Week XV: Rehab

"We are [...] developing a situation where there is one rule for the rich and famous and another for everybody else – the rich and famous who use the paparazzi when it suits them but complain when they are doing something in public they don't want recorded." - Darryn Lyons, owner of Big Pictures paparazzi agency, responding to Amy Winehouse's injunction against his company after claims of harassment on the part of his employees.

I wonder if any personal tragedy has been as widely publicized as Amy Winehouse's life and death. It seems to be the great irony of her life. There was perpetual conflict between the adulation for her music and the antagonistic, demeaning portrayal of her personal life. She died right in front of us. Couldn't but sit and watch.

My reactions to celebrity deaths usually mirror my reactions to mediocre food. How unpleasant. Moving right along, then. When Amy Winehouse died I felt it. I was a bit incredulous at my own emotions. I felt it right in my stomach. I kept thinking about her voice and wondering whether we'd all abused it somehow. Complicity, writ small perhaps. Her singing was surreal beauty. It reminded me of another surreal beauty I knew who died too young. I remembered hearing that her father was pleading with people not to buy her records or concert tickets because she'd spend all the money on drugs. I listened to Back to Black, and felt sad.

Maybe we could have done something to help her. I don't know, I probably couldn't have. How far down the line do we need to go before somebody might have done something? The good Lord helps those who help themselves, maybe. Could be she didn't want to live, and there's not much that we could've changed. Could be... The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. It's not for us to decide.

I wish Amy Winehouse hadn't died. I want to hear her next album. I don't get to now. I can listen to her albums, but there will never be anything new. When I look at the records that characterize her life, too many of them are these repulsive pictures, these tragic, pitiful representations of a lost, sad girl tormented by rabid, scandal-hungry press. It's not fair. They reduced her to a strung out caricature of herself, they told us not to look deeper, just to mock and scorn. This is the legacy. The music and the crack fiend half-dressed and sick in London at 3AM. Look and see a life in shambles and be entertained.

This is what I'll leave behind. Remembrance of things past. This is where I'll be found. Until the power goes out. Maybe they'll find my notebook and be absolutely horrified by everything that I didn't make public. Maybe they'll remember me. I remember her.

I don't know anything about pop music. I don't really like it very much. I find it boring. Style over substance, rarely outstanding. There are so few pop artists that I genuinely love, that I would consider truly exceptional - David Bowie, Billy Idol, guilty pleasure nod to Justin Timberlake, and in a league of extraordinary women along with the Nina Simones, Etta Jameses, and Sharon Joneses of the world, Amy Winehouse.

While I was preparing this week's entry, I spent a lot of time listening to Amy Winehouse's music and reading about her life. For her entire professional career, she was generously, quietly donating much of her time and money to all kinds of charitable organizations - the side we didn't get to see, Amy the philanthropist. We could have if we'd looked, but we were all watching the spectacle of alcohol and drugs and violence and failure. She was admitted to the hospital more than once because she had been chain smoking crack. How do we keep looking at the beauty in the face of such ugliness? The voice, it's all she had, and she was destroying it.

I'm glad that we have something on record. As I've been writing this, I've been thinking a lot about my friend Lisa. It was almost inevitable - they were both beautiful young women who loved to sing, and didn't live long enough. Is it selfish to wish someone alive for the sake of hearing more? Maybe they were here for just the right amount of time, to give what was theirs to give, to leave what they could behind before departing from this world. Or maybe that's a load of shit. I don't know.

We don't get much else, but we still have Back to Black. Mark Ronson produced, a lot of the songs were played in the studio by the Dap Kings - Sharon Jones' band. They were her touring band. A brilliant group of musicians. It was a transcendent moment in pop music, one of the few. The planets aligned, the Gods conspired to make it so. By whatever the mechanism, it triggered one of the best recordings of all time. A few minutes of music that truly says something, that breaks out of the generic fabric of pop music, that can be appreciated as a piece of art, that stands on the merit of its clever songwriting and beautifully polished sound.

It's the old soul - the feeling that the sort of maturity in her singing ought to come from someone a lot older. That's how I see it. Do we all weep for want of more? More songs, more poetry, more beauty, more music? She only made it to 27 years old. Not enough time to grow into her voice. Next year I'll be dead. How does that feel? Janis, Jimi, Kurt, Layne, Jim, all died at 27. It's a bad year for musicians.

How to quell the desire, the ache for the potential, for what might have been? How much hope do we keep for what was left behind, to see that it will stand against time? How many years before we start to forget all the messes and the courts, the divorce and domestic abuse, the wasted shell of one of the most unique and stunning voices ever to emerge from England? How long before the picture of a drug-addicted young woman in London falls from the public eye, away from the disgusting gaze of the tabloids and what's left is the resonant sound - the digital echo chamber. When will it filter out the pain and the anguish, the sickness, and just leave the love of songs and music, the bewitching moments that we try so hard to capture?

A recording isn't real, it's just a simulation. It's an attempt to re-create what was. The performance happened, and the magic is to capture it and encapsulate it without losing the realness. We try to put a fantasy in a jar. To shine a light on it and make the magic happen again. But it's not real, it was just a fantasy. Maybe she was just a dream.

Word count: 1,158