Did the media kill Amy Winehouse?
“Blacks, Pakis, Gooks and Nips… and deaf and dumb and blind and gay” slurs Amy Winehouse in a grainy clip uploaded on YouTube. In the video, she is slumped on a couch in a dilapidated basement littered with drug paraphernalia. Her boyfriend, Blake Fielder-Civil can be heard egging her on and promising that he isn't "recording it... I swear on my life". A friend called "Eddie" says that they have taken "a bit of E, a bit of C and a few beers, watched telly, smoked crack". Winehouse is later seen lying comatose on a sofa.
Upon the release of the racist video, she was cussed out by scores of angry netizens, including her fans, who called her everything from a “crack whore” to “drunk-ass bigot” and “white trash”. But she was under the influence of a variety of toxic substances, which included a toxic boyfriend.
Fallen angels are all the more endearing because we can see ourselves in them. She was broken, confused, and in the grip of a beast she could not shake loose. She was sliding down a slippery slope. She was one of us.
I was in audience when Amy performed the song “F*ck Me Pumps” at the Glastonbury Festival in 2007. She mocks the social climbers and gold-diggers among us in her smoky, whiskey-soaked voice, reminiscent of a latter-day Ella Fitzgerald. “When you walk in the bar/And you dressed like a star/Rockin' your F*ck me pumps/And the men notice you/With your Gucci bag crew/Can't tell who he's lookin' to/'Cause you all look the same/Everyone knows your name/And that's your whole claim to fame/Never miss a night /'Cause your dream in life/Is to be a footballer's wife.”
The same year I attended her concert in London, where she sang the smoldering ballad “You Know I’m No Good”. She commiserated with us, told us it was okay to be sad, to be lost, to be less than perfect. I was mesmerised by her preternatural ability to get under the skin of her audience. Only too aware of her failings, she admits, “I cheated myself/Like I knew I would/I told you I was trouble/You know that I'm no good.”
She was a bona fide musical phenomenon at the time, having won a Grammy for her hit album “Back in Black” and was adored by millions of fans around the world. Often wasted on a cocktail of drugs and alcohol, she had been struggling with her inner demons for a long time, which gnawed at her more fiercely after she was flung into the spotlight.
In the Academy award-winning documentary Amy, director Asif Kapadia holds the media and society largely responsible for her downfall. “If one looks carefully, there are lots of people who make lots of decisions or who were aware of one thing – whether it was the drinking, the bulimia, or the drugs – and nobody stopped it. That’s what the film is really about,” he told The Guardian. “But the second half is where most of the audience come on board. It’s not just about her any more, it’s about us. It’s about the city, it’s about the media, it’s about everything, people who have taken this in, enjoying, laughing at her.”
In the film, her manager Nick Shymansky describes the media’s behaviour as a “feeding frenzy”. “Suddenly it was cool to make fun of a bulimic’s appearance or her drug habit.”
Not everyone was happy with the way the documentary turned out. Winehouse’s father Mitch told the filmmakers they were “a disgrace” and claimed the film is “trying to portray me in the worst possible light”.
The riveting film is almost entirely assembled from archival footage and home videos of Amy from the time she was a little child, through her awkward adolescent years to adulthood and the crazy last years of her life. It is narrated by Amy herself and by the men in her life; managers Nick Shymansky, Raye Cosbert, bodyguard Andrew Morris, pianist Sam Beste, boyfriend Blake Fielder and assorted friends and crew members.
he two things that stand out in the documentary are her unpreparedness and terror at the pernicious effects of stardom and her unhealthy fixation with the boyfriend Blake Fielder. She seems in control of her life only when she is singing. For the rest, she appears like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck.
The haunting title song from "Back to Black" is about her break-up with Blake Fielder: “We only said goodbye with words/I died a hundred times/You go back to her/And I go back to/I go back to us/I love you much/It's not enough/You love blow, and I love puff/And life is like a pipe/And I'm a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside.”
Was it her inability to handle the constant public scrutiny, the drug and alcohol abuse, an eating disorder, a manipulative lover or a broken heart that ultimately killed her? At age 27, she was found dead at her home in Camden, North London on July 23, 2011, with several empty bottles of liquor on the floor. She had a premonition of things to come. Her doctor gave evidence in a written statement that said she saw her patient the night before her death at which time “she specifically said she did not want to die”.
She was the latest member of the “27 Club”, named after a group of artists who died tragically at the age of 27. They were some of the most prodigious talents of their generation, and in their short lives, each made an enormous impact: Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jean Michel Basquiat, Robert Johnson and Brian Jones. Many of them, like Amy, led hard-partying lifestyles, abusing drugs and alcohol.
Winehouse had repeatedly refused psychiatric help fearing it would stifle her creative abilities. In the iconic track “Rehab”, she sings about her reluctance to seek professional help.
“They tried to make me go to rehab/I said, no, no, no/Yes, I been black/But when I come back, you'll know, know, know/I ain't got the time/And if my daddy thinks I'm fine/He's tried to make me go to rehab/I won't go, go, go.”
In one of the final scenes of the film, she lands up at the venue of a much-hyped concert in Belgrade and mumbles her way through the show, clearly out of it. She is booed by thousands of irate fans in the audience. “It felt like the end. She was someone who really didn’t care anymore,” says pianist Sam Beste in the accompanying commentary. “To the extent she was willing to sabotage not just her career, but her friendships and musical relationships.”
Indeed, Amy was ready to throw it all away. “If I could give it back, just to walk down that street with no hassle, I would,” she says a few weeks before her death.
But it was too late by then. The vultures had been circling around for a while, anticipating the end, waiting to feast on her warm remains. And feast they did.