Amy Winehouse and the Seduction of an Open Wound: Remembering Her Ten Years After Her Passing

Can you separate the artist from the tragedy if their art is dependent on such affliction? If the music hadn’t been so great could she have been helped, or was studio time just too important? Was it the drugs, was it the instigators, was it the fame, or was it herself? No answers to the questions but officially ten years of pondering them. 

When asked my favorite album, my mouth answers Frank before my brain can register the question. But how could it not be with the acoustic spiraling of “I Heard Love is Blind,” the unforeseen rejection of “You Sent Me Flying,” and cocky dismissal of “In My Bed.” A debut whose words I would have tattooed across my whole body just so I would never have to part from them. How can someone that got expelled at 14 be so utterly profound and impossibly prolific? It was in her blood, to which she spilled onto the page. The transparency in her writing created a voice I have never seen another come close to. No one can be declared the best, but one can be so fully individual that rankings don’t matter. With this logic in mind, Amy stands alone. 

In no way did Amy invent or popularize the style of jazz singing she was known for, but it was because of her love of voices like Mahalia Jackson and Dinah Washington, soloists like Thelonious Monk, and songwriters like Carol King that conjured something within her, propelling her fated career. The thing is Amy didn’t grow up in a church and wasn’t raised amid a booming jazz revival, instead she was a 5”3 Russian Jewish girl from Enfield who wrote all of her own songs. In many ways it is hard to fathom how she reached the level of fame she did considering the pop sensibilities of Back to Black resembled the 1960s far more than they did the early 2000s. Her selective blend of jazz, R&B, soul, and pop music is in many ways a culmination of all the artists who inspired her and a testimony to black music, though there is still an element of inexplicable magic that made Amy’s sound her own, which the world could not ignore. 

It is heartbreaking to hear Amy say in an MTV interview with Tim Kash in 2004 how little interest she has in anything that isn’t recording music. Her face completely falls when Kash brings up all the responsibilities she will now have to deal with in the public eye, before she cuts him off to say, “I think the more people see of me, the more they will realize that all I’m good for is making tunes, so leave me alone, and I’ll do it.” It is shocking to see how Amy appeared to age a decade during the three years between Frank and Back to Black’s release. She entered the press world as a charming and enthusiastic 20-year-old, becoming jaded and utterly disinterested just a few years later, in some ways unrecognizable from her slightly younger self. Throughout all of her time in the public eye, and present in every song she sang, Amy’s honesty is perhaps what demonstrated itself most strongly, and a major reason why fans continue to come back to her. 

So much of the discourse revolving around Amy’s career centers on how much more she could have given the world, rather than focusing on what she did. Nearly every comment on any Youtube video of Amy, or news headline regarding her passing, mourns the brevity of her life and reduces it to one of tragedy, but what good is this logic? To color Amy’s life as being devastating is to ignore the incredible things she accomplished, and how she continues to live on as an inspiration to the unorthodox pop stars of today. 

Loving Amy is no losing game. What she did give us, Frank, Back to Black, and posthumously Lioness and At the BBC, have more heart in each track than many artists’ discographies combined. The past ten years since her death have allowed Amy to be depicted primarily as a victim. I’m hoping in the next ten, and forever after, she can be seen for who she truly was: a vision, who possessed enough talent and sincerity to last long past her lifetime. I always think the appeal of her persona lies in its duality. To appear as a masked figure but sound like an open wound is not just alluring but transfixing, propelling a desire for the truth of the subject, even if only for interpretation. Amy’s mop of chocolate brown hair, sloppy winged eyeliner, and Daddy’s Girl tattoo would ordinarily leave her looked down upon, washed up in the shadowy corner of some bar. But the second her voice spilled over jazz chords she became an international treasure, transcending the mass media that didn’t align with her authenticity. Would she have been considered such a living wonder if she had aged past 30? I don’t know the answers to her mystery as I don’t know the answers to most. But I do know her memory is with me always.