Amy, you are teaching us.

Yesterday I saw the documentary ‘Amy’ at the movies. My mother had recommended it. When I’d picked up her call a few weeks back, Mum’s eyes were heavy with sleepiness. “Are you ok?” I asked. “Oh, yes, I just didn’t sleep much last night because I watched an incredible documentary and stayed up all night thinking about it,” she replied. My mother is a critical movie goer so I knew I had to see it.

The film starts with a home video in which a young Amy Winehouse sings Happy Birthday to a friend while innocently sucking a lollipop. For someone on the cusp of adolescence, Amy has a wise, velvety voice almost spooky mature for her age. Her talent is as obvious as oil on water.

As Amy slowly crawls into the spotlight as a late teen, her humility shines. “You know becoming famous will come with a lot of media attention? How will you deal with it?” an early interviewer asks. “I just want time to write my songs. I think fame would drive me mad,” Amy replies. This is a sentiment she repeats often during interviews, knowing that while thousands –millions- of teens would give their left foot for fame, she wouldn’t, couldn’t deal with it.

Unlike many Jazz singers, Amy makes it into the mainstream. Her voice is clearly her gateway but leaves the audience questioning what else contributed to her sudden fame; after all, other Jazz singers -Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday- are famous only among elite Jazz circles. Amy herself admits that her songs will not appeal to the mass markets.

But then they do.

Being young, pretty and edgy makes her a marketer’s dream. She’s different: Her hair is twisted into a beehive, her thick eyeliner is drawn way past the edges of her eyes and makes her look almost feline. Her thin arms are illustrated with tattoos. She’s tiny and witty; she gives attitude when interviewers bore her, she bitches on live radio about a sound technician who added the sound of a violin to her recording. Unlike many celebrities she has a big personality. She writes her own songs.

But she’s also relatable enough to appeal to wide audiences: her family isn’t rich and she still has a working class accent. She has a huge, down-to Earth laugh. She has daddy issues and goes for bad boys. She drinks and smokes. People feel like they know her even though they don’t know her.

As Amy becomes famous, first in England and then world-wide, she self-destructs. What started as a vibrant, funny and smart woman becomes an increasingly incohorent drug addict and alcohlic.

As her foreshadowing teen-self predicted, she can’t handle the fame. Paparazzi hassle her. “I would give back my whole singing career to just be able to walk along the street in peace,” she tells a friend. After years of exploitation, she ultimately sabotages her tour with a drunk performance in Serbia; she refuses to sing. She doesn’t care that her tour is cancelled because between producers and media and managers and a fame-obsessed father, she is trapped in a world of exploitation. This is her way out. Three weeks later she dies.

~

My grandmother once said that people die the way they lived. Friends of my grandmother’s who lived peaceful, calm lives slipped into death without resistance. The fighters fought. The comediennes cracked a last joke.

Amy refused to give a last performance and then she died. She was done selling herself out.

~

It’s easy to blame those close to Amy with her destruction: Her fame-hungry father, the addicted boyfriend, the mother who didn’t spot the bulimia warning signs, the manager who insisted she go on tour when she should have been cradled in rehab.

But there is one main culprit which sticks out, and that is the media. The film makes you red-hot with rage as the pap follow her, relentlessly as though she existed simply for public consumption. However, as the old saying goes, when you point one finger at someone, you have three fingers pointing back at you. Why are we so obsessed with fame and the famous? The paparazzi wouldn’t have a job stalking celebrities if we didn’t eat those tabloids up.

I remember as a teenager reading those magazines obsessively. I didn’t know it then but I was looking to validate my own insecure existence. It was reassuring to see a good looking, talented and admired actor or singer become a train wreck. I suddenly wasn’t alone in figuring shit out, failing, resurrecting.

I stopped reading those tabloids when I started making my own art. Art doesn’t care if you’re successful or normal or a little bit fucked up. That’s why Amy started singing too.