“You should be stronger than me.”
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Amy Winehouse’s “Frank” took its fast-and-easy hold on audiences with opening track “Stronger than Me,” a bouncing number that made sweet love to Winehouse’s knowing voice, while pushing the track’s subject away for not being man enough for her. Perhaps it was telling that Winehouse began her mainstream career with a hefty world-weariness that the greats of jazz and blues take a lifetime to cultivate. When she came on the scene, Winehouse—almost immediately the darling of music critics who praised her raspy cynicism and jazz roots—seemed somehow already old.
For the many who would not discover her until “Rehab” became a pop culture staple (and something of a mean-spirited soundtrack for tabloid readers who followed her drug and alcohol problems), Winehouse’s fatigue was something of an absolute, a perpetual state of personal angst. This clouded Winehouse’s lighter material, her playful sense of self on tracks like “Fuck Me Pumps” and “Moody’s Mood for Love,” and made her a public punch line for many.
Unlike other celebrities who find themselves the brunt of unfair and self-righteous jokes, however, Winehouse’s personal problems were compelling because they stood in sharp relief to her rich musical output, which often painted the picture of a woman in charge of herself—and in many cases, her man. Outside the stories she weaved of love and loss and strength stood a young woman who fought the worst kind of demons under the detached scrutiny of the press, who caught it all on camera—from her fading physical appearance, to camera shots of Winehouse with traces of cocaine in her nose, to the less-than-stellar live performances near the end of her life.
Until the day of the funeral, however, far less attention was paid to Winehouse’s other defining characteristic—her Jewishness. Honored in a Jewish memorial service in conjunction with a cremation, Winehouse’s family and friends could all be seen in Daily Mail photographs as they met one another and mourned in preparation for the funeral, kippot clearly visible. ABC News reported that Rabbi Frank Hellner, a graduate of the American Reform seminary, led the service. Rumors circulated about the viability of a Jewish burial in light of Winehouse’s extensive tattoos, which of course was followed by frustrated Internet discourse on social outlets like Twitter and Facebook about the accuracy of media reportage on Jewish matters. (In fact, tattoos have never precluded burial in a Jewish cemetery.)
Like other great artists—filmmakers, comedians, musicians, etc.—Winehouse’s Jewish identity seemed to be arbitrary side-information in light of her musical contribution. And like many of those other great Jewish minds, Winehouse’s art nevertheless reflected essentially Jewish concepts. With an emphasis on the blues, the inevitability of loss and the pains of love, comparisons with Kohelet (the biblical book of Ecclesiastes) are inescapable, so that lines from each—“Laughed at by the gods, and now the final frame” or “To increase learning is to increase heartache”—are almost interchangeable
Like the great musical minds that have been taken in years past, history and public opinion will shape a narrative from the disparate pieces of a life that puzzled, infuriated and, most importantly, inspired. The most disappointing aspect of the public’s response to news of Winehouse’s death has been its sense of condescension toward, rather than any real inaccuracy about, Jewish life. No, Winehouse herself has been made into an almost predestined tragedy.
When Cobain took his life, a narrative took form that emphasized his troubled, artistic soul and lost potential. With Winehouse’s end, it feels like her role as a tabloid star, complete with the yet undetermined cause of death, has finally eclipsed the crooning, saucy artist of “Cherry,” who in that number described her relationship with music—specifically a new guitar—in turns of phrase suggestive of a tryst, then dropped the revelation at the end of an abrupt full-stop.
If such an eclipse says something about the state of journalism, it also says something about the maturity and depth of Winehouse’s music, and the salty voice it accompanied. In a moment like this, as a people, we struggle to categorize a new experience. It is easy to overlook all the components in an effort to make the process as simple as possible. It would be easy to write Winehouse’s relatively short career off as accessory to her bigger role as tabloid fodder. It would also be easy to beatify her on the basis of two very good jazz-pop albums. Neither is fair to us, nor to the artist herself.
If heartbreak is inevitable, as Kohelet wrote and Winehouse sang—and the latter’s critics and onlookers believed—there’s still something to be said for those profound moments when, despite all odds, a life as tortured as Amy Winehouse’s bears genuinely beautiful fruit. One spin of “Mr. Magic” or “You’re Wondering Now” can testify to that.
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“You’re wondering now what to do, now you know this is the end…”
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John Wofford is a junior at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the current editor of an upcoming interfaith arts hub, a Neo-Hasidic nerd and music journalist of five years. This is his first piece for New Voices.
