5:07 AM
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Sure, Amy Winehouse's rap sheet certainly made it seem as if the singer was either powerless or impassive in ceasing the behaviors that, too often, effect in calamity. Keep in mind too that she was singing about rejecting rehab before she was became a celebrity, so if we're going to go down the twisted road of assuming she was singing about her life, then we can also assume that she hadn't been easy to assist. (If, indeed, people tried.) Now, though, there will be people who take Winehouse's loss as proof of something powerful about her art. I want those people to realize this: an early death proves of nothing. For every Jim Morrison there's a Leonard Cohen; for every Janis a Joni, a genius who sidestepped. Amy Winehouse was great in spite of drugs, not because of them. Can drugs be a useful tool for some artists? Perhaps, though we have no idea we how much more productive artists who looked to drugs for motivation might've been had they kept cleaner.
Drugs & music go mutually. It is a shady business, full of shady people. It can be hard to say no, & it does not get any easier. For a while maybe drugs can assist a musician work better. When, as in the astonishingly gifted Winehouse's case, they get famous & we learn about their drug use, we find it compelling. It shows that they're "tortured"; that they're "artists"; that they're "rock'n'roll." (Not one of those things equates to being human, by the way.) Then, in the worst-case scenario, the musician dies. & we get sad, put the dead in a line with the others who died similarly, and, over time, move on to the next seductive disaster-in-waiting. I hate this pattern. I hate it so much.
Maybe drugs can allow some musicians to get closer to the music's glow. But it can also snuff them out, & there is no new after the fact lesson to be learned from that. There is only unhappiness & the hope that, over time, we accept that it is far, far better to fade away than burn out. It always was. It always will be…
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