Amy Winehouse and Her Critics:
Lines Lived Among the Lyrical Landmines
by Ed Pavlić | special to NewBlackMan
I stay up clean the house at least I’m not drinking.
Run around just so I don’t have to think about thinking.
—Amy Winehouse, “Wake up Alone”
I wrote the following essay after reading Daphne Brook’s review of Amy Winehouse in The Nation Online in September of 2008 when Amy Winehouse’s album Back to Black was still a sensation lost by degrees to the shadow of her real-life foibles projected by the pop culture industry’s (from tabloids to academic critiques) media machine. I came to Winehouse’s work late, I considered her then and I consider her now one of the very finest writers and deliverers of “lyric” I’d come across in recent years. The following is the final third of a triptych essay I’d drafted titled “Evil Gal’s Blues” that considered the lyric brilliance of Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, and Amy Winehouse. Yes, I was looking for a fight. Right off, I’d heard something in the way Winehouse can (now, could) “live a line” that joined her to the work of these master-forebearers of her trade. Lyric. Now that she’s gone on and formally joined Holiday and Washington and other too-briefly lit lyric torches, I thought it would be a good time to reconsider how Amy Winehouse sounded, at her best. Rather than gawking at her at her worst, I thought some people might be willing to consider her in her place, where I think she belongs, among other great lyric writers. Here’s my piece:
*
“I keep thinking about the lessons of the human ear / which stands for music, which stands for balance—” writes Adrienne Rich in “Meditations for a Savage Child,” from Diving Into the Wreck. She’s meditating on the role of the ear, of hearing, and of language in trafficking between and charting terrains of who we are. She considers the physical structure of the ear : “the whorls and ridges exposed / It seems a hint dropped about the inside of the skull / which I cannot see.” As one pushes one’s listening back into the interior, as we all know, the identifications and distinctions between self/other (between whole grammars of this and that) begin to bend, flex, warp. Rich concludes the section observing : “go back so far there is another language / go back far enough the language / is no longer personal / these scars bear witness / but whether to repair / or destruction / I no longer know.”
For you I was a flame
I want to suggest that, at bottom, the lyric is a device for pulling back these kinds of layers (in language, memory, experience) or suddenly piercing through them, a way of charting and summoning buried structures and putting them into the air. Obviously, various borders (which can be concrete in one level of experience or voice and which can become porous, and even vanish, in others) are blurred and crossed in this ‘lyric’ process. Others appear sharply focused often by the crossing as if transcendence pulled a hamstring and left one, then, across the border in denied territory. This kind of traffic can be disorienting and, as Rich notes, can bear ambiguous results (repair or destruction) to the traveler. But, what happens if the lyric traveler (as well as the audience) operates in proximity to sacrosanct, historically volatile borders? Seems the results could be confusing, even dangerous. This final section of “Evil Gals’ Blues” charts just such lyric confusions and dangers (and, possibly, some that offer a sense of growth and repair) emanating from and swirling about the career of contemporary musician, singer and lyricist Amy Winehouse. Possibly, considering her work in close relation to its lyric pulse (and in relation to multiple lyric traditions with which she’s aligned) might enable a new glimpse at what she’s done, what she’s undone, and what’s she’s provoked in response to her various “lessons [for] the human ear.”
love is a losing game.
In her recent essay, “Tainted Love,” about the ambiguous racial and gendered scurryings-about inflecting (infecting?) Amy Winehouse’s voice, stage persona and personal life, Daphne Brooks displays many many things. One, she obviously knows more about the pop cultural cipher than I do these days. Brooks is seemingly mad at Amy Winehouse (isn’t everyone?) about many things : unacknowledged and / or dishonored sources of her style; her style; her bad behavior off stage; the stage; her borrowed behavior on stage and her self-obliterative behavior off of it? But, is any of this a surprise? Maybe *that's* what—the repetition trauma—Brooks is—and seemingly so many others who care about popular culture are—upset about? I appreciate what Brooks writes. And she writes about many things: minstrelsy, vaudeville, the blues, Motown, Winehouse’s racial affronts, her stage show, her cracker jack handlers. All with accuracy and aplomb and a healthy dose of rage.
Five story fire, yet, you came / love is a losing game.
What I’d like to do if I could is re-orient attention according to the rare things I hear in Winehouse’s lyrics. Most centrally, the power of her writing and the way her lyrics—in the tradition of lyricists like John Keats, Billie Holiday, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Dinah Washington, Marvin Gaye, Yusef Komunyakaa and others—involve frayed edges of her life and psyche. Even more, I’d like to point to Winehouse’s gift for “living the line” in performances that (dangerously) blur the line between life and art in a way that communicates a turbulent, simultaneous sense of living and artistic flux at the border (among others) between becoming and unbecoming. So, this is an essay about art and the rough (largely interior but not necessarily personal) waters it swims on its way to us. Before that, some ground to clear.
One I wished I’d never played / oh, what a mess we made.
As with much I’ve been reading about Winehouse (admittedly, not an exhaustive survey), all of what Brooks writes is true and most of it a.b.c. gum stuck to the shoe of the popular culture that's steady stomping on Amy Winehouse. It’s a formidable distraction. It has been a while since a performer of such talent has worn the shoe that stomps her with quite the intensity of Ms. Winehouse. Still, amid it all, I think Amy Winehouse is a real lyricist. One of the best I’ve heard. And, as happens in all true lyrics, registers of experience collide and the results in life can be as ugly as the results in song can be beautiful. Whatever—beautiful, that is—that means? Certainly, there are things to pick at about Amy Winehouse (easy target) and even easier to dart the barn-sized board of popular culture. Even easier than that to deconstruct historical popular culture where we don’t share the blind place in the contemporary chaos that the performers occupy.
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