Amy Winehouse’s last big concert was in Belgrade, a month before she died. This was June of 2011. Billed as the beginning of her comeback tour, the gig turned into one of her most infamous train wrecks: when she came on stage, she was drunk beyond the point of making sense, beyond the point of standing — tripping and crouching, sitting down to take off her shoes, leaning into her bass guitarist and holding his hand. The crowd started heckling her early and didn’t let up. “Sing!” they shouted. “Sing! Sing!”
Her eyes were as large as a child’s, as if she’d been dropped into a life she had no idea how to live. Her life had been unmanageable for years. But the thing was, she had all this management: a promoter, a producer, a father. She was asleep when they put her on the plane to Serbia. She slept for the whole flight, woke up to her own life, and heard: Sing! Her fans loved her as long as she gave them what they needed — as long as she broke down so they could watch, as long as she picked herself back up again so she could give them her voice. Her backup guys in their orange suits didn’t know what to do with her.
The footage of Belgrade is nearly impossible to believe, but there it is, happening over and over again, as many times as you want to click the YouTube refresh button. Amy stumbles along in her tiny yellow dress with ragged stripes of black, a bruised banana. When she falls off an amp, her drummer’s smile stretches into something more like a grimace. Is this an oh-those-self-destructive-music-legends-how-they-fuck-up moment or an actually-this-woman-is-basically-committing-suicide-right-in-front-of-you moment? He isn’t sure what face to make. The public didn’t know what face to make for years. “She’s shit-faced,” says a voice on the YouTube video. “She doesn’t know where she is.” And then: “Look at her. Look at her.” At a certain point, her face changes. She’s not confused anymore, or scared. She’s smirking. Her smirk seems to say, I’m done with this. She throws the mic. Someone hands her another. One voice cries out: “Sing or give me my money back!”
She finally does sing, her voice barely audible above her music — above the song she’d written to turn her heartbreak into something beautiful, something profitable, your love goes and my love grows, the music that had turned her into a tabloid sensation it never seemed like she wanted to be. At a certain point, her voice is no longer audible above the noise of the crowd, the sounds of their frustration and desire, their voices reminding her of the words to her own song.
The public loved to see Amy fucking up. They loved to hate her, loved to judge her, loved to feel bad for her. They loved to relate to her, whatever the terms of that relation, because it brought them closer to her, and what they wanted most was access. The public loved to watch her falling apart. The darkness inside her was always spilling out. They got more of it than they wanted: She couldn’t sing for them in Belgrade. She couldn’t stay alive for them in London.
At a concert on the Isle of Wight, where she slurred her mumbled words behind a wheel bearing the title HMS Winehouse, she sang “Rehab,” her unrepentant rallying cry, and drank from a plastic cup of wine held close to her mouth. She had to choose between drinking and singing — moment by moment, on a physical, literal level: she couldn’t do both at once. She was already drunk. At the end of the song, she threw the cup and an arc of booze sprayed across the stage, streaking it like paint. No, no, no, she sang. She wouldn’t go to rehab. Instead, she was doing this.
There are thousands of comments on her YouTube clips, full of taffy strands of pity: It’s really sad to see a human being like this. Or else harsh strokes of judgment: She is the definition of trash, nice voice or not! She is a disgrace to music and all the hard-working musicians around the globe. Fifty years after the emergence of Morton Jellinek’s disease model of alcoholism, people are still trying to figure out if it’s a sickness or a sin: Addiction = retardation . . . the crowd was right to boo her . . . So many people dream of being a Singer and being on stage and Amy just threw it all away.
Someone else: I see someone with a broken heart. (...)
The soap opera version of the story went something like this: Amy’s drinking got out of control after a breakup with Blake, her no-good junkie boyfriend, and then her friends tried to make her go to rehab. She said, no, no, no, and then she wrote an album that blew up, fueled by the anthem of her refusal to get better. Her career went through the stratosphere and Blake fought to get her back. They were madly in love. They got married in Miami, and hugely addicted to crack back home in London. At the peak of her use, she was spending £16,000 a week on hard drugs.
