During her final years, Amy Winehouse was tabloid’s darling, referred to as “Wino” by celebrity blogs, hounded by the paparazzi and thoughtlessly ridiculed by the public. We indulged from a distance and capitalized on her catastrophes. The collective shaming of a young, talented artist reached a despicable crescendo. Even till the bitter end, media publications reporting on her death couldn’t help but make glib references to lyrics from her single “Rehab.” Here, we reimagine the ubiquitous gossip mag and consider a world where empathy, not derision, sells.
It’s hard to separate Amy Winehouse’s legacy from the image of her disseminated by the media during her very public breakdown. Divorcing an artist, especially a female one, from addiction, erratic, emotional behavior and dangerous antics, historically, isn’t easy. But if we can remember Kurt Cobain for defining not only a genre, but a generation, rather than as a petulant junkie, surely we owe the same service to an artist like Amy Winehouse. Because before we replace her deserved legacy with a hazy montage of images of her stumbling out of town cars and threatening paparazzi, we should pay tribute to the fact that Amy, for better or worse, was a talent the world had never seen before, and one that we’re yet to see again. Ignoring her personal failures, what exactly did Amy leave behind? What indelible mark did she leave etched on the music industry? What does “Amy Winehouse” mean to us now?
What do you say about a woman who invented a genre? When Amy came out with Frank, she was pegged as a jazz singer, but she was always so insistent that she was more than that, and it wasn’t until she paired up with Mark Ronson for Back to Black that she proved she was, indeed, chameleonic and even visionary. Saying she reinvented jazz would be a disservice both to Amy and to jazz. But what Amy managed to do, which she is so rarely credited for (because what’s apparently more interesting than a young woman reinventing the wheel is her inability to keep her emotions in check), is create a whole new genre of music, that is, quite simply, the genre of Amy Winehouse. She didn’t reinvent jazz, she reimagined it, and in doing so created something truly unique.
Back to Black intertwined Amy’s love of hip hop, rap and Motown-era girl bands and married them to her jazz roots. She was passionate for disparate sounds, and when she put them together, she gave birth to her own genre. It’s a genre that’s hasn’t been replicated by anyone with the same captivating, global, mainstream magnetism that Amy managed to achieve. But her closest successor, Adele, had her path pioneered by Amy. Much like Amy, Adele is a stand alone, unconventional pop star, a genuine musician with immense talent, whose genre is a little bit to the left of any distinct definition.
Amy created a mold for a female pop star that was completely new. Immediately following the girl power era that saw Riot Grrrl transition into the squeaky clean, perfectly choreographed teenage pop stars and girl groups of the late 90s, Amy completely rejected any of those existing stereotypes for female artists. Her mold was no mold. She did what she wanted, sonically and visually, and made no apologies. She had no political agenda, and no people pleasing pretentious. She set the bar for female performers somewhere it had never been before: she wasn’t existing to be seen, nor was she making any profound point about womanhood. Amy sang about the delicate condition of human emotion, sure, but she wasn’t trying to be anyone’s hero. She was a woman who simply wanted to make music.
For those who remain unconvinced that Amy’s musical legacy can surpass her tawdry undoing, we need look no further than at the posthumous release of Lioness: Hidden Treasures. An album of unfinished tracks and demos, hastily released after her passing, Lioness went straight to number one in the UK, selling over 200,000 copies in its first week. Without images of Amy’s latest public inebriation splashed across tabloid covers, Lioness was still an overwhelming success. It exists as proof that Amy, The Artist, eclipses Amy, The Disaster. Her music stands alone. It speaks for her. It holds her up in spite of the swirl of controversy she existed in, and it will let her live forever as a musician, not a drama.
Amy has been met with introspective and glowing reviews. Audiences unexpectedly felt the visceral, suffocating nature of celebrity through Amy Winehouse’s story, and the consensus seems to be that we must take responsibility for our forcibly voyeuristic media. Moving and intimate, Amy is a force of reckoning for a woman whose troubled life was made the butt of our celebrity-obsessed culture’s jokes. Watch the newest trailer for Amy after the jump.
