Amy Winehouse... dead.

[SPACERITUAL]

I dont give a fuck about amy crackhouse because ELWOOD IS BACK.

[Achtane]

Guess she should have gone to Rehab HO HOOOOOOOOohhh

[Mudfuzz]

I dont give a fuck about amy crackhouse because ELWOOD IS BACK.

[grindonomicon]

Guess she should have gone to Rehab HO HOOOOOOOOohhh

But she said
No
No
GACK.

[Bellyheart]

Today the news glorifies her, but a week ago they were waiting to see her fall. Media is business.

[hclapp219]

I thought the NY Times had a very fair write-up of her life:

For Winehouse, Life Was Messier Than Music
By JON PARELES

She was just getting started. Amy Winehouse, dead at 27, was only two albums into a career, and a life, that would be derailed by alcohol, drugs and bad choices.

Ms. Winehouse had not released an album in five years; her masterpiece, “Back to Black,” arrived in Britain in 2006 and in the United States in 2007. Its insolent, savvy but sadly prophetic single “Rehab” won Grammy Awards as Record of the Year and Song of the Year, and it might not even be the album’s best song. Under better circumstances, “Back to Black” would have been a foundation for a long and maturing catalog. Now, it remains as a warning that Ms. Winehouse could not bring herself to heed. “I tread a troubled track,” she sang in the album’s title song. “My odds are stacked.”

The police in London have said that they are investigating the circumstances of Ms. Winehouse’s death, but that “at this early stage it is being treated as unexplained.”

The years after “Back to Black” brought a very public decline. Her performances were erratic or much worse. She planned and canceled tours, went in and out of hospitals. Photos and videos showed her stumbling, bleeding and apparently taking drugs. With her boyfriend and then husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, who served jail time for attacking a pub landlord, Ms. Winehouse shared drug benders and never made it through rehab. The long, pathetic spectacle brought joy only to the jackals of the British tabloids, which sneered in big headlines at each new downturn.

But her self-destruction was a deep loss to listeners. Ms. Winehouse was no manufactured pop commodity. She was a genuine musician: one of the very small handful of British singers whose version of American soul music had a gutsiness and flair far beyond what could be studied.

Ms. Winehouse’s 2003 debut album, “Frank,” made when she was still a teenager, introduced her as a tangy-voiced, scat-singing disciple of Erykah Badu, Esther Phillips, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan. The album straddled jazz and R&B, big bands and bossa nova; the production was sometimes cluttered, but it certainly wasn’t cookie-cutter pop-R&B. Like many pop newcomers, Ms. Winehouse showed off a little, swooping around melismatically when she didn’t have to. But she already had the slide and slur, the way of bending phrases down toward slight dissonance, that always made her sound so nonchalantly willful.

While Ms. Winehouse had many songwriting collaborators on “Frank,” her lyrics already showed her acerbic, unsparing eye on both the people she observed and herself. “I Heard Love Is Blind,” written on her own, has a chord progression like a Tin Pan Alley ballad, with lyrics that describe a tryst with someone who looked like her boyfriend, trying to explain how it wasn’t really infidelity: “You left me here alone, I drank so much and needed to touch/Don’t overreact, I pretended he was you/You wouldn’t want me to be lonely.”

That friction between retro music and bluntly contemporary lyrics — to the point of raunch — was perfected on “Back to Black.” On that album, Ms. Winehouse worked with a disc jockey-turned producer, Mark Ronson, who could recreate the anatomy of vintage soul and R&B down to the studio room tone. (The surprise of hearing cusswords in a classic soul setting was still a fertile enough strategy, years later, to get Cee Lo Green nominated for Record and Song of the Year at the 2011 Grammy Awards for what was called “The Song Otherwise Known as ‘Forget You’.”) In songs she wrote largely on her own, Ms. Winehouse sang about her misery after a breakup, and about temptations she could not fight off: alcohol, drugs, sex and addict boyfriends. But with girl-group harmonies around her, and arrangements harking back to Motown, Stax and ska, she sounded shrewd and knowing, a woman who recognized all her own weaknesses and could see beyond them. Her beehive hairdos and out-to-there eyelashes only made her appear more amused, more in control, at least at the beginning.

In her music, Ms. Winehouse could sketch out her troubles and laugh them off, with a resilient beat and that insouciant flutter in her voice. Outside the recording studio, as a human being separate from her art, Ms. Winehouse couldn’t do that. Her songs, it turned out, would be wiser than she was.

[theavondon]

http://www.ilovefuzz.com/viewtopic.php?f=150&t=18667

DUDE WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? HOWS FRANCE?

[aens_wife]

To those of you who have no compassion or empathy for her because she was a drug addict, may you never have to walk in her shoes. Addiction is a different kind of disease, for sure. But it IS a disease. No matter what bad choices were made, it is not up to us to judge her.

She was talented. It is sad that she was unable to reach out to someone and get the help she needed.

[Doodahman1969]

How not to OD by Doodahman1969:

1. Measure that shit (jeweler scales be cheep)
2. Be very careful with genre mixing (yer CNS be sensitive)
3. psychedelic$ are the best (Shulgin be almost 90)
4. Don't develop an opiate habit
5. Vasodilators are yer co-pilot (cayenne powder 1g (veg cap that shit) about 2hrs before anything)

#themoreuknow

[Big Mon]

To those of you who have no compassion or empathy for her because she was a drug addict, may you never have to walk in her shoes. Addiction is a different kind of disease, for sure. But it IS a disease. No matter what bad choices were made, it is not up to us to judge her.

