Crumbler

For all the finger-wagging that accompanied Amy Winehouse’s slide into oblivion, it strikes me that she had no harsher critic than herself. What is Back to Black but a chronicle of failures, glumly owned up to? Her American debut, which came courtesy of a free download on iTunes, was a song called “You Know I’m No Good.” “I told you I was trouble,” goes one lyric. She sang it like she meant it. 

Later Rihanna would play an unconvincing devotee of S&M, and Ke$ha made herself out to be a hotter mess than she probably is, but Amy Winehouse was the genuine article: desperate, destructive, and just self-aware enough to break your heart. We remember “Rehab” for its defiance, but listen again today and hear her pain: “I don’t ever want to drink again,” she ached. “I just — ooh, I just need a friend.” Mark Ronson’s pop-soul production was an ideal vehicle for Winehouse’s voice, but it also softened the jagged edges of her songwriting. An Amy Winehouse lyric was something you could cut yourself on.

Ultimately, Winehouse’s defining characteristic may have been her fatalism — her growing certainty, in the years leading up to and following Back to Black, that she was destined to fail. “I tread a troubled track; my odds are stacked,” went a line on that album’s title track. On what is perhaps her saddest song, ”Love Is A Losing Game,” you can hear her giving up: “Over futile odds, laughed at by the gods, and now the final frame.” She wrote those lines when she was 22.

The final frame wouldn’t come for five more years, and it arrived with much sadness and little surprise. The unaddicted among us clucked about the importance of saying no to drugs; the earth’s crust may buckle today under the weight of millions braying “I told you so.” Some will wonder whether someone or something could have rescued Amy Winehouse, but the truth is that she was far gone by the time we met her. She leaves behind millions of fans and a fluke masterpiece that will long endure. I like to think that future depressives will listen to Back to Black and, having peered into the abyss, develop the strength to step back from it. And I wish Amy Winehouse could have been there to meet them.