Photographer Stuart Nicholls remembers the aftermath of Amy’s passing, as it was at Camden Square on 30th July 2011.
Amy died on 23 July, 2011. All the papers could write about during the following week was Amy’s death. I lived on the other side of Camden at the time, so I decided I would take a walk across town to Camden Square with my dog Peg, to the house that Amy had lived and died in. It had been seven days since she passed, but there was still a crowd outside, paying their respects to their idol.
It was a hot day. I made a few laps to see all the tributes, and to survey the scene before taking photos. There were lots of people there, some just sitting, thinking. Most were crying. There were flowers, stuffed toys, makeshift banners, magazines and newspapers showing features and articles on Amy. Fan-made artwork depicting the star were strewn around. Most noticeable was the amount of empty alcoholic drink cans and bottles left almost as an offering, like fans were “sharing a drink” with her. The sad irony was that alcohol was what took Amy’s life.
I didn’t stay long taking photos. I didn’t feel it would have been right. I just wanted a record of the time, which I believe I got. A few days later, thieves stole all the Camden Square road signs that had been covered in graffiti.
Following the release of Back To Black in 2006, a lucid, rosy cheeked Amy was interviewed by Joe Mace. Sipping a drink through a straw, her lipstick fading, she barely breaks eye contact with her interviewer. Without hesitation, she answers questions with confidence, and unlike her later self, she seems genuinely engaged with the conversation. Amy talks very matter-of-factly about the “dark place” she was in that inspired “Rehab” and a lot of the Back To Black album. Admitting that she’s “a manic depressive”, Amy doesn’t shy away from frankness when it comes to discussing her troubles, although is still dismissive of those trying to help her. It’s the most self-aware Amy, but still one who is quite defensive.
With Asif Kapadia’s documentary now in theaters everywhere, we take a look around the web to see what the journalists are writing about.
‘Amy’ a devastatingly sad look at the life of Amy Winehouse (Boston Globe)
“the movie depicts Winehouse as a victim of her own addictions and insecurities, a stubborn user abetted by enablers on all sides”
‘Amy,’ an Intimate Diary of Amy Winehouse’s Rise and Destruction (NY Times)
“The director, Asif Kapadia, doesn’t directly answer whether the public wanted to see Ms. Winehouse hit bottom or were instead force-fed her downfall, though this question haunts the movie. Because whatever the case, it became difficult to avoid the steady feed of her later-life degradation, photo by photo, joke by joke. What’s startling now is to realize that we were all watching her die.”
A Most Modern Tragedy: Why We're All To Blame For The Death Of Amy Winehouse (NME)
“There's a lot to process in Amy, but at the film's core is a single, deeply unsettling question: how did the happy, healthy and outrageously gifted 14-year-old glimpsed in its opening moments become the traumatised figure we all recognise from her final months? There are no easy answers, but by the end, the coroner's verdict of death by misadventure doesn’t seem to tell the whole story: this was death by a thousand cuts, an agonisingly drawn-out demise of cumulative influences, appetites and mistakes.”
Documentary Seeks To Free Amy Winehouse From Her Tabloid Legacy (NPR)
“Kapadia's new documentary, Amy, tries to rescue the singer from the tabloid narrative by examining who she was before she was famous — and tracing how addiction and fame transformed her.”
Amy Winehouse, the Reluctant Celebrity: A Parable On the Fatal Cost of Fame (Huffington Post)
“No one can control fame. That is the problem. Fame is not so much a thing, or a place, or a station one arrives at and can settle into as much as it is a dynamic that has its own particular trajectory. It is hard to put a bit and reins and a saddle on fame; like a wild horse, it has a mind of its own.”
Winehouse Documentary Amy Reveals the Lethal Effects of Celebrity (NY Mag)
“Amy is a celebrity-mongering documentary about the lethal effects of celebrity. Her management’s decision (abetted by her dad) to push her into a tour that began and ended in humiliation was the coup de grâce. But the main culprit might have been fame itself.”
