People keep referring to Janis Joplin but the real mirror image is that of Marianne Faithful.
There are photos on the net of Amy when she was 14, 15, 16 and she was a sweetie, just like Marianne Faithful was when she too became famous at 16. Perfect complexion, smooth healthy young skin, just a lovely young lady.
This is a story of the “downward spiral” writ large… again… and it will happen in the future too… again…
It’s a sad story. 27 year olds aren’t supposed to suddenly die. Parents aren’t supposed to live longer than their children. Apparently her Mother was already resigned to Amy dying young, such was the inevitability.
All I knew about Winehouse is she was a singer who had a drug problem.
Seeing the clips of her on the Saturday news made me realize she was beautiful, had an amazinf talent, and wasted it. That always makes me so sad and so angry.
Many are now saying that this wasn’t a drug overdose, but something to do with her continuing to drink. The police reported no drugs were found at the scene.
She was enormously talented and highly respected in the industry. The first time I heard her, Shocker Khan and I were driving home and Teri Hemmert on WXRT played “Rehab,” maybe the first time they’d played it, and introduced the song by talking about how blown away she was by this new breakthrough artist Amy Winehouse. The song came on just as we parked the car and we sat in silence while listening to the track utterly blown away by what we were hearing. Retro-soul seems to be the new fad w/ female singers (Duffy, Adele, Ellie Goulding) but Winehouse paved the way for all of them.
While driving yesterday, we listened to the audio rip of her Live in London DVD again and it’s just outstanding. She has such a fantastic way with words in her songs - cutting, honest, and even very funny (“Aside from Sammy you’re my best black Jew.”)
I can still remember the goosebumps I felt that first time I heard “Rehab,” and when it came on in the car again yesterday, I got the same chill - only for obviously different reasons.
Corner Sharon Duff ordered a Section 20 postmortem on Amy, which means that she feels that “there is reasonable cause to suspect that a person has died a violent or unnatural death or in any other way which would require an inquest.”
Interesting, after all the assumptions of an OD, it would be crazy if she was actually murdered or something.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she died not from drugs, but from complications (possibly heart failure) from to her long-term emaciation, which I have always assumed was due to anorexia/undernourishment…
This is possible too. You can abuse your body enough that it’s so wrecked that something that a normal person can survive comes along and kills you. It’s possible that someone who isn’t using anymore is still left with a messed up heart/lungs/liver.
Here she is just a few days before she died. She’s certainly skinny, but she looks ‘coke/crack’ skinny, not anorexic skinny and not (IMO) skinny enough to kill her.
If the speculation about Amy’s smoking habits is correct - namely, that she was a relentlessly heavy smoker of both cigarettes and crack - then yes, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that her lungs would have been in a bad way.
But more than anything else, the photos I’ve seen of her in her darkest moments indicate she was loaded up with toxins of all sorts. The problem with illicit drugs of course is that there’s no quality control - they’re often cut with who knows what sort of crap. If you’re using really heavy, that’s a truckload of toxins you’re introducing into your body which, quite simply, take a toll.
The emphysema speculation, if correct, would have doomed her career into oblivion regardless methinks. I suspect it would have been a career dogged with “cancellations” and “poor reviews”, not dissimilar to Whitney Houston’s modern day career.
It’s kind of relative (especially if you think there’s a ‘crackhead skinny’ which is different from being skinny because you are undernourished). You can die or be seriously ill from complications of an eating disorder without being a skeleton at 60 lbs. Amy has been more than underweight enough for years to qualify for anorexia (less than BMI 17.5).
