.Amy Winehouse, July 23: The Timeline

10:45am. “Amy Winehouse died,” someone’s posted on Facebook. What? Well, have to check it out anyway. Quick Google: Daily Mail is saying so. Really? Really? Within a matter of seconds, Guardian and Telegraph and BBC have it up too. Fuck. Fuck. Really? This can’t be true. Give it ten minutes. But the news keeps coming in. “London police have confirmed the death of a 27-year-old female…”
11:15am. A stomach knot and all I can think is that the media killed Amy Winehouse. With its salivating predatory need for photos, the more grotesque the better, and stories fabricated or not, who cares, post it up now and get those clicks! That concert in Belgrade—even I clicked on the link, and after about ten seconds of the video I couldn’t watch anymore. But I clicked on the link. Another click means another vote that tells the media AMY WINEHOUSE DISASTER = SITE TRAFFIC VICTORY, and I cast it, and you cast it, and we all cast it. The result is more posts about Amy Winehouse, the ugly, wandering, makeupless falling down trainwreck, to satiate the public hunger and boost the Alexa rating and the advertising rate card. See? The media killed Amy Winehouse. Or if it didn’t, it certainly obliterated any chances she may have had at getting better. This, I know: When the media places your life in a certain frame, over and over, you cannot grow out of that frame. Here is the narrative since 2008: “Amy Winehouse: Hopeless Addict.” Over and over. How could she be anything but? Jesus, we all killed Amy Winehouse.
12:30pm. Someone calls and tells me they saw the thing in the paper about my mom, and I tell them I’m actually kind of more beat up about Amy Winehouse. And: I never saw her perform. She only played San Francisco once, at Popscene right after the record came out. It was completely sold out, and I’d’ve tried to buy a scalped ticked, but she’d already canceled a bunch of shows already and I didn’t want to take chances. Later, she canceled two shows at the Warfield. Man.
1:10pm. Denial. Was Back to Black really even anything special? The soul revival had been on full blast since 1999, with Brainfreeze and Alice Russell and Tru Thoughts and Dap-Tone and Sharon Jones and Sister Funk and Keb Darge, and all Amy Winehouse did was come along and do the same thing but be skinny, and white, and pretty, and have a bloggable hairdo. Hers was a double steal: she wasn’t just hijacking the Shirelles, she was plundering a rich underground club scene. Remembering a pitch to an editor about the Dap-Kings, and how they deserved more credit for making Amy Winehouse who she was. A friend tweets: “Not to downplay the loss of another human life but can we admit that Ronson was the brains behind the operation?” Yeah, like what did Amy Winehouse even do anyway, but what people told her to do?
2:13pm. That’s crazy. I know I really liked Back to Black, played the hell out of it. Didn’t I write something about it when it came out? Oh, look, here it is:
…Winehouse has got a goddamn voice to shake the T-cells out of your bloodstream, replace them with a revamping toxin of shudder and sway and exit your system, laughing, while you walk in perfect rhythm for the next two weeks. By any estimation, it comes from a place deeper and larger than her lanky frame could possibly contain, and it evokes both Dusty Springfield and Gil Scott-Heron, with one part come-hither and two parts gettda-fuck-outta-here. On her sophomore album, Back to Black, she’s backed by a stellar band (aided themselves by the welcome trend of retro-soul recording techniques), sounding thoroughly fresher than the processed sugar fix of most U.K. buzz-girls. The songs are all from Winehouse’s own pen, and they read like a series of esoteric MySpace comments: “What kind of fuckery is this? / You made me miss the Slick Rick gig.”
Yes, it seems, I liked it. (Ha ha, MySpace.) I remember now that it made me feel like a teenager in love, in Detroit, in 1968. And all the songs were written by Amy herself? Okay. I have to listen to this record again. I know death makes music sound different; I’m going into this with my guard up.
2:45pm. My guard is down. Jesus, how does she do it? Those elongated vowels that turn into two, that husk, that phrasing. That phrasing, most of all! No one else on Earth would sing these songs the same way. You know those girls who get up and sing the National Anthem at baseball games, and warble all over the notes in an attempt to be pyrotechnic but just wind up shitting all over the song? You know those girls on American Idol? You know Christina Aguilera? This is nothing like that pyrotechnic warble. This is pure inspiration. And did she really write the songs? Insert sleeve credit check: yes. And those lyrics! “Nowadays you don’t mean dick to me.” Ha! Adele would never sing shit like that. God, I hate Adele.
3:15pm. Even the non-hits are good, like all of Side Two, after “Tears Dry On Their Own.” Listen to it again. How could this have happened? I guess I’ll watch her last performance ever, with her goddaughter or whoever this person is. Some kinda iTunes promotion. They’re singing “Mama Said” together but… wait, they don’t have a microphone for Amy Winehouse?! What? Amy makes the best of it and dances along while looking repeatedly in the wings for a microphone. This translates into “looking confused and out of it” by media reports. Goddamn it all to hell. The media killed Amy Winehouse.
3:36pm. Just sad, for hours and hours.