Amy Is A Triumph Because It Remembers Amy Winehouse As Human (The Fader)
“If anything is missing from the way we as a culture remember Amy Winehouse, four years after she died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 27, it’s her wit.”
Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain and the Gendering of Martyrdom (Pitchfork)
“ If Amy proves anything about the life and times of Winehouse, it’s that newscasters, tabloids, and even respected media outlets reported on her shortcomings with enough thinly-veiled aggression to weaken what little resolve the drugs hadn’t already sapped.”
Sam Smith, Mark Ronson and More on Amy Winehouse's Lasting Legacy, Tragic End and Eye-Opening New Documentary (Billboard)
“In Winehouse’s story, many of the perils of 21st-century fame collide. She was hounded not only by paparazzi -- the famously aggressive British tabloids painstakingly tracked her movements around her London home -- but by talking heads insensitive to addiction and mental-health issues.”
Mark Ronson: Amy Winehouse Documentary Showcases 'Genius' Singer (Rolling Stone)
"The really respectful thing about the movie is you are reminded why she was famous in the first place – she was a genius, that’s the stuff even I can forget,"
We All Destroyed Amy Winehouse (Pitchfork)
“Amy will give you myriad emotions, but mainly it will piss you off.”
Amy (The Dissolve)
“It wasn’t some caricature of excess who died, but a woman of unique gifts, with people who cared about her and a private life the public didn’t entirely know. Nor was her death necessarily unavoidable. Part of what makes Amy so sad are the moments that point to paths not taken and choices not made—often by those around Winehouse—that might have changed the course of her life, and that could have prevented her from joining what Kurt Cobain’s mother called “that stupid club” when her son died at 27. “
Amy Winehouse Documentary Lets Nobody Off the Hook (NY Times)
“Rather than focus entirely on Ms. Winehouse’s demise, the director sought to deconstruct the train-wreck narrative and junkie caricature (messy beehive hairdo, bruises and scars, smudged mascara) that dominated Ms. Winehouse’s later years.”
At the age of 22, Darryn “Mr. Paparazzi” Lyons moved from Geelong, Australia — where he is now the mayor — and flew to the UK, where he spent the next 27 years photographing every celebrity imaginable.
“Celebrity culture was really born from myself and my company Big Pictures,” says Lyons, who launched a pre-Perez Hilton site called Mr. Paparazzi. He enlisted 30 staff photographers and countless freelancers to shoot everyone from the Princess of Wales to Pete Doherty and Kate Moss to Amy Winehouse (and all of her dysfunctional boyfriends) from America to Africa. “I did everything from the Paris catwalks to wars to sports to rock n’ roll, I was an all around news photographer.”
Despite being slapped with an injunction by Winehouse, “This was not my company it was a freelancer using our company name,” asserts Lyons, “I will sue if anyone says it was Big Pictures! It was not.” He maintains he was always close with the singer, and actually very close to her father, Mitch. “I’m surprised they didn’t include me in the film because I know more about Amy Winehouse than half the people in the film,” says Lyons. Here, Mr. Paparazzi gives us some dish on what it was like to get a front row ticket to the tabloid side of Amy Winehouse’s brief but brilliant life.
When did you start taking photographs?
I probably took one of the most famous pictures in Geelong as a young cadet. I did the Royal Bicentennial with the Queen at the age of 18, then went overseas and I ended up a staff photographer for the Daily Mail. I covered the Bosnian War and the downfall of the Iron Curtain and watched the Berlin Wall coming down. I also shot during Sarajevo and then came back in the late Eighties, early Nineties.
So what got you into the paparazzi business?
There was only one celebrity magazine at the time and I suppose it was being a visionary into where the obsession of people and celebrity were going and we started www.mrpaparazzi.com, which was one of the early entertainment websites before Perez Hilton. I remember Perez flying over to London and getting a few tips on what we were doing over here.
