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Amy Winehouse is mostly a voice and a face. She isn't wresting a new form of music from the earth and doing heavy touring duty to get it out there, so it's hard to take all the misery and drugs as her authentic blues experience. Drugs aren't a solution, but they do get folks through heart-wrenching times, so we can acknowledge the drug use of Billie Holiday without making it all of who she was.
To me, Amy Winehouse looks like just another pampered, self-indulgent starlet... a reminder of the line that God made cocaine for people who have too much money. If she transcends that, and goes on to make passionate, innovative music, she may become part of the pantheon. But if her life ended now, I think she'd be just another young life who couldn't handle stardom.
