s, early 90s would have been all manufactured pop bands that were vetted by focus groups, saying nothing with over-produced beats. We all hated that part of the music world, and it was clearly part of our mission - mine and the self-destructive tatted and pierced, fucked-up children that I worked with - to provide the alternative view. 

But I was in my late 30s, and I had started down the road of responsibility already. I couldn’t join them when they were shooting up, and they saw too much of their mothers in me, so I reluctantly left the music business around that time. I did several of those Landmark classes trying to deal with my anger issues and I was being forced to choose cheery, up beat positivity as my approach to difficulty, while in my eyes, all the power and beauty was still residing in the negativity of those who were flipping the finger to adult expectations. 

So that’s what I see as Winehouse’s ultimate contribution - a giant fuck-you to the music industry, the celebrity media, and the moralizing adults out there who want to control their children’s lives.  She was gloriously alive til she wasn't, she did everything with a big flourish, even if some people didn't like her choices. She did exactly what she wanted, all the way to the last moment. And some people still don’t want to allow her to have her last word.

But I’m guilty of that too, having tagged on with my own opinion. I just wanted to provide the alternative view.