re: Amy Winehouse

I’ve rarely been paying attention to popular music of any sort for about 15-20 years, so I’m often surrounded by a flurry of celebrity musician names that everyone else seems to know but which mean nothing to me.

About three years ago I met a university colleague in Ace, which is essentially a British pub in the Cairo suburbs. A music video came on. Wow, I thought– this woman really has a certain something. Who is she? “That’s Amy Winehouse,” said my (American) colleague. “Yes, she’s really good, but completely messed up.” I’d heard the “messed up” part from the newspapers, of course.

Then I forgot about her until reading last month that she was booed off the stage on her tour due to poor performance. It sounded alarmingly late-Cobainesque, but not enough so that I consciously thought she might be near the end of her rope.

Just now I put on a few more videos, and I still think she had a certain something.

27-28 always seems to be the age when they die in that business. It’s really quite uncanny how regular that is. Astrologers would probably argue that it’s the Saturn return. Whatever it is, that seems to be the age when they fall into the darkness.