Tuesday, July 26, 2011

The short foregone song of Amy Winehouse Singer was wreck waiting to happen, and we couldn't tear our eyes away

r several days after her death, you heard the rollcall.

Amy Winehouse had shuffled off her mortal coil and joined "The 27 Club," the rock 'n' roll pantheon of self-destructs who all managed to die three years before their third decade - Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain. (Cobain's mother, less kindly but with more cause, called it the "Stupid Club.") The club's founding member, bluesman Robert Johnson, died at 27 in 1938 of causes never made clear, possibly from strychnine poisoning or, more mythically and more appealing, from a deal he made with the devil. He was said to have surrendered his soul in return for mastery of the guitar. Thank gawd times have changed. Nowadays, people just take up Guitar Hero.

The devil that dogged Amy Winehouse was more mundane. So intertwined was her drug addiction with her art that it was impossible to think of one without the other, or to determine which informed the other more.

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