Then one [celebrity tabloid] magazine exploded into 10 or 15 and I had a group of photographers worldwide from New York to Sydney to Los Angeles to London to Germany and Italy. At the height of it we had 30 staff photographers traveling the world doing celebrity photography. We had pretty intimate relationships with celebrities, we used to partner with celebrities for picture sales, some donated to charity. We broke many, many big stories from David Beckham and Rebecca Loos scandal, we broke Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s pictures in Africa.
You also had images from Princess Diana’s car crash?
Indeed I do.
But you never released those?
No, they’ve never been sold.
So what do you think drives the paparazzi? What’s the mindset?
It’s kind of a mindset I got sick of in the end and that’s kind of why I decided to go back to Australia. I think there is an insatiable appetite by the public. I wouldn’t say anything drives the paparazzi other than the almighty dollar. I mean you’ve got to remember that at that stage the photographers were earning more on a monthly basis than Premier League footballers so it was a huge money industry.
The Princess of Wales kind of fueled it in a lot of ways, but so did the celebrity culture becoming an obsessive-compulsive disorder by the public. You know that old adage “Don’t Shoot the Messenger” because there are people buying it and the people were obsessed with wanting to be somebody else and I think that’s what drove it. I think the paparazzi facilitated the insatiable appetite for pictures of celebrities. When you see these pictures of celebrities walking down the street, on vacation, doing whatever they did, we as a society through the Eighties and particularly the Nineties we obsessed with what they did, what they ate, where they went and everything about them that the public needed to know. I suppose it was a form of voyeurism.
So within that voyeurism framework does the paparazzi ever consider the emotional state of the celebrity?
I think if you speak with celebrities my company was known as the friendly paparazzi more than anything else. We used to work with celebrities on a regular basis and, in fact, a lot of them were on the payroll. But they knew how important their brand was and just like selling anything you need marketing whether it be a CD or a movie. We were the go-to people for Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan when they came to the UK, we were tipped off very early. So they’re using the paparazzi. I think the Princess of Wales used the paparazzi and she was a blueprint for the Beckham family, the list is endless. It’s a no-brainer. To be in a celebrity magazine made you more popular.
How do you remember Amy?
Like all geniuses she had an addictive personality and she kind of got in with the wrong crowd and I think it was the boyfriend Blake, he had almost a guru influence over her life, and really took her into this underworld of alcohol and drugs and really destroyed what was an extremely talented girl.
Strangely enough she started working in London at a picture agency, which was the start of Amy Winehouse’s career. It was a photo agency like mine, she was actually involved in celebrity imagery as an editor for a company called WANN. She actually started in the photographic business.
When did your relationship with her start?
It was started through Amy’s PR company and I suppose it was a lot of damage control we were used for, but I think she had an affinity for photography and celebrity, though she had a personality that would change like the wind. I think she liked to turn the tap on when she wanted it turned on and then wanted to turn it off at her leisure, which is very difficult for any celebrity. You can’t have it all your own way.
I remember one particular time when [Amy’s publicist] Alan Edwards phoned me and said, “Look we need you to get a really nice picture of Amy all done up. Basically she’s gonna be at the house and we’ll let you in through the back door, but they don’t want the whole world there. We just want to do it on a one-to-one basis.” I’ll never forget the picture that was taken and probably made the front page of every tabloid around the world. She looked amazing and she’d been going through a very terrible time. She’d just broken up with Blake, who was a really bad influence. He did some terrible things. It was almost like she was under some kind of hypnosis at the time.
What was the story with that photo?
It was after an incident where she was caught out by another paparazzi when she was completely off her tree and they wanted really to get her back with some good PR. The record company was at the end of their tether with all the bad publicity and the drugs and alcohol influence, the non-delivery of certain songs, and things weren’t working out. They wanted to send out an image that Amy was alright, Amy’s on the ball and Amy is all fine.
Was she fine?
