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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Friends and family have been in the news recently urging British pop singer Amy Winehouse to quit using drugs, saying that she has a problem. What have the warning signs been?
* Follow-up single to "Rehab" was "Big Fat Lid of Black Tar Heroin"
* Beehive hairdo occasionally drops baggies, spoons, poppy plantations
* Always in good mood or bad mood
* Keith Richards seen leaving her flat looking defeated
* Constantly screams "God, I love taking drugs!"
* Before a show at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, Winehouse refused to go on until the stage had been cleared of all the four-headed snakes and ghosts of her ancestors
* Her music thus far is pretty cool
If Winehouse thinks she needs to do heavy drugs to be talented, I don't think it's working. She's derivative. And how many John Coltrane's paraded their drug use for the paparazzi?
Another self-involved publicity clone. My career is my tabloid time. Talk about fake.
How people can't distinguish musical talent from artistic creativity or merit. Winehouse is talented. She is not artistically creative. Her musical stylings are every bit as contrived and unimaginately as the "boy bands" or whomever else the letter writers are referring to as "pop radio". She can hold a note, and provide some fairly good renditions of original songs in a well-defined genre. Her work is only "original" in the sense that the genre of which they are a part is rarely engaged by contemporary performers. Why don't you all just admit that you like her because she sounds different than what is on the radio now, and you like to be different? There is no shame in that, and avoids this whole "tortured, fallen visionary artist" pastiche which is as old fashioned and frankly offensive as the mythologies embraced by right-wing, conservative America.
Alcohol too. Almost been there and certainly have seen my share of incredible people lose their talent and in some cases their lives because of it. Can you imagine if Billie Holiday and Jimi Hendrix had lived longer than 44 and 28 years, respectively? With Winehouse, I get the feeling she will either be a flash in the pan (mainly due to the abuse) or end up like Anna Nicole Smith - another woman we watched self-destruct for our entertainment. And Winehouse will simply not have the legacy of a Holiday or Hendrix. It's quite sad. When an addiction reaches the point of self-abuse, you really need professional help.
to be anything but a poser.
Does she even have any talent? A BAD actress either way.
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.
Back around 40 years ago when Janis Joplin was popular, there wasn't the continual bombardment day after day from the media about her battles with her drug addiction/alcoholism demons--we just knew she put out some awesome music, & we loved listening to her sing. We rarely knew, cared or obsessed about how much she abused herself, even though we may have had an inkling about it at the time. Her music was our focus, & it transcended above everythig else. When she died, it was a shock to most of us.
It's a shame that today in this instant internet tabloid culture, we become more exposed to Amy's self-destructive antics BEFORE we experience her as the talented, singer/artist that she is--unfortunately coloring any previous perception we may have of her, & instantly equating her worth or lumping her in with the far less talented manufactured pop twits polluting the airwaves. It's a shame because she's one of the best young singers I've heard in a very long time. I hope she survives & somehow manages to get her life together, but if she doesn't, it won't come as a shock.
that the letters the editor picks aren't anywhere near being the best ones?
I think the suggestion here is that because Winehouse is white and Jewish (read: middle class), not to mention English, her debauchery and addiction function as examples of her exploitation of a (Black) American soul tradition.
But pop artists -- all of them, regardless of color or clean living -- have been mining the blues and soul -- popular music's roots -- for years and years. All artists rely on their forbearers to inform their work, and some of them model themselves on their heroes. Amy Winehouse probably buys into the myth of the doomed artist, but I doubt her addictions are just her way of appropriating authentic r&b culture. She's a talented entertainer, and a train wreck, and, sadly, the fact that she's a train wreck is entertainment, too.
to save the Brit music scene from the Winehouse freak show. One of these days the Winehouse era will be looked upon as a low point, and hopefully she will be around to comtemplate that fact.
"Living it may not be enough?" Why did this get a star?
"Had enough," who's apparently channelling Newt Gingrich (unless Gingrich is channelling him) does a good imitation of every bourgeois reverse-racist blues snob of the last eighty years. No convincing white blues players or singers?
Literally impossible to list them all, but off the top of my head, and in approximate chronological order, there's Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Jimmy Rodgers, Hank Williams, the Delmore Brothers, the Kershaw Brothers, Eric Von Schmidt, early Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk (on Mississippi John Hurt: "He's been dead for thirty years, and he's in better shape now than I was then"), Geoff and Maria Muldaur, together and separately, Tracy Nelson, Paul Butterfield and all his friends, Charley Musselwhite, Tony Joe White, Stevie Winwood, Georgie Fame, early Joe Cocker, Leon Russell, Chris Smither, Anson Funderburgh, Rory Gallagher, The Allmans, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, The Dixie Dregs, Stevie Ray Vaughn, the list just goes on. Add your own, please. The mind boggles.
Obviously, it's not who was first, it's what you do with it and where in the soul it comes from. Cultural cross-fertilization is what makes this country, and the world, great. Denying it, from the left or the right, is what makes it a pain.
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