It was my intention to do a fabulous blog posting on Prince for my 174th piece. You know the kind of thing - lots of links, video, music downloads, the works, right?
After all, it's 30 years since 'Controversy,' 25 since 'Parade,' and 20 since 'Diamonds and Pearls,' musical milestones one and all; the man deserves all over again to be recognised as the genius he undoubtedly is...
Instead, this post is all about the hideously untimely death of the young singer, Amy Winehouse. I never knew Amy Winehouse. However, I was genuinely, emotionally affected by her unerring ability to write great pop songs and her compelling talent in performing them in a way that was both breathlessly intimate and startlingly forthright - my suspicions are that she found it difficult to suffer foods gladly; witness her self-deprecating, bullshit detecting video performances.
We are, all of us, culpable, in small ways and large, in Amy Winehouse's death - the media, and our complicitness in accepting what they say as fact, stridently 'encourages' us to accept the unacceptable about people and celebrity - in Amy's case, the blackly choreographed images of the crack smoking, vodka binge drinking, consistently amoral rock star...
Of course, Amy was no angel. More than a passing familiarity with her lyrics will demonstrate that she co-inhabited a dark side, was hugely attracted to it and the casual gratification it could so mesmerisingly offer. Like Blake, Coleridge and Curtis before her, Amy had an undoubted fascination with dissolution, the 'active evil better than passive good,' that so informed her art whilst so misinforming others' conspired opinions of her.
More than anything else, the other real victims in this are her family and friends. Their pain is real and always will be. Her fans, and there are many, have lost not only the object of their love, affection and, often, infatuation, they have lost a part of what it feels like to be young and alive and to love someone who could articulate their most private of feelings in a way no one else could or dared to.
Some magic is now missing from their lives, and from mine.
I never knew Amy Winehouse. By many accounts, she was a shy, fiercely intelligent woman just beginning to mine the first seams of her talents, to show just what, as an artist, she was capable of - it's a tragedy and a travesty that we will never have the opportunity of seeing these talents flourish...
RIP Amy.
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