No, I don’t think she was, it was more spin than anything else. She was forced into a situation where she had to do what she was told for a change. I’ve got to tell you it took at least 72 hours to convince her to do it. It was probably somewhere between myself and Alan’s advice. He owned a very successful company, Outside Organisation.
What was she like day-to-day as a person?
She was a supremely talented lovely individual to be able to talk and deal with. She certainly had her up and downs with the paparazzi. It wasn’t only my company, in fact there was a time we had a bit of a fall out because other photographers with other companies were saying that they were with my company when they weren’t at all. We gave her the space that she needed but we also traveled around the world with her. But she was a complete and utter genius and the old 27 Club she became a part of was a terrible shame.
I was at a wedding not that long after her death and was sitting down at a table with her dad, Mitch, whom I had a very close relationship with. He was always concerned. He was a London cabbie and was a jazz musician and his band was playing at this wedding of another celebrity’s daughter and I think she got a huge amount of inspiration and talent from her dad. It was just one of those roller coaster rides she couldn’t come back from, but at the time we thought she was well and truly past it. I think she just had a relapse and the weaning off the alcohol. Mitch seemed to think it was the detoxing that caused the death. She was a very hard woman to control and the record company was getting agitated not only about the publicity but the non-delivery because of the state she was in. I think there was almost too much pressure on her because she became too famous too quickly after Back to Black.
It seemed like paparazzi was staking her out toward the end.
There’s no doubt that was true. She was the biggest thing in rock. There’s no doubt she was staked out on a daily basis, she was the golden ticket for cash for the paparazzi and London was the center of the world for where the money was and her fame escalated overnight so she was hot property. The trouble was with Amy at the time there were many people who tried to help her with her situation. I certainly worked very closely with Alan, but Amy Winehouse was a pretty uncontrollable human being. She didn’t listen closely enough to the people around her, she was a rebel, and you can probably tell that from the lyrics in her songs, but she was led down the wrong path by people she thought she could trust. But the people in the background, like myself, knew they were untrustworthy people that were leading into a situation that was only go one way, and that wasn’t Amy’s way.
What was it like to watch her on the decline from that vantage point?
She was up one day and then down the next day and, like I said, it was a roller coaster under the influence. You never knew what you were going to get with Amy. Ultimately, she was just really poorly advised, really more by Blake than anyone else. Blake loved the attention whereas Amy knew the business, she worked in the business — it was her first job — so she knew how it worked. But there aren’t that many people who are able to deal with having that much fame and that much money. A lot of celebrities are clueless about having the right people to work with. People blame the paparazzi all their life, but the paparazzi will welcome anyone. I worked very closely with the Princess of Wales and with open arms everyone can win, but I do think the paparazzi get a very bad rap because there are always some bad eggs in the business. I personally think a lot of them crossed the line and toward the end of my career in the UK I left probably because some of the people in the industry pushed the envelope.
Did her death have anything to do with you thinking about leaving?
There’s no doubt. I had a lot of celebrity friends who died. It’s difficult with all the success in the business and I had a lot of close relationships, but I think I got fed up with the bloodsuckers who would go to any length. I was lucky enough to be an award winning photographer, but I also knew how to work with people. The big success of my business at that time was because I worked with people very high up in the record industry, the film industry, or the TV industry and built relationships so the trust factor so whatever I was doing would be out there behind it.
Michael Hutchence’s widow came to my office one day and asked for all the photos after his passing. There was a lot of protection of celebrities that went on. I worked very closely with them to protect them and kept stuff hidden away, and the reason was that I wanted to have the trust with not only their management and PR people but also the celebrities. They would be confident they wouldn’t be snitched up in any way.
What was Amy like to work with?
I likened her to the Princess of Wales at times. She was hot one minute and cold the next, there were days she wanted the publicity and days she didn’t.
Did she ever attack your photographers?
