my obligatory thoughts on Amy Winehouse…
Awesome article on Amy Winehouse and on music as artifice or “music as memoir”. I think he’s really nailed one of the essential questions, as it were, that lots of musicians and songwriters confront: do you need to live a certain way to produce “authentic” art?
I actually went to college with Nitsuh (where we both studied poetry, believe it or not - Hey Nitsuh, what’s up?!) and that would be right around the time when I was fond of saying that you can’t separate the way you live form the art you make. The interesting thing (in light of his article) is that I still think maybe that’s true. Or maybe…and this is probably ridiculously vague and problematic…it’s not that you can’t separate the art you make from the way you live; it’s that you can’t separate the art you make from who you are.
What I mean by that is this: Try as I might, I will never, ever be a free-wheeling, macho, hard-partying, free spirit, easy-going type of guy. Yet, many of my favorite musicians were exactly that. I mean, rock and roll is practically BUILT on the music of guys like that. Now, I can make all the bad decisions in the world. I can party until I puke, sleep with questionable women, tour the country and sleep on floors, make bad career decisions (i.e. focus on art rather than money), etc. But you know what? At the end of the day, I’m still a perfectionist nerd and control freak. I’m just a tired, broke, lonely perfectionist nerd/control freak.
I’ve done all the things listed above and I do think they’ve made less of an uptight kind of guy. But somehow they haven’t changed me fundamentally. Some of them I’ve enjoyed and some of them have been exactly as empty and demoralizing as you might imagine. But what ultimately comes through in my music, no matter what I’m doing at the time (living “responsibly”, living like an idiot) is who I actually AM - my underlying personality. I just simply do not do raunchy, rebellious, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am rock and roll as well as I’d like. But my thoughtful stuff seems to come out pretty well.
So, maybe the idea I would add to Nitsuh’s piece and to the discussion of art as artifice vs. “keeping it real” is that how you live can change who you are (slowly and minorly), but who you are is what comes through in your art, even if you make opposite choices. If you’re a troubled wild child who manages to make good choices, I think all that intensity and all that struggle and all that pain and whatever else will come through even if you manage to NOT live it. Maybe the real tragedy of Amy Winehouse is that, if she did live horribly in pursuit of “authenticity”, perhaps she never needed to in the first place. She could have made great choices and her struggle with those demons would still have come through loud and clear and lent that “authenticity” anyway. And, if she was just troubled…that’s sad no matter what and her art is the one positive she was able to make out of her pain.
… appear here; please enjoy
