Amy Winehouse was my contemporary—exactly my age, 27, when she was found dead at her London home on July 23.
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In the fall of 2007, while I was a grad student in New York, I couldn’t stop listening to Back to Black. My roommate and I played it as we lined our eyes to go out in Brooklyn; I played it behind the bar at the half-student, half-uptown-townie dive where I tended twice a week. My best friend was Amy for Halloween; she stuffed a T-shirt under her thick chestnut hair to achieve the iconic beehive’s height.
We twisted, we swayed, we drank and smoked to her, like her and along with her. We listened to Amy while we knocked over candles dancing in dark bars and when we smoked cigarettes in our underwear out the bedroom window in the morning. A girl once asked me if I wanted to watch her dance to “Fuck Me Pumps.” I said yes.
Amy was a collision of eras–not so much anachronistic as timeless–a foxy retro minx, a Fast Girl if ever the term applied. She was our foul-mouthed Brit-Jewish Petula Clark, our own rangy little Diana Ross, the crusty-cute Dusty Springfield you found curled up still passed out in the corner of a couch with her panties showing when you got up to pick up the cans the next morning. She didn’t write about wanting a boy to ask her to the dance. She wrote about a boyfriend noticing the rug burns on her knees she’d gotten from blowing someone else on a thick carpet. She wrote about ex-sex,whiskey dick and smoking weed, asking “What fuckery is this?”
Finally, said the rest of us twentysomething girls out to get some in the city, in an exhale of relief. Someone said it. We clapped each other on our backs and traded knowing crows when she sang “little carpet burn.”
Amy wasn’t all swagger and brash, though. That’s why we loved her. She wrote about relationships as weaknesses, about the way it feels to know you’re not to be trusted around someone else, about the way it feels when you can’t be trusted even around yourself.
It’s never safe for us, not even in the evening
Cause I’ve been drinking
Not in the morning where your shit works
It’s always dangerous when everybody’s sleeping
And I’ve been thinking
Can we be alone?
Her duende was heartbreak. She might’ve known nearly as much about heartbreak as Billie Holliday, although no one’s ever known as much about heartbreak as Billie. Amy’s life was shorter, more privileged and less exploited, but you hear a heartbreak like that when she sings “we never said goodbye in words, I died a hundred times.” Hers was somewhere near that magnitude of sorrow, and we were grateful for that, too.
Soon she outpaced us with the twisting and drinking and smoking. Her tattoos weren’t coy when interlaced with scabs. It hurt to see her stumble. It hurt to see the drugs and rats in the videos. We waited for the next album, and even before Saturday morning we’d probably started to know it wasn’t coming.
What Amy gave us, she gave us whole. Like the Amy disclaimer: she cheated herself, she ain’t got the time, her daddy thinks she’s fine and life is like a pipe. She told us flat out she wasn’t ever going to change, even though we could see the romance had left her, just like it left Janis Joplin.
Now she’ll always be 27 and the rest of us still have to grow up. When I woke to the news that she’d died I thought of the poem Frank O’Hara wrote after Lana Turner died:
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
Back to Black is a slim album to match its slim feline author: 10 original songs, two remixes (at least on the iTunes edition I have), 42 minutes. Approximately the length of a subway ride from central Brooklyn to upper Manhattan. Approximately the length of just the right amount of foreplay or an unusually furious journal entry. The irony is tragic but uniquely hers: that Amy, who constructed her artistic identity so cleverly outside of time, who knew so much about the most intense ways to spend it, would end up being known for such a specific and brief amount.
15 responses
Laura- Thanks for this beautiful post. I want there to be more posts like these, and less that disregard Amy’s talent and simplify addiction.
Here’s another comforting post about Amy I found if anyone is interested, at Carolyn Zaikowski’s blog:
http://liferoar.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/navigating-musicians-deaths-compassion-choices-amy-and-the-others/
Jesus, this is great. So pointed, so succinct. I was sad to hear about Amy Winehouse, and now I have a much better idea why.
This is spot-on. Amy’s death got to me much more than I expected, & I’m glad to read something so close to how I experienced her.
This was just ace – every nail hit squarely on the head. Beautiful.
This is so incredibly lovely. And of course, bittersweet. There’s so much to appreciate here, but this sentence gave me an unusually poignant pang: “Now she’ll always be 27 and the rest of us still have to grow up.”
wow. thank you for doing her justice.
It’s messed up how these big name stars kill themselves (with drugs or otherwise, and usually at 27), and it;s like nobody can do anything about it. Like why didn’t she try even harder to get off drugs and booze? Why couldn’t she have been surrounded by better people that could help her and not enable her? Is that what money and fame does, being able to surround yourself with people who don;t say no or ‘you need to change? It sucks she could not see her potential enough to stop whatever ‘life’ she led that killed her. I guess a sad lesson for her fans. Probably, a lot of people would end up the same way as Amy if they lived her life, in her shoes, simply because it is really hard to change your ways, whether they are good or bad.
I really don;t have the connection to her songs like the author of this article, but it helps to hear from a true fan the sadness of her passing.
Thank you for writing about her with respect – something that is lacking in much coverage of anything any young woman does. I’m sad we’ve lost her talent but I think we need to respect that she lived her life the way she wanted to live it. Back to Black is a classic album that we are lucky to have!
I second that wow. Beyond even Amy Winehouse, this is a beautiful meditation on knowing that line where creative courage veers into self-destruction.
Your very personal framing of this sad loss is encouraging to me. I am adding it to my blog post with thanks http://mscomfortzone.blogspot.com/2011/07/amy-winehouse-27-found-dead-today.html. Ms.
That was beautiful. Thank you for this. RIP Amy.
Maybe having to spend a couple decades of tedious work before being discovered is a blessing in disguise.
This is the best tribute to Amy that I have read. Spot on lovely.
Jesus, this was breathtaking. Thank you, Laura. You have put my exact feelings on Amy (and her death) into words, which no other writer had been able to do yet. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
So moving, intelligent and beautiful. Can’t help but read it again and again. And to tell you. Merci.
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