In My Bed was the first Amy Winehouse song I heard and it was a sit-up-and-listen moment I’d always remember. It was 2004 and the single, which cleverly employs the same beat as rapper Nas’s “Made You Look,” had already been the third release from the English singer-songwriter’s 2003 debut album, “Frank.” The down-tempo concoction of old school jazz, ’60s soul and ’00s hip hop made me kick myself: How could I have not known about this sooner? I’m not one to sleep on new music — especially new music from Britain — so I made up for my relatively late arrival by eagerly downloading everything she had recorded up to that point, including remixes and B-sides.
So when her second effort “Back To Black” hit stores in 2006, and its biggest single, Rehab, became Song of the Year at the 2008 Grammy Awards, Amy Winehouse and her brassy vocals weren’t that new to me anymore. What was striking, however, was how different she looked compared to the 20-year-old I first encountered a couple years before. She was considerably skinnier and had a lot more tattoos; her tiny miniskirts made her beehive look bigger, which — to repurpose a line from the movie Mean Girls — suggested a ton of secrets. Of course, the fashion world took notice: Karl Lagerfeld declared her his muse in 2007, and the next year, Fendi tapped her to perform at Fendi ‘O, the Italian label’s super-exclusive pop-up fashion week club. In hindsight, that was probably the last time Amy Winehouse was known more for her talent than for her drama.
No, No, No
Her death last week came as a shock, but not a big one. Since her every misstep was chronicled breathlessly by the tabloid press, it was assumed that her slow, public downward spiral would lead to her demise.
Amy Winehouse’s short narrative – “Great singer, tragically destroyed by her unhappy private life and bad habits, who turned her pain into universal art,” as foreshadowed by Pitchfork’s Douglas Wolk in 2007 – may be a bit of a cliché. But still I find the “27 Club” angle rather silly. While it may be true that influential musicians such as Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix all met the Maker at that age, the cynic in me says it’s just romantic bullshit.
Her id did her in
I mean, Joy Division’s Ian Curtis died when he was 23, Jeff Buckley at 30 and Elliott Smith at 34. I’m sure we could easily fashion “23 Club,” “30 Club” and “34 Club” Wikipedia entries if we Googled hard enough. And why stop at recording artists who kicked the bucket at the peak of their youth? We should also create silly groups for River Phoenix and Heath Ledger — 23 and 28, respectively, when they passed away — while we’re at it.
The tragedy of Amy Winehouse is that her artistic id took full control, unrestrained by a seemingly nonexistent superego. “Hip-hop is the new jazz. Jazz is not about saxophones. It’s about taking a form and reinventing it, and that’s what good hip-hop does,” she told the Montreal Gazette in 2004, while promoting “Frank.” She may have taken a familiar trope, remade it and built an all-too-brief career out of it. Unfortunately, the self-destructive tortured-artist routine — totally passé in this post-post-everything age — was something she wasn’t able to reinterpret.
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