Back to Black

 As I'm writing at this moment, it is a gray and rainy Sunday afternoon. Not unlike many Sunday afternoons in London. But today has to be different for the Winehouse family as they await for their 27-year-old daughter's body to be autopsied. I'm sure that they hoped that it would be her doing this to them and not the other way around, but unfortunately as many of us know, tragedy doesn't discriminate or acquiesce into what we believe should happen.
 From the  moment she emerged on the cultural landscape in America five years ago,  Amy Winehouse had already attained cult status. Cult status being that her voice and her music had instantly made her an iconoclast in contrast to her peers. While she is credited with being the face of the new millennium British Soul invasion, it was her disregard for pop star conventions that made her stand out in America. She was visibly clad with several tattoos, had a beehive that seemed to go on forever, and her public appearances made obvious that she wasn't coached by a team how to act. But looking back it is all a haunting reminder of how what the public fell in love with was an illusion to hide years of pain.
 Anyone who has even casually heard "Rehab" knows that song is powerful in a unique way, but now it's haunting. One lyric: "There's nothing you can't teach me/That I can't learn from Mr. Hathaway" keeps going in my head. Mr. Hathaway refers to tragic soul legend Donny Hathaway who died in his early thirties after being ravaged by schizophrenia. His death was so shocking that it was hard at the time for anyone to imagine it happening. Flash forward over thirty years later, you heard comments from people saying it was almost expected she die young. Is this a sad commentary on society's expectations for some celebrities or a wake up call to how drugs affect even the brightest talents.
 There's no denying that Amy used her voice to capture the rawness of her pain, but relied on drugs to numb it. Like so many people who constantly felt pain, the only way she could live inevitably was to kill herself slowly. Josh Groban's tweet expressed it best when he said that she was already gone before she actually died. Drugs and music unfortunately have their own overly cliched catchphrase. Yet as time moved on drug use became more hidden because many people saw it as wrong and it became criminalized in the Reagan era.  And the music industry with advent of MTV became more visual. But as anyone knows drugs never disappeared, they just got more high tech.
  Sure no one was singing about them, but they were there. And even now as we joke about the casual use of marijuana of artists such as Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson, the darker demons of drugs still linger. Wouldn't it have been nice to see Amy Winehouse mature and go to rehab to produce more music? Wouldn't it have been nice to see Nirvana make another record and then breakup? Or how about Janis Joplin singing at the Grammys before receiving a lifetime achievement awards? While these things can never be answered, I really would have like to have not been writing about another member who joins the tragic 27 club.