amy winehouse - C or D? [RIP 7/23/11]

worst internet post i've seen so far: "WHY AMY WINEHOUSE AND NOT LINDSAY LOHAN?!?! WHY??? WHY???"

Her manager Ray is a very popular and well-known guy in London, a genuinely nice man who was probably not equal to the challenge of looking after someone so troubled. As he is not a music industry leech, I'm sure he is absolutely heartbroken. OTOH, I can't think of anyone who would have been able to help her WRT her addictions.

When she was arrested a couple of years ago, she was taken to the police station 100m from my flat and it was besieged by hundreds of young female tabloid reporters who spent nearly 24 hours catcalling anyone who emerged from the station; it was really provocative, vituperative stuff and if they'd been student demonstrators or whatever acting like that, I am sure cops would have made some arrests. I have never seen so many nasty little cows converged in one spot in my life and I wanted to just line them up and start smacking them.

Anyway, RIP Amy.

...

Goodbye Amy - thank you for your music, we'll miss your great voice.

Hey drugs, you suck.

so who thinks she was really that tortured or if she was into some sort of tragic elegantly wasted thing that just got out of control? cos idk what happened to her but the way she came across when i saw her when the first - always underrated- album came out compared to when the 2nd one was released, it was like 2 diff people.

i don't know, some of the lyrics on Back to Black seemed to suggest she was hurting on a very fundamental level. I mean, these weren't merely simple "breakup" songs, these were songs questioning the foundations of love, or complete shutdown. Like the title track, while catchy as hell, is really bleak lyrically....

what do people mean when they say a tragic death is a "waste"?

― the table is the do the standing still (get bent), Saturday, July 23, 2011 5:05 PM Bookmark

I don't know what other people mean, as it is a phrase that is often applied differently, but when I said it earlier today, I meant that basically she died without reaching her full potential, either as a musician or a human being. Not meaning it in a derogatory or accusative light, just factual...that if things were different, that she may have had a lot still to contribute that she won't get to now.

xp, as i understand it, she had problems with stress, depression and nerves that were magnified enormously by being in the public spotlight. She used alcohol and drugs as something to enable her to get over that enough to get up on stage, as well as deal with all the chaos away from it. A lot of her social relationships made that harder.

I saw the headline earlier but didn't see the whole thing, and didn't realize until now. Sad. What a waste (meaning, roughly: it's easy to imagine a life for her in which she would have worked out the problems that drove her to this, and made something more of her gifts).

wow @ some of you

People asking "why weren't there people in place keeping her from killing herself" don't know a lot about addicts. No one but the addict can stop an addict from using. Rehab / AA only works if you want to get clean. That's why rehab and AA have such dismal success rates, barely 1 in 10, and also why tons of people get sober without either.

There's a reason it's called "addiction". It's not like eating too much candy corn before dinner.

it's like when Michael Jackson died, he had a doctor that tried to stop him from killing himself and giving him access to painkillers, so MJ just said "ok, well then who WILL help me get these things"? Even with maximum efforts, if the addict is doing whatever they can to procure their substances, it's extremely difficult to combat it.

I suffer from eating too much candy corn addiction, you insensitive bastard.

:(

I like using candy corn to pretend I have "fangs."

Its funny when mj died I remember ilx being a lot less respectful abt it

amy winehouse never molested kids iirc

And a lot more ppl connected w his music - the story was still incredibly sad

There's more to gawk at w/mj

MJ is a very different thing

The mysteriousness of mj's death mixed with his existing air of weirdness makes for a much different dynamic than someone who died from od'ing on less exotic drugs (and also, afaik, wasn't as far gone as mj). Sorry if I'm bein disrespectful

Jut wait until the full Dommy P-written obituary, guys.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/07/23/article-0-0D21E84200000578-84_306x541.jpg

xp MJ is arguably the most famous black dude of all time... def a different situation.

wait, what does him being black have to do with it

MJ almost doubtless ruined a number of people's lives forever by having sex with them when they were children. It's tragic that he did so because he himself was fucked up as a child, but that doesn't mitigate the monstrosity of his probable actions. He was never convicted in a court of law, but hardly anyone thinks there wasn't something deeply off in his relations with the children who stayed at his house. Anybody who can't see a massive difference between that situation & any other situation is fooling themselves, God knows why.

Because he made, Thriller, man... Thriller.

not to help hijack this thread but I don't think you can say 'almost doubtless' w/ that claim

aside from the whole molestation thing, i just think a lot of it has to do w/ age & accomplishments -- michael spiraled out but he gave us a very full career. i.e. no one said "oh, what a waste" when he died. both deaths were pretty sad & fucked up, but in different ways

People already be forgetting that, despite the revisionist post-death history, MJ was generally regarded as a "freak" for the last 20 years of his life. Winehouse just had two years as a "fuckup".

not to help hijack this thread but I don't think you can say 'almost doubtless' w/ that claim

sure you can. MJ is your classic case of money buys you a not-guilty. anybody who reads the testimony & says "oh well there's two sides to every story" is eager to make excuses for somebody whose music they like imo

mj had been a joke for 20+ years for a large part of the public, amy was a punchline for 3-4 years and with a much smaller percentage of the population

or what what whiney said

can't agree w/MJ as a "joke." the caliber of his artistry at his peak is all-time-titan stuff. his music changed the world. few compare to him in any way.

i meant as a public figure, not commenting on his artistry

ok fair enuf everybody knew he was out of his mind & probably a bad, bad dude

but i mean, i do have to say it is a little weird ILX is being so reverent about all this. the jay reatard thread had a "good riddance to bad rubbish" within the first six hours.

it's reverse sexism. that has to be it.

i was gonna go jewish conspiracy but i'll allow it

but i mean, i do have to say it is a little weird ILX is being so reverent about all this. the jay reatard thread had a "good riddance to bad rubbish" within the first six hours.

would guess that most of those people had never heard his music.

really tho, jay reatard's death was obv shitty but there's such a lineage of out of control punk dudes flaming out early that it's not as shocking as something like this

I don't really care about her music I think it's not a bad idea to be reverent towards pretty much every death in the world that isn't OBL, there doesn't have to be an argument and it doesn't have to be a contest over who you should be more or less reverent for or whether this is more important than some other event

but I think*

how dare you speak ill of our glorious leader

idk J0rdan. I mean...Winehouse is like Pete Doherty: every time you see a news item on her, you expect it to be "Winehouse is dead." She's the punk icon at the celebrity level, which is its own trope. I think the shock here is a sort of weird class-relations thing: if I had the kind of money/power (not political power, but wealth is power) that she had, you can bet your ass that I'd take care of myself. It's incomprehensible to me that somebody who gets to that level doesn't say, fuck it, I'll drop 100k on getting myself clean. What junkie actually loves his junkiedom? not many in my experience; most of them always talk about getting clean, but the prospect of being clean & poor vs. high & poor is too unattractive to pursue. So it's kind of - bizarre, hard to understand - that she died in her illness.

I was hoping that she had a little bit of Keef genetics and could pull through. I just wish it didn't feel so inevitable.

Notably, there's a thread on Amy Winehouse over there right now, and this is the most-favorited comment

― mh, Saturday, July 23, 2011 1:37 PM Bookmark

Yeah, my sister (who, coincidentally, got out of rehab today. I'm happy to see her so healthy!) and her struggles with addiction have definitely informed my reaction to this.

i...can't tell if aero is trolling? but i pretty much strongly disagree with everything he is saying

for one thing he's capitalizing the first words of each sentence, which is throwing me off