Get Well Soon Amy Winehouse
Since her breakout album Back to Black, Amy Winehouse has become the a tabloid fascination. With her beautiful sultry voice and her darkly modern twist on the Motown doo-wop era, Winehouse has earned critical acclaim and super-stardom. Unfortunately, she is also notorious for her addition to drugs and alcohol, with the world watching her spiralling down, down, down.
Over the last few months the buzz about Amy Winehouse - or more specifically her drug abuse and other social dysfunction, has hit fever pitch. Since January, Winehouse has been filmed in several crack dens, once actually hitting the pipe, and another time singing some racist nursery rhyme. She is gaining a reputation for strange concert behavior and her Drs have told her to give up drugs or die. There are even rumors that she will be replaced as the singer for the theme to the next James Bond movie.
Recently, Rolling Stone sent reporter, Claire Hoffman to London for an interview with Winehouse. The scene described by Hoffman was pretty bleak: a barely conscious Winehouse, puttering around preparing to make a statement to the waiting paparazzi on the day the news of the aforementioned “racist” video broke, disappearing up stairs at regular intervals and digging around a littered floor to find a scarf. What really struck me though, was that Winehouse claimed her downward spiral is a result of the incarceration of her beloved husband, Blake Fielder-Civil; Winehouse’s marriage to whom Hoffman sites as “when things got weird.”
But things got weird not long after Winehouse married Fielder-Civil in Miami in May 2007. In November, he was arrested for the assault of an East End bar owner in June 2006. (Fielder-Civil pleaded guilty.) With her husband gone, Winehouse slid into a despondent place. She canceled her tour at the end of 2007, saying, “I can’t give it my all onstage without my Blake.” And in January, after a clip of her smoking crack was released to the tabloid The Sun, she was sent to rehab by her record label again. She didn’t stay long, and she happily tells me she did drugs the whole time.
This spring brought story after story in the tabloids, parading images of Winehouse wrecked and wretched, usually high and half-naked. There were rumors of extramarital affairs, and she was arrested (and later released) on drug charges and cautioned by police for assaulting a man. Her smacked-out haze of an existence went viral in May, when Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty posted videos on YouTube of the two of them in a dark room playing with just-born mice, their fingernails encrusted in black resin, using the animals as puppets to beg Winehouse’s husband not to divorce her. Also in May, Mark Ronson, the DJ and producer who worked with her on her hits, canceled her recording sessions for the title song of the upcoming James Bond film. “I’m not sure Amy is ready to work on music yet,” he said at the time. It is now rumored that the wholesome and beautiful young British singer Leona Lewis will replace Winehouse on the Bond song.
Winehouse says all of this is the product of heartbreak from being separated from her true love, whose name appears in a little heart pin she often wears in her hair. “To be honest, my husband’s away, I’m bored, I’m young,” Winehouse tells me. “I felt like there was nothing to live for. It’s just been a low ebb.”
When listening to her debut LP, Frank, you can almost tell that Winehouse was in a healthier state. In videos, she definitely looks healthier. However, that album was dedicated to an ex-boyfriend and Black to Black written during a time when Winehouse and beau were on the outs, so maybe her creativity is driven by drama and heartache. Either way, the angst that fueled such “divine madness” is quite possibly just as addictive and dangerous as her addition to drugs; and we all know that addition is an ugly, ugly beast.
All I can say, is that I really hope Amy Winehouse get’s well soon. As it stands she does not seem headed toward a happy end.
(Image via Newscom)
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