Amy Winehouse: Some Thoughts In a Minor Key

She was, first and foremost, a soul singer. 

In these days of people overdoing it on "American Idol" and elsewhere, maybe that needs explaining.

Being a soul singer doesn't have that much to do with technique (although hers was solid). Or possessing a vibrato so intense it can dissolve calcium deposits in an audience member's knees (hers was dry, even if it vibrated in an agreeable way).

And, to some of us (those born before Mariah Carey, at least), it has nothing to do with those endless displays of melisma. You know what melisma is by now, surely. It's when a singer takes a word or phrase and, instead of stapling it to one note, uses the occasion to worry the word through the entire musical scale, in a display of vocal acrobatics designed to wow judges and people gathered at a wedding or a Bar Mitzvah. It's showy. It's dazzling. It takes a while to learn.

Even Shakespeare had a phrase for it: "Sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Amy Winehouse had no use for such tricks. When she sang, she told you what she was actually feeling. In lyrics that were smart, snarky, darkly funny and often had a wicked backspin on them. But in her own colloquial, un-tricky, no-melismas-allowed-here voice.

She told you what was happening deep down in her soul. What she was really feeling. That she was suicidally depressed, full of self-loathing, would take some other woman's man, was certain that life just wasn't worth it and occasionally that it was.

Winehouse took her own spiritual temperature and then showed you the thermometer. That sly smile on her face seemed to say, "You're not going to like this when I show you." Yet she knew numbers on a thermometer don't lie.

Neither did Amy Winehouse. That's why she was a soul singer.

People are grieving right now, only partly because a young promising singer is dead. God knows that unlike any number of martyred children or adults who did fine works and asked for nothing in return, she wasn't what you'd call too good for this world.

She sometimes gave short, insultingly bad, slapdash performances. Had depressing relationships with thugs. Winehouse also seemed to take an almost indecent pleasure in defiling her body with tattoos and gold teeth and ridiculous '60s girl-group hairstyles. When her teeth fell out, she was in no hurry to replace them.

So, why are people crying and feeling so angry about Amy Winehouse's death, I asked myself this weekend? Her bad habits, hard living and self-loathing were well-documented. This outcome was, seemingly, inevitable. So, why?

Because Winehouse told them the truth. In song, anyway. And her fans knew it.

If you look around in our time (or any time, let's face it), the truth is always in awfully short supply. Our government lies to us. So do our spouses, our friends. Definitely, the cable company. And we get used to it. Or make jokes about it so we don't go crazy.

But here and there, in music usually, someone comes along and tells us the truth. Not a story with a moral. Not something uplifting (although happiness exists and can be the truth sometimes). Not a Sunday School story with a good, strong maxim.

I mean, the truth. 

As in:

I took too many drugs today. I don't like myself very much. I slept with your boyfriend. I hated myself for it, but I did it anyway. Life seems completely meaningless. Death is always nearby. 

These are some of the things Amy Winehouse said to us. In song. With cool grooves and retro production (by the estimable Mark Ronson). It didn't have to be your truth. But you knew, without a moment's hesitation, that it was Amy's truth. Irreducibly. 

And that's one reason people are grieving today.

Let's compare this to Britney Spears. She can have her kids taken away, shave her head, be carted off to the loony bin for all the world to see. Awful stuff. And what comes out of these hellish experiences? A song called "Womanizer." Sung by a slightly older version of that insufferable poppet who appeared in 1999. Who's still grinning and doing her dance steps and jiving around to beat the band. Not as a survivor. But as someone who's too afraid to tell you (or has been told by her handlers not to) about the hell she's been through. 

Now, you're going to hear a lot from the Dr. Drews of the world over the next few weeks, about the sadness of Amy Winehouse's death and how it could've been avoided if she'd gotten treatment and followed the program rules and such. But I don't know.

I do know people who've been addicts and gotten clean and I know people who just couldn't stick with the program and died. They either killed themselves out of the hopelessness that being an addict brings or died from long-term effects of drugs and alcohol or our good old friend, unbearable sadness. 

It's the hardest thing in the world to know you can't save everybody, especially valuable friends, but I think members of Rehab Nation should get hip to this. Not everyone is going to make it. Not everyone wants to.

Amy Winehouse clearly had the disease of addiction, but she might have had a scarier, harder-to-cure disease. Call it depression, nihilism, too keen an eye. Call it what you want. Maybe she just didn't want to keep on keeping on. Not everyone does.

All of us, if we're honest with ourselves, can understand this.

I used to volunteer at a suicide hotline. And I actually lost somebody one night whom I was trying to counsel. I used all the well-thought-out maxims in our big Play Book. What this person had to live for. That tomorrow, or the next day, things might seem different. Try to sleep, I said. Go to work tomorrow and keep as busy as hell. It didn't work. This man hung up and then checked out.

The motto at this organization--which was dedicated to saving everyone it could, by the way--was "Life Isn't For Everybody." A rough thought. Frightening, the first time you hear it. But you have to admit, if you've lost enough people to drugs, suicide or some combination thereof, it's honest.

It might even be called the truth.

With the loss of her voice and talent, our number of great singer/songwriters has now been diminished by one. I can't help but feel that Amy Winehouse might have agreed with this thought. If she had lived, she might even have written a fine, dark tune about it. As it is, wherever she is, she's probably chuckling about the whole thing. While the rest of us are down here. Trying our best. To keep on keeping on. And today? Well, crying.