After Amy almost overdosed, her friends and family staged an intervention at a Four Seasons in Hampshire. The doctor said if she had another seizure, she’d die. But she went on her US tour anyway. She and Blake kept doing drugs together till he went to prison. She won five Grammys but she wasn’t allowed to attend the ceremony because of all the drugs. In her acceptance speech — delivered at a club in London, where she was watching from afar — she said: “For my Blake, my Blake incarcerated.”
A YouTube video from six months after Blake’s incarceration shows Amy high on crack, playing with a bunch of newborn mice. Watching it is like falling into some one else’s terrible dream. “This one has a message for Blake,” Amy says, holding one of the wriggling furless mice on her finger. She gives us a squeaky mouse-voice, pleading: “Blake, please don’t divorce me.” The mouse-voice says: “I’m only a day old but I know what love is.”
Even after Amy finally stopped the hard drugs, she kept drinking. She and Blake got divorced, mouse pleas notwithstanding. She kept drinking, and kept singing, but never made another record. She stopped drinking, kept drinking, stopped drinking, kept drinking — until her body finally just gave up. When she died, her blood alcohol content was over .4 percent, five times the legal limit for drunk driving. The coroner ruled it “death by misadventure.”
The paparazzi loved Amy. They couldn’t get enough of her. They loved her beauty. They loved its blemishing even more. They didn’t just want her beehive hair; they wanted it ratty. They didn’t just want her eyeliner cat’s-eyes; they wanted them smeared. Their photos tried to zoom in on her cuts and bruises; the damage from her crack binges and booze benders. Little wounds were like openings in the tent flaps of her privacy. The camera got close on her wet flesh as if it were trying to get inside the wounds themselves, the closest thing to fucking that a camera could manage. The paparazzi wanted to get right into her bloodstream.
Amy once said to her husband: I want to feel what you feel. And that’s what the public wanted from her — to know what she felt, to get under her skin. But also they wanted to jump away again, hide under the safe cover of irony: What crawled into her hair and died there? one comedian wanted to know. She looks like a campaign poster for neglected horses. Her broke-down addict self was irritating. It was so fucking sad. OMG, it was funny.
Her addiction kept delivering physical evidence of her vulnerability, her bruises and her gashes and her emaciated body, and comedians kept delivering jokes so everyone could metabolize the horror of what was happening, like a five-year-long video of someone slowly dying in public.
by Leslie Jamison, Longreads | Read more:
Her eyes were as large as a child’s, as if she’d been dropped into a life she had no idea how to live. Her life had been unmanageable for years. But the thing was, she had all this management: a promoter, a producer, a father. She was asleep when they put her on the plane to Serbia. She slept for the whole flight, woke up to her own life, and heard: Sing! Her fans loved her as long as she gave them what they needed — as long as she broke down so they could watch, as long as she picked herself back up again so she could give them her voice. Her backup guys in their orange suits didn’t know what to do with her.The footage of Belgrade is nearly impossible to believe, but there it is, happening over and over again, as many times as you want to click the YouTube refresh button. Amy stumbles along in her tiny yellow dress with ragged stripes of black, a bruised banana. When she falls off an amp, her drummer’s smile stretches into something more like a grimace. Is this an oh-those-self-destructive-music-legends-how-they-fuck-up moment or an actually-this-woman-is-basically-committing-suicide-right-in-front-of-you moment? He isn’t sure what face to make. The public didn’t know what face to make for years. “She’s shit-faced,” says a voice on the YouTube video. “She doesn’t know where she is.” And then: “Look at her. Look at her.” At a certain point, her face changes. She’s not confused anymore, or scared. She’s smirking. Her smirk seems to say, I’m done with this. She throws the mic. Someone hands her another. One voice cries out: “Sing or give me my money back!”
She finally does sing, her voice barely audible above her music — above the song she’d written to turn her heartbreak into something beautiful, something profitable, your love goes and my love grows, the music that had turned her into a tabloid sensation it never seemed like she wanted to be. At a certain point, her voice is no longer audible above the noise of the crowd, the sounds of their frustration and desire, their voices reminding her of the words to her own song.
