Amy Winehouse died for your sins

Take a good look.

This is how I choose to remember Amy Winehouse, an artist I really liked, and listened to a lot.

You think it’s disrespectful? That I should remember her they way she was before she fell from grace?  I think quite the opposite. That it would be disrespectful to forget who she was, how she died, and our part in it.

Another splashy headline hits the newsstands and internet sites, chronicling the early, premature death of another rising star. One who had battled drugs, eating disorders, Alcoholism, stormy relationships, and some obvious mental problems, and now, like so many others before her, she will be remembered as a beautiful, tragic, icon, forever frozen in her turbulent youth, and I am more than sure, that posters, tattoos, and songs about her will start popping up everywhere.

Born to a working class   Jewish family from the Southgate section of London, her rise in show business, was like that of many artists who become working class heroes overnight.

He music, dark, “edgy” with tons of references about drugs, hard feelings about love, depression, and betrayal, made her CD’s instant classics in the united states particularly, and her signature  “You know I’m no good”  “and “Rehab” were hummed by hundreds of thousands of people as they got drunk at bars and did lines of coke in the bathroom. I saw it all over the place when I was traveling.  We idolized and shook our heads at her at the same time with each new piece of news about her out of control drug habit, her habit of consorting with losers, and obvious health problems.

And all of this is important now , why?

Because we love our rock stars teetering on the brink of destruction for our enjoyment.

Really, the fact that we even prefer dark and edgy music, and troubled souls for our entertainment says a lot about our dark side as consumers. A dark side most of us don’t feel empowered to embrace, or empower, because to do it the way our idols do, would mean losing our families, or jobs, or friends, or who knows what.

And that’s what we are. consumers, consuming them, without knowing anything about them really, just like we like to enjoy a great steak without seeing a cow slaughtered

So they become our surrogates, boozing, and fighting, and fucking their way through tormented lives, lives we sometimes wish we had the guts or freedom to experience ourselves, and somehow for us, their music is more “legit” and has more street cred because of it. And we read, and watch television shows about them, and hang on every dangerous reckless act they perform, and hope they can pull back from the brink long enough to make some more music.

Then, unfortunately, often they die in the prime of their lives, too young, and then we idolize that too. We idolize their now-eternal youth, as though it were some cosmic nod by fate saying  “yes. you can live dangerously, and die, and still be beautiful forever”, because that is what we want to make of it. And it’s a lie.

No one really remembers or collects, (I am sure there a few who do) photos of the death scenes of their favorite musicians and actors, the pools of blood and vomit, and emaciated, or obese, bodies, the wreck hotel rooms strewn with drugs, dirty clothes, and other paraphernalia of death.

We don’t keep photos of their grieving loved ones, their now widowed spouses,  their heartbroken parents and kids, because none of these images serve our real incessant need for fashionable soldiers on the dark side who do our emotional dirty work us, writing and singing about the horrific sadness, and battles with inner demons, and with themselves, and looking beautiful the whole time, as though you could walk through the ugliest parts of life without so much as getting your makeup smeared.

And we secretly love their little or blatant references about drugs because they say and do publicly what many of us do and hide privately. We’d like to do a bump on a plane on the way to work. Or to have a drink in the back seat of a limo, or the actually ingest drugs at a concert in front of thousands of people like we didn’t give a damn.

Tragic beautiful rock stars, are our nasty mental porn, and their all important image, is far more important to us than their music most of the time, because in terms of our idea of beauty, there hasn’t been an obese, bad-looking, unfashionable female pop star since Mama Cass, despite the fact that there have been some mind-blowing, incredible female musicians who were just that, and we don’t even know them or don’t give them a second glance as we shop for cd’s. The same applies for record companies.

If fact, anything unfashionable by hollywood model standards, which often include Gia Karangi (seen here in the famous photo shoot where they used makeup to cover her bleeding heroin track marks) levels of anorexia, drug addiction, and near-death bulimic weight problems, is simply not even looked at by us, or the industry,  because it doesn’t fit the fantasy they want to sell, nor the one we want to buy and remember.

No, for us, the death, sexual beauty, torment, and ultimate finale act of our preferred idols who die early, must be tasteful, well-dressed in the latest fashions, smell good, feel good, and give us closure before we go on to spiritually feed, and act like social vampires with the next young beautiful idol that comes along, because our love of them, says something about us.

We are fakes. Most of us. We hide our real feeling about drugs, death, and sex, deep down, while shaking our heads at a “tragedy” that we had part in, though most people I know who adored Amy Winehouse, see themselves, as in no way connected to her death, though they hypocritically felt themselves connected to her life.

The truth is, we never knew these people. Not in then slightest.The vast majority of us never sent them letters asking them to quit drugs, or how we could help. We don’t send condolences to their parents, or loved ones.

Amy, Kurt, Jimi, Michael, Darby, Dee Dee……

I could go on forever, but they won’t. because they’re dead.

And they did it with our support, and on our dime, and for our sins.

Maybe one day we’ll actually appreciate the sunny, happy, lyrically upbeat music that so many non-edgy, balanced, family-type artists make.

Maybe we’ll see that we have been trained in sardonic negativity, and been trained by the music, film, and fashion industry to think that it is any more real than someone singing “I love you baby”

Maybe one day, we’ll stop providing fuel for these hurt, gifted artists to kill themselves with.

And maybe we’ll stop encouraging our kids to think that there is something fashionable about cracked-out, deathly, bulimic, tortured musicians, and stop presenting them as role models.

But that will require for us to admit what, and who a lot of us really are:

In the equation between our tortured rock stars and ourselves, we are really the ones who are dark, sad, morbid, with suicidal musings, and addicted.

We just need someone else to do it for us.

Godspeed, Amy.

You will be missed.