Kiss The Bottle

My boyfriend walked into my office. "Did you hear about what happened in Norway? It is all over the radio."

We turned on the television to hear about the massacre. As horrific as it was, it sadly seemed strangely familiar: 9/11, Columbine. Dates and places created as our own rhetorical short-hand to encompass horror. Like so many other images, the often repeated phrases become just that: mediatized commodities.

Just 24 hours later, we sat on the same couch in the same room. The news was on again. This evening, Norway had been eclipsed by the death of Amy Winehouse for lead story. We sat and listened, horror struck. In some weird way, as the next morning's newspapers screamed out from the headlines, "AMY DEAD!" above all else, THIS "event" seemed MORE REAL, MORE DEVASTATING, MORE tangible than far away Norway. The media framed her passing as an equal tragedy, if not greater, than the events in Norway- Winehouse's sharing or pushing the hell of Norway from the cover.

Now there are tribute and after tribute, proclaiming that Winehouse was "the voice of a generation," a "role model" and a "trailblazer." Her albums are set to be on the top of the charts (again), in a parallel to Michael Jackson's post-mortem assent of rabid new "fans."

It may appear blasphemous to contradict these accolades with Winehouse's recent passings. But it seems eery that such a grand separation of person from music, human from commodity, has already occurred, less than a week after her death. I was a Amy Winehouse (music) fan. I remember the first time I heard Frank. It was after school one day in San Francisco. My dear friend Dom, who always knows about everything right before it breaks, the uber-"early adapter," told me that I had to come to his car, and hear this "new Jewish chick from Britain." He played me a couple songs from the album. I loved her voice and her style, but the record did not "stick" with me. I got out, and forgot all about Amy Winehouse.

A couple years later, I sat in the living room of my cousin's house in England. It was Christmas. We played cards and drank every night. My cousin had just picked up the Kaiser Chiefs Unemployment, and a record by a girl named Amy Winehouse. We listened to those two albums over and over again for the entirety of my trip- two weeks of "No, no, no." I went back to California with my own copy of the album, feeling almost as cool as Dom had been a couple years ago. Back to Black had not broken in the States yet, so I seemed cutting edge to have the songstress pumping for all who would hear.

In the following year, I was set to see Winehouse twice- once at a friends club in San Francisco and another time in Texas. She was already becoming a caricature of her own work by that time- at the first gig, falling over wasted, demanding shots of tequila. The second time, she was too much of a mess to appear, and cancelled the date. Amy Winehouse the fucked-up rock star had arrived.

The "rolling 24 hour cycle coverage" as my mentor John Hutnyk points out, transforms both the horror in Norway and Winehouse into an "event" to be witnessed. As he says,

" the acknowledgement of death here is not death as such, but 'death' in quotation marks, death as commodity, death as yet another experience you can go have. Even the deaths in Norway merge into this commodification via industrial news production... no compassion, only staged 'compassion' - behind which you know there are technicians, crew, director and sound man all just doing a job. Fascination, but more like the movie Crash than actually watching a crash."


After seeing all the coverage, I went down to Camden Square. The media had reported "hundreds of fans," "numerous vigils" and "countless tributes."

Upon arrival, I realized that there were "hundreds" of people- mostly media types, circling the Square like vultures: some had microphones, and chased down fans for yet another "interview," while others stood holding the equipment, poised for "action." A row of reporters lined the Square, frantically tapping away on laptops and phones:


People milled around- looking, watching, waiting. Waiting to be interviewed, waiting for their friends to arrive - I heard several people screech into cell phones, "I am at the Amy Winehouse thing. There are tons of news cameras- come down!' Watching other people "reacting" to the "scene-" because that is what it was. It was a little too manicured, a little to set up, a little too cliche. How many of these people were really Winehouse fans? And how many simply came to "watch" the spectacle, live entertainment?

It made me feel sad- sad for all of us for creating this hunger for macabre, which seems removed in so many ways from any actual feeling. It is easier, safer, to live through our consumption than experience, to grasp onto a cliche than question the meaning or the message behind it- and celebrate this cliche, no matter how false:




We should have ask ourselves, as we sit down for our evening dose of news, what are we watching?

Instead of asking in retrospect, "Who could have saved Amy?" and looking to point the proverbial finger, we should do some self-reflection on our own habits of consuming: booze, alcohol, and, most of all, the media.

So, Amy, this one goes out to you.