A very very good read.

http://www.myspace.com/music/blog/2011/7/29/stop-making-sense-the-life-and-folklore-of-amy-winehouse

The news of Amy Winehouse’s death this weekend had been barely broken before fans, critics, and casual observers alike began rushing to compose their final thoughts. Within minutes, thousands of words went up on the Internet — words that, while outwardly meant to express how we felt upon hearing the news, turned out to say more about how we interpret the lives of our icons. Armed with a bizarre mix of superstition and literary affectations, these elegies hewed closer to the final act of a Shakespearean fall myth than to the factual account of one woman’s tragic ending; they convey more about the way we “read” death as a culture, than they do about the real life of Amy Winehouse.

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First came the seers and the prophets, quick to cash their post-dated checks: This wasn’t a surprise, they smugly proclaimed. We saw this coming! Right behind them were the fatalists, who quickly declared Winehouse’s death “inevitable” and practically tripped over themselves to be the first to induct the singer into that mythical “27 Club,” whose ranks consist of any perfectly coincidental number of rock stars — including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and more recently, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain — whose lives ended at the age of 27. Finally, and perhaps with the least amount of welcome, came the blind moralists, whose deficit for compassion was surpassed only by their collective ego. To them, Winehouse was a flat character whose personal narrative begins and ends with her well-documented struggles with addiction; if her personality were any more complicated, its ability to neatly function in the moralist’s black-and-white cautionary tale would be compromised. Lest the so-called “moral” of the story be obscured, an editorial decision was made: Winehouse’s narrative was depersonalized and rewritten — no longer inflected with the hue of a complex and multidimensional human being, as we all are, but with the stain of a garden-variety junkie.

If you’re new to the world of pop music tragedy, let this be your introduction: Ours is a culture of myth-makers, not truth-seekers.

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It’s no secret that we tend to organize our lives into well-worn narratives. Our desire for order and meaning is what leads us into philosophy, politics, and religion — what to speak of music and art. If storytelling has become our oldest, if not most venerated social trait, it’s because it allows us to create an arc where there is none. It gives us perspective for the past and hope for the future, if only because the endings we write for ourselves are invariably happy. The construction of these grand narratives also invent significance. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion once wrote. “We look for the sermon in the suicide.”

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To be fair, Amy Winehouse contributed to her own myth, and we probably took as many cues from her lyrics as we did from the tabloids. Self-aware songs like “Rehab” and “Addicted” implied chronic pot-smoking at best and intervention-worthy alcoholism at worst; they spoke of a world where “puff” and “blow” seemed ever-present. Songs like “Back to Black,” meanwhile, extended her frankness to paint a picture of incurable loneliness, and on some level, play to the same sense of destiny that dogs our conversations about her today. At the same time, these lyrics are far more nuanced than all of this weekend’s insensitive “Rehab” jokes will suggest: She acknowledges her drinking as a crutch and suffers her isolation in sobriety on “Wake Up Alone,” and elsewhere, in her signature song — even after digging her heels in and refusing to “go, go, go” — Winehouse makes a somewhat heartbreaking, but mindful admission. “I don’t ever wanna drink again,” she sings. “I just need a friend.”

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Even still, Winehouse was not a diarist. She was a singer, a songwriter, and a highly capable artist whose gift was far greater than her curse.

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The fact is, we couldn’t have seen her death coming because life is not a novel, and foreshadowing does not occur under the will of authorial providence; what happens yesterday does not predetermine what might happen today. The fact is, her death was “inevitable” only in the sense that the death of any human being is, bar none, inevitable. The fact is that Amy Winehouse struggled with her demons and ostensibly lost — let’s not forget that her autopsy was inconclusive and that a full toxicology report is still forthcoming — but this does not mean that our demons are “better” than hers, or that we’re somehow “stronger.” Addiction is a disease, not a mere moral lapse, and between our varying romanticization and stigmatization of alcohol and drug use in popular culture, real people get caught up in it and die. These are, indeed, the facts.

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So no matter how much we want to be the author, to make sense of this tragic loss, the Amy Winehouse story is ultimately her own. She existed not to teach us a lesson or to eventually join some inane “club” for pop-music rubberneckers, but to express her own personal truth in a way that happened to resonate with millions of other people — people who, if given the chance, would have chosen the music over the myth every time.

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A recent tweet posed the ...g question: “Differing accounts emerge about Amy Winehouse’s final days. What do you believe?” But the real question here is, Why does it matter what we believe? Reality is not bothered by loose ends, wishful thinking, or plot resolution. Truth — much like Winehouse herself — is an open-ended, complicated, beautiful, difficult to translate, and sometimes, even downright messy thing. Everything else is surplus.

[Edited 8/2/11 22:19pm]

Amen. Very well-written.