Amy Winehouse, 1983-2011

Yes, she was a train wreck and no one is surprised, but I can’t snark on someone destroyed by addiction and/or mental illness. I’ve seen it happen too often to people I love. I hate losing such talent to the “romance” of self-destruction.

Damn, she was one hell of a singer.

What Mistress Cynica said.

A waste of a talented singer. Not that I have her CDs or anything.

@Mistress Cynica: Perfectly put.

I was rooting for her. Damn that Blake Incarcerated!

I guess Back to Black will be getting heavy rotation. I like this song. My mother likes Rehab for good reason.

@ManchuCandidate:

+1, I knew her be reputation more than by her actual work. But supposedly her music is stellar. I guess I’ll have to give it a listen now.

@Serolf Divad: This is a nice Carole King cover.

@Serolf Divad: Really good voice. R&B seen through Alma Cogan and Dusty Springfield. Witty in a deadpan kind of way. Rehab is pretty terrific as is Tears Dry.

@JNOV: Pretty arrangement.

Life sometimes imitates art to a bad extent. Great voice, shame she could never find peace with what she dealt with.

I love her music. She was 27. Hendrix was 27 when he died, and Janis Joplin was 27 when she died. WTF?

@blogenfreude: Cobain was 27, as was Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, and I think Morrison was too.

That seems to be the big one for rock and roll stars with troubles, although John Bonham & Keith Moon both died at 32.

And Kurt Cobain was 27 … I have to stop now.

@blogenfreude: When you’re 19 or 20 and you have that many people giving you drugs and everybody says you’re wonderful it can be quite difficult to hold on to yourself. It catches up with you in your later 20s I guess.

@ManchuCandidate: I think there is only one. You should get it, it is remarkable.

I’ve known people who drugged themselves to death. At some point, it becomes obvious what is about to happen, and it is almost unstoppable once the problem starts gathering speed (pardon the pun). Always terrible, alway so sad, but worse when great talent is involved.

@Tommmcatt Be Fat, And That Be That: There are two: Frank (dropped when she was 20) and Back to Black (she was 23). Mark Ronson was involved with Back to Black, and he made it a little more Motowney, if a Brit can do such a thing. ;-) I’m not sure why, but I thought that if anyone could help that kid out, it would be Mark.

@Benedick HRH KFC: This is going to sound so trite, and maybe it is so trite, but a lot of these talented kids — kids that become famous while their brains are still more adolescent than adult, they usually have a rough time evaluating risk, plus they have a need to dull the pain that drives them to create in the first place, the end result being they lose their ability to create. It’s like the thing that helped them exorcise their demons offers them dangerous alternatives that take less effort than working it out through art or therapy or whatever.

I have a thing for John Frusciante. The Red Hot Chili Peppers is a mediocre band that lucked out with three excellent musicians: Flea, Hillel Slovak and John Frusciante. Slovak OD’d, and Frusciante replaced him. Frusciante was about 18 years old, and he found himself touring with men almost a decade older than him. Frusciante had been a fan for years, so it was like a dream come true, right? Then boom! They became famous, and John just did not deal with it well.

Yammeryammeryammer — I dunno. It’s the sensitive ones that touch us, but we forget how fucking fragile people are in general and most artists are especially.

Then I think about Ai Weiwei and how he’s been silenced, and it breaks my heart and pisses me off. No one in their right mind would want to share themselves with such a fucked up world, but they have to.