She was talented. It is sad that she was unable to reach out to someone and get the help she needed.

Yeah,why is compassion so frowned upon? You know who else frowned upon compassion when Kurt Cobain overdosed? Andy Rooney. That's right ILF. I called you Andy Rooney. Get at me,dawg

But in all seriousness,addiction is a motherfucker. A close friend of mine had moved down to Savannah to go to SCAD and started fucking with Morphine. Wasn't long before he OD'd. It's the same thing when people downplay depression or Bipolar disorder. Those are diseases,too. And when someone passes that off as "laziness" or a "pity party",it makes me wanna simultaneously puke and beat the shit out of them.

[bigchiefbc]

To those of you who have no compassion or empathy for her because she was a drug addict, may you never have to walk in her shoes. Addiction is a different kind of disease, for sure. But it IS a disease. No matter what bad choices were made, it is not up to us to judge her.

She was talented. It is sad that she was unable to reach out to someone and get the help she needed.

I have a lot of compassion and empathy for people who are addicted to drugs. But that compassion can only go so far. If they are willing to accept help when it is offered and given to them, then I respect them. And I understand that it is fucking hell to kick that shit. And I even am understanding when someone relapses, because again, I know that detox is a fucking beast. But when someone is in and out and in and out and in and out of rehab for years and years and years, and it just never ever gets better ... obviously this person has nothing in their life that they care about enough to give a shit. And that's when I stop giving a shit. After the 10th rehab, you really have to question the point of giving compassion and empathy, because that person obviously doesn't want it.

[aens_wife]

I have a lot of compassion and empathy for people who are addicted to drugs. But that compassion can only go so far. If they are willing to accept help when it is offered and given to them, then I respect them. And I understand that it is fucking hell to kick that shit. And I even am understanding when someone relapses, because again, I know that detox is a fucking beast. But when someone is in and out and in and out and in and out of rehab for years and years and years, and it just never ever gets better ... obviously this person has nothing in their life that they care about enough to give a shit. And that's when I stop giving a shit. After the 10th rehab, you really have to question the point of giving compassion and empathy, because that person obviously doesn't want it.

Respectfully disagree. She may have wanted it badly, but didn't feel she deserved it. There are a lot of other issues at hand when dealing with drugs, etc. Depression or mental health problems are likely. Lots of addicts have been abused. My dad, a long time alcoholic, lost his first love, went to Vietnam to see his best friend get his legs blown off, then came back and married my mom who cheated on him, divorced, raised three difficult teenage girls by himself... The list goes on.

Point is, we don't get to judge whether someone has good enough reasons to use or whatever. No one wakes up one morning and says "fuck. My life is too good right now. I'm gonna throw it all away and become a miserable drug addict."

If it was just a matter of wanting to be sober/clean bad enough, drug addiction wouldn't be the problem it is.

[bigchiefbc]

I have a lot of compassion and empathy for people who are addicted to drugs. But that compassion can only go so far. If they are willing to accept help when it is offered and given to them, then I respect them. And I understand that it is fucking hell to kick that shit. And I even am understanding when someone relapses, because again, I know that detox is a fucking beast. But when someone is in and out and in and out and in and out of rehab for years and years and years, and it just never ever gets better ... obviously this person has nothing in their life that they care about enough to give a shit. And that's when I stop giving a shit. After the 10th rehab, you really have to question the point of giving compassion and empathy, because that person obviously doesn't want it.

Respectfully disagree. She may have wanted it badly, but didn't feel she deserved it. There are a lot of other issues at hand when dealing with drugs, etc. Depression or mental health problems are likely. Lots of addicts have been abused. My dad, a long time alcoholic, lost his first love, went to Vietnam to see his best friend get his legs blown off, then came back and married my mom who cheated on him, divorced, raised three difficult teenage girls by himself... The list goes on.

Point is, we don't get to judge whether someone has good enough reasons to use or whatever. No one wakes up one morning and says "fuck. My life is too good right now. I'm gonna throw it all away and become a miserable drug addict."

If it was just a matter of wanting to be sober/clean bad enough, drug addiction wouldn't be the problem it is.

Oh, I completely agree that it isn't just a matter of wanting it. And I agree that it usually also comes along with mental health issues. I am married to psychologist and she used to counsel people with these issues all the time. But the thing is, it IS possible for them to work with the mental health issues, and kick the shit. And the people that do go through that process have my utmost respect and compassion. But a lot of people just go to rehab after rehab for some other reason (often to avoid jailtime), and have no real desire to get clean at all. And if someone DOESN'T want to clean up, that's fine, I don't have an issue with that. I'm not gonna judge anyone for using. Do your thing. But if you die from an OD, I don't consider that a tragic death, and I'm not going to be able to empathize with them very much.

[SPACERITUAL]

To those of you who have no compassion or empathy for her because she was a drug addict, may you never have to walk in her shoes. Addiction is a different kind of disease, for sure. But it IS a disease. No matter what bad choices were made, it is not up to us to judge her.

She was talented. It is sad that she was unable to reach out to someone and get the help she needed.

The point i think you are missing here is that ELWOOD IS BACK

[theavondon]

To those of you who have no compassion or empathy for her because she was a drug addict, may you never have to walk in her shoes. Addiction is a different kind of disease, for sure. But it IS a disease. No matter what bad choices were made, it is not up to us to judge her.

She was talented. It is sad that she was unable to reach out to someone and get the help she needed.

The point i think you are missing here is that ELWOOD IS BACK