I wouldn’t say attack. There was plenty of verbal abuse at times when she was unhinged, but that was probably the drugs and alcohol talking. There was very rarely a day when Amy was sober through that time. Even the family didn’t know what they were going to get on a daily basis. Mitch tried to intervene on several different occasions. Actually toward the end one of my last conversations with Mitch was that he thought things were really starting to turn around. He was a controlling man and tried to help her but I don’t think she saw that as help. She was very much an individual and was very much influenced by a dark side that he was extremely concerned about.
Looking back now, do you miss being in that world?
No, not really. I changed over from one side of the camera to the other, but I’d been doing that for some time on American TV, covering the royal wedding for Extra! and working with Barbara Walters and Simon Cowell. The last two years I was traveling presenting celebrity TV shows. I had a wealth of information working privately with them and I had celebrities under management. The people who are in charge trusted me to deliver what they needed. I used to advise a lot of celebrities about how they should be working their brand with the mediaand taking control back. I would advise celebrities on where to go where they couldn’t be photographed.
The secret to dealing with the paparazzi is getting the exclusive before they get it, so all the sudden it kills the story off, the papers and magazines get what they want, the celebrities get what they want, everyone is happy chappy and everyone makes money. That was the secret to my analogy. I was the world’s leading expert on what to do and what not to do at the time. The list of celebrities I was working at the time was pretty much endless.
Were you working with or advising Amy?
I wasn’t directly advising Amy, her team was, but I was brought in by them for advice.
Was she ever on the payroll?
No, she wasn’t. She didn’t need to be. I think she thought she knew it all. But I don’t think she’d ever become as estranged as she did.
Interesting.
It’s a very daunting situation and very few people have the experience and when people get this amount of fame and they feel that the parasites come in they find that very difficult to understand. The people who are successful, it’s not all based on talent. There’s plenty of untalented people singing making hundreds of millions of dollars in the industry and it’s all down to marketing and publicity. I was in the halcyon days when you could be made or broken by still images.
“When “Rehab” dropped it was just like a newspaper being lit.”
We partnered up with Genius.com and Darcus Beese, Co-President of Island Records and Former A&R Representative for Amy Winehouse, to help to tell the story behind some of Amy’s most famous songs. Here, Darcus talks us through the breakout hit, “Rehab.”
Popping gum and casually chatting with MTV, Amy Winehouse, at least at the beginning of this 2007 interview, seemed bored. Indeed, the interviewer isn’t overly engaging, throwing the usual album promotion-friendly fare at her disguised as questions. It isn’t until the interviewer asks her some banal question about her “image” that she shifts in her seat looking visibly annoyed, but she immediately and deftly steers the conversation back to her music. The entire way through the interview, she’s intent on pressing the point that she’s “just a musician”, something that seems intrinsic to Amy’s battle with celebrity and the fame machine. She comes completely to life, however, when the interviewer reveals that Prince had said in an interview, just the day before, he wanted to perform with Amy...
AMY Director Asif Kapadia opened up to the public in a Reddit AMA about the movie, the singer, and her life. Asif learned a lot about Amy Winehouse in the process of the movie, much more than he knew when he started trawling through archival footage and interviewing those who inhabited Amy’s world. Below are some of the highlights of the lengthy AMA, and what we can learn from what Asif learned.
Amy was much more than her tragedy
Q. “What's the most incredible piece of information you found out about Amy Winehouse?”
A. “I was amazed by her humour, her intelligence and song writing”
There’s not enough time in the day to truly appreciate the enormity of Amy
Q. “Is there anything you wish you could have added to the films but couldn't (due to deadlines, lack of funding, etc)?”
A. “I wish we could've put in more of the early days there is more of her singing, more amazing acoustic perfs, more v funny scenes. hopefully on the dvd...”
Healing after tragedy is a process
Q. “Did you ever feel you were ethically overstepping by requesting interviews and materials from her friends and family so soon after her death, especially considering how media coverage contributed to her harmful habits?”
