Last week I was in Camden, London, and it was like walking through a shrine for Amy Winehouse.
Graffitied walls adorned with her face,
her signature ‘beehive’ taking pride of place
in record shops, her name scrawled across the walls,
so much talent
yet all we remember is her downfall-
bittersweet.
Multiple Grammy Award-winning album Back to Black released at the age of just 23.
Dead at the age of just 27-
alcohol poisoning,
her talent tainted by addiction,
her musicality matched only by her talent for self-destruction.
With all of Amy’s success came pain, her struggles magnified at scale by the British tabloids that even the hardiest of characters would find impossible to maintain.
Catapulted to fame in her early twenties, Amy was relentlessly hounded by the British press day after day, and then left to deal with the fallout of it all on her own, her life sold as though it were nothing more than an Eastenders episode,
‘light entertainment…’
Yet when Amy Winehouse died, the headlines soon changed, the tabloids in a frantic rush to hide their blood-stained hands.
At the height of her addiction, the headlines all read:
‘Amy Winehouse on crack’
(sensationalist).
VS
When she died:
‘A troubled star gone too soon’
(false concern).
From sinner to saint, joining the ‘27’ club, Amy’s death was romanticised by the media as though they had suddenly developed a conscience, one headline too late.
It’s a shame that the press couldn’t have thought more about the ‘troubled star’ while she was still alive…
When never has there been, I would argue, someone as desperately and painstakingly obviously in need of help than Amy Winehouse, yet instead of help, all she got was ridicule.
Profiting from her declining mental health, the press didn’t want her to get help because, if she did, then who would become the next scapegoat?
‘Who can we take the piss out of and dehumanise if not Amy?!’
It’s disgusting, the way the media treated her, to the extent that she had to take out a court order to stop the press from camping outside her house to photograph her.
It’s disgusting that the press then had the audacity, when she was gone, to pretend that they actually ‘cared’ about her.
And it’s not just Amy Winehouse, either, we have seen it happen time and time again. People ‘cancelled’ by the media, villainised, their every movement scrutinised by the tabloids that are hungry for attention, willing to chase it at whatever cost…
We have the misconstrued belief that by virtue of being a celebrity, people waver their right to privacy. That if they choose to be in the public eye, then they must be prepared for constant scrutiny.
To be thrown into the spotlight at such a young age, it’s unsurprising that so many artists become addicts- addicted to substances that allow them to escape, to feel something ‘other’ (or to just not feel anything at all)…
Whereas a ‘regular’ person struggling with addiction would get the help and support they need, thrust into the limelight, public figures have no escape. And so they take more substances, chasing the escapism that never comes.
An endless cycle- they take more to escape, the media hounds them more, and on and on and on it goes until the body can’t sustain it anymore. And at that precise moment, messages of condolences come flooding in…
‘Our Amy,’
‘Amy was a ‘national treasure’,
as though the press actually cared about her/as though they wouldn’t have tipped those last drops of vodka into her mouth if they thought it would make them money. Their humanity overshadowed by their thirst for a world exclusive, always.
Cruelly mocked by the British press, always.
Amy was raised up for her songs only to be brought crashing down, made into the punchline for exhibiting the very struggle that inspired those songs.
Crying along with her songs of suffering, laughing at her signs of suffering, as Lady Gaga spoke about in this interview a week after Amy’s passing;
‘You can’t have it both ways. You can’t enjoy listening to someone sing sad songs about the blues and heartbreak and not expect them to be truly heartbroken.’
‘You get a pen and slash it into your arm and bleed all over the pages.’
So committed was Amy to writing music for her fans that one of her most famous songs of all time, Rehab, was about her not wanting to accept help in fear that it would ‘affect her creativity’, as heard by Winehouse’s GP, Dr. Christina Romete, in a statement read out at the inquest into her death. Yet the same ‘fans’ who she devoted her life to, blindly bought into the narrative that the media sold of ‘Amy the Junkie.’
The media that loves nothing more than to watch a young woman fall to pieces, as if to say; ‘this is what will happen if you try to make something of yourself…’ Media coverage only serving to feed into the stereotype of the ‘hysterical’, ‘overly sensitive’ woman.
Unlike a male celebrity struggling with his mental health who can just disappear for a while, going ‘off the radar’ to take some time out, a female celebrity has no such privilege. Unable to disappear, she receives more media coverage for her declining mental health than for her actual career…
During her final ever performance in Belgrade (footage shown above), Amy can be seen being booed off the stage for being drunk.
Where was the compassion from her so-called ‘fans’ when she needed it the most?
Because, don’t misconstrue it, as much as Amy said she didn’t want help, the night before she died she explicitly told her doctor, ‘I don’t want to die.’
Yet what did we do? We all sat by and watched her kill herself, with every new paparazzi shot of her blood-stained shoes, disheveled hair, open wounds, and then acted surprised when the news broke that she had died.
Anything to sell a story, the same occurred with Britney Spears, too. Her breakdown in the early noughties making headline news, the press cashing in on her pain.
What did Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse have in common? They didn’t fit the ‘be seen and not heard’ image that women are expected to be- not ‘innocent’ or ‘pure’ enough, too ‘wild.’
‘Crazy’, ‘unhinged’, ‘she’s gone off the rails.’
Despite publically struggling, like Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears became the punchline.
In a 2008 episode of the US game show, ‘Family Feud’, contestants were asked to name ‘something Britney Spears has lost in the past year’, for which winning answers included, ‘her hair’, ‘her children’, and ‘her mind.’
How about naming something that we have lost? I’ll go first…
Our HUMANITY.
Villainising the vulnerable, a woman’s success is always deemed as being ‘lesser than’ her struggle.
On her own with the whole world watching, why is a woman’s success always overshadowed by pain?
Portfolio of Hope 