Some visual clues might help to clear this up.
This is talented:
This is a moron:
It gets no simpler. The gig she was fucking up for 20,000 people was her 'comeback' show and I think she displayed her ability to come back all too well. If you can't get it together for that, then you can't get it together. If you don't respect your fans that have stumped up their hard-earned money for a ticket, transport, food and drink and possibly a place to stay, and if you disregard the way they've looked forward to your gig for months, then you don't deserve to have those fans.
Addiction may be a chemical thing, it may be learned behaviour. It may be attention-seeking or response-seeking behaviour. The thing that needs to be forgotten, is that she was an addict.
For many though, this is the point. She was an addict and as such, couldn't help it.
She was an addict, clearly, but the help was there if she wanted it. If she didn't want it, then she's a moron. And why, with all the things she had going for her would she not want it?
Many other addicts may not even know where to go for help. Amy could have checked into the finest establishments, best equipped to deal with her demons. Many other addicts have nothing to look forward to when clean, indeed it was probably the lack of things to look forward to that put them there. Amy was a pop star, loved by millions, earning millions. She had plenty to live for and look forward to. If she couldn't see the good in those things she was...yep, a moron.
If she decided those things weren't enough or that she didn't like the pressures of fame and being in the public eye, then she could have stepped away from it. Given time, people would stop wondering when the new album was coming out, she could have negotiated her way out of her contract, and got a 9 -5 in McDonald's and lived happily ever after.
My point is she had choices, and she chose the one that led her to the 27 club. All the grievers out there who are feeling sorry for her, need to recognise that she made that choice. With all the other variables, she made the dumbest choice she could have. This makes her something beginning with 'm'.
Russell Brand has had the gaul to label Winehouse a genius. What a remarkably daft thing to do. Fleming was a genius. Feynman was a genius. Darwin was a genius. If we're talking music, Mozart was a genius, Bach and Beethoven the same. Modern day musicians that fit the term genius are Tim Smith, Frank Zappa, and Johan Johannson. Though I'd probably argue that writing songs isn't the behaviour of a genius anyway. You can be very, very good at it but genius? Doesn't fit well with me.
Thanks to our obsession with celebrity in the West, and the 27 club, Winehouse will become a legend in the music industry, and revered more and more as time goes by. Never has grief and attention been so misplaced.
Vasili Arkhipov. Stanislav Petrov. Are you familiar with these names? Perhaps so, but probably not. Without these two people, you would not be here today. I would not be here today. In fact its fair to say most things wouldn't be. In the early 60's, Arkhipov was part of a Russian submarine crew, patrolling waters near Cuba. They found themselves surrounded by American subs dropping depth charges in order to force the Russian sub to surface. The Russian captain forgot about this tactic and assumed they were under attack. Since they were underwater and unable to contact Moscow, the captain believed war had broken out. He moved to fire nuclear torpedoes. The only way he could do so was if the three highest ranking sailors agreed. Two did, Arkhipov didn't. Arkhipov saved the world.
Stanislav Petrov was in charge of a monitoring station in Russia in the early 80's. The station detected an incoming missile, then four more. Petrov decided it was a glitch in the machine and not a thermo-nuclear attack. He was right, and once again the launch of nuclear weapons was avoided. Petrov saved the world.
These two remain ignored or forgotten by many people. Yet we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for them. Arkhipov died in 1999. Where was the coverage? Is he labelled as genius? Did they call it a waste? Chances are, you didn't even hear about it. We hold the moronic in high regard, and ignore the people that have enabled us to even be here.
Martin Amis once wrote a very good short story that was kind of a dig at our culture's recent obsession with putting the dire forward as divine. He switched the literary world on its head, by putting poets earning millions and flying around the world on private jets, and having Hollywood script writers struggling for work and being disrespected by the poets. His point is a good one. Poetry is far more beautiful than the latest Michael Bay film, but the poets usually write part-time and hold down a day job, while the idiots churning out the popcorn munching bilge get paid a fortune for clunky, predictable dialogue and rehashed story lines. We value the mindless over the mesmeric.
Though the cause of her death remains - as I write at least - unclear, the fact remains that she was spotted buying drugs in Camden at 10:30pm the night before her body was found. No-one was there forcing her hand. She chose to do it. She could have as easily selected a different choice, and that is of going to the very rehab she sang about. I struggle to see then, how I can possibly place any sympathy her way. I struggle to see how anybody can. Making records should not place her above any other person that dies from drug or alcohol abuse. In fact with her options and reasons to live, she should probably be placed well below them.
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