Amy Winehouse left us before I personally came to appreciate her music. There’s always that time marker, where before that you’re just a little kid who doesn’t pay attention to anything in real culture. Who can say that I’ve reached it myself, even?
I’ve revisited (or just plain discovered) her work, mainly her breakthrough 2006 studio album Back to Black. I downright love it. It’s quickly becoming my favorite LP of the newly-turned century. Up there with Arcade Fire and Radiohead. Quite possibly topping them.
I’m less, how do I say, distinct in my criticism of music. I enjoy it almost as much as I do movies, but my expression of that enjoyment is different. Movies for me make up a gray area; I either like music or I don’t. The movies I have watched in my life have a cumulative effect on how I see the world and mean more as a collection of little experiences I’ve taken from all of them; I can name a specific list of musical albums that have had the most meaningful effect on me and see the others as small. And, probably most significantly, I can say why I like a movie. Maybe not with movies in general, but with an individual movie I can pin down what I like about it.
Music not so much, just as I can’t really name what I adore about Back to Black. Is it the jazz movement that feels retro but all the while sounds like a time made by itself? Is it the truly wonderful lyrics that illustrate Amy as an artist and as a holistic, beautiful person in her strengths and flaws? Or is it just her voice? It’s the best we’ve heard in awhile. I am still waiting for popular music to bring to life the riffs that she did.
While I can’t answer these questions, they leave me asking, and with the attitude I now have toward Amy, I would take every opportunity to immerse myself in them again and again. If you have not heard Back to Black, I would suggest watching Asif Kapadia’s new documentary Amy first. It is, after all, what got me so enthralled by this musician.
At times sad, at times enlightening, it is always shocking. The film is entirely made up of footage, real and moving, of Winehouse herself, in the studio, during concerts, surrounded by friends away from fans. I could never get over it. These clips never lose their effect, and for moments, I’m taken away from the world which brought me news of the then-less-impactful death of this gifted young master. To know Amy is to know her music, but to be in her raw presence must have been a mystical source of energy that further defined her aura. There is just something else to this documentary.
It’s hardly a definitive account of her complete life. Very few clips are shown from her childhood, which isn’t covered a lot in general aside from vaguely described pressures from her father. It picks up briefly, very briefly (in terms of its footage and the aid of recorded interviews) before the release of Back to Black, where radio stations were still picking her up and she, while making a name for herself, was not close to the level of fame she would soon achieve. This area of the film is concise, but fulfilling. If home videos of Amy’s childhood were in fact available, they would detract anyway. She was a young woman who was treated with the boundaries of an entertainer and not the boundaries of a human being that everyone deserves to hold. All we need to see is where the understanding dropped off.
The movie covers her drug and alcohol habits. Tony Bennet, who did a duet with Winehouse for a collaboration project of his that was, at the time unknown, her last recording, is quoted beautifully: “Life teaches you really how to live it, if you live long enough.” Amy matured in her music so fast that even I forget how shockingly young she was, twenty-seven at her death. She will always be remembered for the beauty she brought to pop culture, but I like to think about how she could, and would, have grown to be a role model. So many factors collided in a place she was not ready to handle alone. Her life was fragile and gave into her burdens. They were her life.
It pains me that, with just some more experience, she would have been able to bear the media attention, her career, her relationships. No one should have to go through those things, but she could have realized them as an obstacle rather than a fate if she had more innocent years to refer back to. She should have had more time.
And yet, in face of the horrifying personal demons the action would eventually bring her, she gave that time to us. Thank you, Amy.