A. “I was nervous about doing the film so soon after amy's death but once i met people, I could see Amy's death had not been dealt with no one had taken responsibility for her passing life just went on, it left a lot of people in a lot of pain. so this film and talking to me did in some way provide closure, it gave them a release and it has shown the world the real amy and why her death is such a loss. many people around the world only knew a messed up, out of control Amy, not the great kid we see at the start of the film i hope our film balances out the harmful media version of Amy.”
The media has different standards for men and women
Q. “Do the media treat troubled female celebrities different from their male equivalents? & do the public?”
A. “sadly I think so. I think the public do as well. she was treated very badly - I hope the film makes us all think about what we can do to change this moving forwards doing give the tabloids publicity by clicking on and sharing links which humiliate people in trouble.”
Q. “Hi Asif, In the past few weeks, several think-pieces have come out in response to the way we view Male celebrities that have issues with alcohol/drugs (Cobain, Hendrix) versus the way we demonize women who have similar issues (Spears, Winehouse). Where do you think this disparity comes from?
A. “the people upstairs making decisions, owing the papers and media organisations are mostly men? it's an old problem Im glad this is being discussed. we really hoped the film would get people looking at the wider issues more deeply, Amy was treated horribly all over the world.”
Amy’s songs informed her story
Q. “How did you plan the structure of the film? There seems to be a lot of archive footage and story to piece together along the timeline.”
A. “the film is edited by Chris King, he's amazing the structure is built around Amy's songs they are the spine amy's songs are key they are the map to her life and soul. so we started with the songs and tried to unravel each one to explain which real like person or incident it referred to the audio interviews came first then the images.”
Even in death Amy can’t escape the paparazzi
Q. “Did you ever feel conflicted using paparazzi footage?”
A. “yes I wondered about doing it but i have to use all of the tools at hard to make the hardest point to make those sequences as shocking as poss to make us all see how awful her existence became so I chose to use the material. sadly for a long period of time, Amy didnt exsist in any other way other than the pap footage.”
Amy was, indeed, still a multi-dimensional human with a history
Q. “What's your favourite trivia about Amy if you discovered any in your research?”
A. “aghh she had a parrot, she wrote a song about it, she forgot to water it. it died.”
It’s our responsibility to try and understand what happened to Amy
Q. “What inspired you to make this film, as Amy Winehouse didn't pass away that long ago?”
A. “I wanted to understand why things turned out the way they did it felt like a London film which I was looking to make (I'm a north Londoner)”
Sometimes, inaction is as damning as action
Q. “Why did such a talented performer turn to drugs and alcohol? To kill the pain? Self-esteem problems? What was it?”
A. “i think self esteem is very high up something potentially to do with feeling left alone at a young age. there seems to be something dark in Amy's make up she said she suffered from depression she didnt have boundaries growing up it seems she was always self medicating with one thing or another. her friends said to me, she would do things to shock, waiitng (hoping) someone with authority would then come in and tell her to stop it.... which didnt always happen.”
Amy Winehouse’s story belonged to a very specific moment in time when tabloid media and technology formed a neat nexus for gossip mongering that has ever since only become more pervasive. Consider that following the release of her critically acclaimed debut album Frank in 2003, Facebook launched itself into worldwide social networking domination in 2004. In 2006, Amy released the album that promoted her to superstardom, Back to Black, just as Twitter was introduced to the public. The beginning of Amy’s career was the beginning of a new era in tabloid culture, and with no frame of reference for this new kind of sharing and oversharing, Amy was the beta version of pop culture sanctioned online abuse that we’ve seen play out over and over again in the years succeeding her reign.
By now, we’re used to the narrative: Troubled star is identified as a “messy” in public. Almost immediately, tabloid websites light up with images and stories. “High-culture” sites commission click bait articles passed off as think pieces. Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and whatever other social networking sites the kids are using are flooded with shares of these articles and images. User created videos and photos also appear, courtesy of the crowd of citizen spectators “lucky” enough to bear physical witness to the sideshow. People write 140 character jokes and embellish them with hashtags for relevancy. The next day the newspapers aggregate that information and splash the gnarliest imagery on their front pages and the most bombastic retellings in their columns. And that’s just a 24 hour news cycle. Another day signals another chapter in whatever celebrity saga is the publicly mandated pariah flavor of the month.