The public loved to see Amy fucking up. They loved to hate her, loved to judge her, loved to feel bad for her. They loved to relate to her, whatever the terms of that relation, because it brought them closer to her, and what they wanted most was access. The public loved to watch her falling apart. The darkness inside her was always spilling out. They got more of it than they wanted: She couldn’t sing for them in Belgrade. She couldn’t stay alive for them in London.
At a concert on the Isle of Wight, where she slurred her mumbled words behind a wheel bearing the title HMS Winehouse, she sang “Rehab,” her unrepentant rallying cry, and drank from a plastic cup of wine held close to her mouth. She had to choose between drinking and singing — moment by moment, on a physical, literal level: she couldn’t do both at once. She was already drunk. At the end of the song, she threw the cup and an arc of booze sprayed across the stage, streaking it like paint. No, no, no, she sang. She wouldn’t go to rehab. Instead, she was doing this.
There are thousands of comments on her YouTube clips, full of taffy strands of pity: It’s really sad to see a human being like this. Or else harsh strokes of judgment: She is the definition of trash, nice voice or not! She is a disgrace to music and all the hard-working musicians around the globe. Fifty years after the emergence of Morton Jellinek’s disease model of alcoholism, people are still trying to figure out if it’s a sickness or a sin: Addiction = retardation . . . the crowd was right to boo her . . . So many people dream of being a Singer and being on stage and Amy just threw it all away.
Someone else: I see someone with a broken heart. (...)
The soap opera version of the story went something like this: Amy’s drinking got out of control after a breakup with Blake, her no-good junkie boyfriend, and then her friends tried to make her go to rehab. She said, no, no, no, and then she wrote an album that blew up, fueled by the anthem of her refusal to get better. Her career went through the stratosphere and Blake fought to get her back. They were madly in love. They got married in Miami, and hugely addicted to crack back home in London. At the peak of her use, she was spending £16,000 a week on hard drugs.
After Amy almost overdosed, her friends and family staged an intervention at a Four Seasons in Hampshire. The doctor said if she had another seizure, she’d die. But she went on her US tour anyway. She and Blake kept doing drugs together till he went to prison. She won five Grammys but she wasn’t allowed to attend the ceremony because of all the drugs. In her acceptance speech — delivered at a club in London, where she was watching from afar — she said: “For my Blake, my Blake incarcerated.”
A YouTube video from six months after Blake’s incarceration shows Amy high on crack, playing with a bunch of newborn mice. Watching it is like falling into some one else’s terrible dream. “This one has a message for Blake,” Amy says, holding one of the wriggling furless mice on her finger. She gives us a squeaky mouse-voice, pleading: “Blake, please don’t divorce me.” The mouse-voice says: “I’m only a day old but I know what love is.”
Even after Amy finally stopped the hard drugs, she kept drinking. She and Blake got divorced, mouse pleas notwithstanding. She kept drinking, and kept singing, but never made another record. She stopped drinking, kept drinking, stopped drinking, kept drinking — until her body finally just gave up. When she died, her blood alcohol content was over .4 percent, five times the legal limit for drunk driving. The coroner ruled it “death by misadventure.”
The paparazzi loved Amy. They couldn’t get enough of her. They loved her beauty. They loved its blemishing even more. They didn’t just want her beehive hair; they wanted it ratty. They didn’t just want her eyeliner cat’s-eyes; they wanted them smeared. Their photos tried to zoom in on her cuts and bruises; the damage from her crack binges and booze benders. Little wounds were like openings in the tent flaps of her privacy. The camera got close on her wet flesh as if it were trying to get inside the wounds themselves, the closest thing to fucking that a camera could manage. The paparazzi wanted to get right into her bloodstream.
Amy once said to her husband: I want to feel what you feel. And that’s what the public wanted from her — to know what she felt, to get under her skin. But also they wanted to jump away again, hide under the safe cover of irony: What crawled into her hair and died there? one comedian wanted to know. She looks like a campaign poster for neglected horses. Her broke-down addict self was irritating. It was so fucking sad. OMG, it was funny.
Her addiction kept delivering physical evidence of her vulnerability, her bruises and her gashes and her emaciated body, and comedians kept delivering jokes so everyone could metabolize the horror of what was happening, like a five-year-long video of someone slowly dying in public.
by Leslie Jamison, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Shirlaine Forrest / Getty
