Every time someone in music dies, I have to sit around and find new ways to eulogize them or talk about their work. It gets to the point as a writer where I feel like I’ve twisted every coinable phrase. I adjust each sentence to fit the mold of the subject and properly send them off into the sunset like a blazing Viking funeral craft barreling towards a natural gas pipeline. Then someone of my generation, arguably one of the most talented and revered (or reviled and feared depending on whom you would ask) is taken from us too young and I start again. The story of Amy Winehouse and those like her is as old as human history, the romantic figure of stolen youth shackled to a crate of drugs floating aimlessly down a sea of hyperbole and gossip towards a black whirlpool of rumor and left to drown. I couldn’t write her story any more than she planned to live it for us. How she went from the voice of a generation and media darling to tabloid sideshow freak in eight years is the story of fame itself and the curses it can bring.

Amy Winehouse’s greatest gift to this world was her unquestionably powerful, soulful and resonating voice. She won multiple Grammy awards, she toured the world, sold millions of records and made a real impact on the times in which she lived. Is it strange, then, how armchair pundits, graceless Nancies and Real Housewives everywhere were always more apt to focus on her struggles with addiction and recovery, a struggle which she did not survive? Illuminating the suffering that takes place in the throes of addiction is easy to do standing on this side of things, such as when a celebrity passes away. We can argue that the things which killed her she could have walked away from, but that merely shows a propensity for people who aren’t addicts to proselytize about what those who suffer from the disease of addiction face every moment of their lives.

Then there’s the fact that Amy died at the age of 27. Oh, yes, there it is: that stupid fucking club. It’s so obvious to you who know about the club and what it means that this was her m.o. from the start. She wanted to join a club! Yes, that’s quite the languid observation to make. It helps people who like coincidences to string them together and form theories that, though based in reality, are simply not real. Clubs like this exist so that writers have something to put their finger on to explain senseless loss of life. But wait — did you know that the worst hand in poker is the 2-7 off-suit. Could that be part of the club? I bet that’s it! A numerological explanation for everything! The number 27 is unlucky in some way, oh how star-crossed and fascinating we are for knowing this!

In that same vein are those who will romanticize her death and make it into something it most surely should not be. “Oh, lucky girl, she managed to push eject at just the right time.” Or perhaps, “She wasn’t nothing but a filthy old slapper anyways, mate. Hide your baby aspirins when she was about you would.” To the millions of kids (and adults) who enjoyed her music, we have to hope that they’ve got no romantic notions of her passage. But just as surely as they would make that connection with her, perhaps at some level so did Ms. Winehouse herself in younger days.

Maladjusted and malnourished as this songbird spent much of her final years in this world, she didn’t seem to shy away from the negative attentions. Perhaps she thrived on it at some point. The tabloid press, who was never one to let the poor girl have a pack of smokes much less time to get her shit together, are without their bread and butter today. The pen swift tailors of dodgy ragtag filth which is bought and paid for by the keepers of glass houses in which they so quaintly reside will surely lack subject matter for their slow news days after today. How long will they torture her corpse? Will Amy be forced to live out her legacy in this world as a zombified pseudo-Bat Boy, outrageous stories of her exploits in the afterlife disgracing the ink which reproduces them for the masses?

For her part in all of this, regardless of what drugs she used, what lives she may have altered forever because of her addiction and mental health, I feel quite confident that she still deserves better in death from the press than she got in life.

Nobody thinks about her family who have to bury a daughter, a sister. Nobody talks of her dear friends, the musicians and producers who worked with her and invested their time and energy into her career. But certainly, people will poll the celebrities out there and ask what they think. Ah yes, let’s ask other celebrities what they think of a celebrities’ death! That’s where the real heart and soul of the matter is, isn’t it? It makes me ill just to imagine that the world I live in has transmogrified into a weeping hot air balloon propelled by itself. And what, then, does that make me?

Sadly, as much as I bitch and moan for the loss of someone who had so many chances in life, I know precisely what I am in this place on the internet where you read me. The world will never tire of people like me eulogizing, canonizing, theorizing and exorcising artists who walk the edge of extremity and danger with reckless abandon as Amy Winehouse did. So long as there are people out there who need to hear someone tell them how they are supposed to feel when this kind of tragedy occurs, my bread will always be buttered on both sides.

I only wish that all that butter and bread could save the life and voice of just one Amy Winehouse, that maybe I wouldn’t be needed here so often, and that the world could love a girl like Amy as I do — for the gift of her music more than what the press made her into. It wasn’t you that was no good, Amy. I really believe it was us.

Amy Winehouse – You Know I’m No Good

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