I discovered Amy Winehouseās music while I was sitting in the office at my first job.
I remember having this feeling quite clearly when I listened to Back to Black for the first time - that rare feeling you get when you start to realize that the one famous radio hit youāve heard (in this case, Rehab), is not even close to being the best song on its album. ByĀ āWake Up Alone,ā Track 8, I was hooked. I would come into work, click play on the first or second song, play the entire album through, and then start again. I had just graduated college and still commuted back and forth from my parentsā house. When I returned home at night, I would play the album some more,Ā to the point where my father, sitting in the next room, started to recognize the shape of some of the songs just from hearing it through the walls so much. Occasionally, he would pop his head through my doors, jokingly and good-naturedly hum his interpretation of the dramatic piano chords inĀ Back to BlackĀ (the track I played the most), and ask me why I would literally not listen to anything else.
Today, I went to see Amy, the documentaryĀ about Amy Winehouseās life, after reading thoughtful things about it from Jada Yuan. As someone who discovered her music long after she had already passed, I didnāt know much about the person behind the songs I enjoyed.Ā
When the documentary opened with clips a younger, healthier, and happier Amy, she looks so startlingly different from her more recognized appearance that itās already clear that itās going to be a very sad movie. Watching her hilariously sass Justin Timberlake and nervously meeting her idol Tony Bennett made me realize how much I really didnāt know about her actual personality, and how much about her Iād previously derived from static, printed paparazzi pictures.
If you enjoy Amyās music, you should see this. If you donāt know her music, you should watch this, and get on the boat already.
I love the video I embedded above, but in my opinion, the true testament of her amazingness comes through best in her casual rendition of Valerie (on someoneās couch) here.
Last thoughts via director Asif Kapadia:
āāIām pretty sure the people in the U.S. have never seen those images of young Amy. That intelligent, funny, special girl. Bright-eyed, healthy-looking. Even in England, people havenāt seen her. She was great, she was a good kid, she was human.ā But, says Kapadia, the heart of the film is about bullying and getting people to understand how picking on someone is dangerous. āThe audience is partly to blame for me,ā he says. āThe paparazzi may have been hounding her and the media may have been making fun of her, but we laughed and we clicked on the videos, and we commented on it and shared it. It just became so easy to make fun of this kid. She was just a kid who was taking it all in, and the more pressure and the more nastiness, the more she self-medicated to numb the pain. Thereās a point in the story where I think the mirror turns back to us and we think,We knew what was going on, and we all took part in it. We were all complicit. I just hope we think twice before we treat someone the way we treated Amy because it will happen again. Itās probably happening right now. I remember somebody saying to me at the beginning of this film, āWhy do you want to make a film about a junkie?ā And I just said, āThatās exactly why I want to make this film, because you just said that, and I canāt believe you just said that.āāā
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