We’ve leaned into this ruthless and relentless news cycle as though it were as sensible and necessary as drawing breath. Now, for the social-media savvy, educated, media-consuming elite, we’re able to be a little more critical, a little more skeptical, of this process. But when Amy was chosen as the first defendant to stand before the digital media courtroom, we might have all been less aware of the consequences of drawing a narrative for someone in a fragile mental state. Even with history to illustrate how damaging even the most arcane tabloid cycle could be (Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana), culture creators allowed the excitement over the novelty of immediately available information overshadow any empathetic misgivings.
And unlike tabloid hounding of the past, Amy’s career was birthed in a time when every mundane act committed by her was as spectacularly captivating as landing a satellite on a comet. In 2015, celebrity has fully harnessed this public interest in banality, using their social media presence to charm fans with the insignificant minutiae of their everyday. The Kardashians have built a million dollar empire on sharing literally nothing important. “Selfies”, family debates over what to have for lunch, the nonsense conversation of long drives: all of this has been the fodder upon which an entire family has managed to make themselves into the most instantly recognizable personalities on the planet.
In Amy’s era, it wasn’t as clear cut. The rules weren’t yet written, and in the early days of the 24-hour news cycle, “brand building” for the individual hadn’t quite formulated itself into the calculated and exploitative exercise it is now. And yet: even then, everyone was documenting everything. Selfies and home footage were already the primary form for self expression for anyone with a cell phone. Amy was no stranger to any of this: she documented her own life in great detail, as the paparazzi documented her. Privacy, especially for a celebrity, was becoming an anachronism. Suddenly, being “famous” meant that you were public property, more so than ever in the history of celebrity before.
Where that has led us is to a very strange frontier. As already mentioned, celebrities have co-opted their lack of privacy and made the system work against itself, allowing them to emerge not only as victims but as generously compensated benefactors. One might even argue that the joke is really on the public thirst for gossip. The second, not yet completely chartered consequence is that celebrity “news” is entering an era in which it is simply news. With an oversaturated market of stories and imagery, breaking celebrity news is becoming, for better or for worse, just as important as breaking news about war, politics, or social issues.
Largely illustrated by the rise of TMZ, “serious” and “tabloid” are now beginning to create a nexus, where once tabloid and digital did. Considering the 24-hour media cycle is not well engrained in online culture, the next logical step is legitimizing it. In the past few years, we’ve seen legitimate reporting begin to creep into the gossip rag circuit. Indeed, TMZ has been at the forefront of investigative journalism in the gossip realm, obtaining and breaking the shocking Ray Rice footage, Donald Sterling’s racist rant and even Stephen Collins’ child molestation confession. All of these examples can be classified as “real” news. The line between gossip and news is blurring, with TMZ now breaking broadsheet worthy stories, confusing even further the notion of what constitutes “tabloid” and what defines “reputable”.
It’s been maybe a decade since the 24-hour news cycle has dominated news consumption, and about the same time since everyone, from the layman to the celebrity in her palatial estate, has been not only able, but encouraged to, share intimate absurdities from their every day lives, from what they ate at breakfast to the pimple they’ve discovered on their forehead. Amy Winehouse was exposed to the public, even when she didn’t want to be, every flash going off in her face an indication that a headline was being drawn and posted to some gossip site for the hungry, misery-inspired public. The relentlessness of metaphorical trial by fire, the flaying we inflict upon anyone so bold as to allow themselves to slip into the public consciousness, might be the most reviled of our collective cultural traits. But the hope at the bottom of the box is that as the flurry over technology transitions towards habitual, and “gossip” news becomes simply news, investigation, quality reporting, and ethical standards will also infiltrate what is otherwise the wild west of digital journalism.
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