Amy Winehouse and the Media
Amy Winehouse, a tiny jewish woman, undoubtedly, was a great talent, her music was terrific, and her voice – exceptional. She was one of those out of the ordinary popular western performers, who write their own lyrics and music. Since the majority of women “of pop” serve as middling executors of what sound producers cultivate and consider profitable.
Amy Winehouse was a difficult child. Is it excluded from normal, and from drama school. The reason for that was inappropriate behavior, striking appearance, singing in class, academic failure, and drugs. Amy wasn’t worried. She planned to be a singer, but if she’d fail – a waitress.
In 2011, she died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 27. Nine of those 27 years, day after day, she cherished an oppressive story of love.
In 2005, she met her future husband Blake Fielder-Civil. By that time, he was already a veteran drug dealer. Handsome, insolent, lanky, painted with tattoos from head to toe, with a chronic cigarette in the corner of his mouth, grinning. Amy adored such cool fish. Judging by what songs Amy was writing at the time, and what lines she dedicated to him, that relationship was pure outrageous passion. Even infatuated enslavement.
There was everything in their romance: alcohol, betrayal, drugs, lots of drugs, feasts, fame, living together, money, lots of money, constant controversy, farewells and retrievals.
That was lunacy. Their relationship was being regularly covered in the media. Amy easily wrenched her soul inside out, tumbling all the details of her life, without waiting for questions. After reading all of the interviews that have been committed to Amy and Blake’s rapport, anyone can imagine what Amy felt towards him, that kind of damaging affection, worse than drugs. When the personality of one of the partners dissolves slap-bang in that of the other’s. When one wants to be alongside the other 24/7. This is fallacious and killing, but it is also impossible to “just get over” these feelings.
Blake hoisted Amy on drugs, with him, she began to thump and lead a strange life, for which almost everyone would condemn her.
Every girl met such a bad boy in her life.
In 2009, Blake was sent to jail. Amy was steadily visiting and supporting him, and he, while in the chamber, files for divorce, claiming, that it would be for the good of her.
The song “Back to Black” was written still in the course of their marriage, when Blake dumped Amy and went back to his ex-girlfriend. In this song, horrible pain bleeds through every line: “We only said good-bye with words / I died a hundred times / You go back to her / And I go back to / I go back to us”
After the divorce, Amy flew off the handle. Her father appeals to her through television and tries to persuade her to go to a rehabilitation center, or to a therapist, or to do something with her drug addiction. Self-destruction, this process seems to be called like that.
In 2011, she leaves the rehab and gives her last interview: “I’ve finally escaped from hell.” When she caught glimpses of her own photos in newspapers, cold draught of fear went through her body. Her skin was covered with morbid spots, she was unbelievably thin and pale. To put herself together was the only way not to die.
But her attempts of a better way of life remained successful not for a long time. Soon after leaving the rehab, she starts drinking again. And drinking even more than she used to before the therapy.
Amy died from several bottles of vodka alone in her apartment on a sultry day.
Celebrity culture is a present day phenomenon that rose in the midst of such contemporary patterns as urbanization and quick improvement of consumerism. In modern consuming society this paradox has become destructive. As celebrities are continually in the media, they have gotten to be “good examples” for young people all over the world. Enthusiasm for stars’ lives makes for a multibillion dollar online industry. It is widely known that popular child stars become mentally unstable as the grow up due to the constant persecution of paparazzi.
During her last years, the media was especially excited about Amy’s personal life and her relationship with drugs.
There doesn’t exist anything better for pulp fiction than an overly communicative celebrity. “Amy Winehouse dead” takes the 2nd position in Google Trends search analysis. According to the same source, there was an a sharp rise in the popularity of the request “Amy Winehouse”, her name was searched about 100 times more often than it is now.
Through the efforts of the tabloids, her name has become synonymous with the word “scandal”. The media was eager to get any tiny bit of information about Amy, and Blake was not the last person in this disgraceful chain of money and drugs. He was a smart boy, and just as every junky, he needed money for stuff, and if you’re Amy Winehouse’s husband, the media is a perfect associate for you to obtain money for drugs. Blake used to sell to the tabloids tons of intimate information about their family life. Addicted to drugs, Fielder-Civil had never really cared for his talented wife.
One of the most immoral episodes happened last year, when he visited Amy’s grave at Edgwarebury Lane Cemetery in Edgware, and organized a photoshoot there. After a few kind of emotional snaps with him kneeling down to the headstone, there was another series of photos with him posing as he has nothing to do with what happened to Amy, despite the fact that he was responsible for introducing Amy to hard drugs.
The singer-songwriter battled relentlessly with addiction, abuse of narcotics, insane love affection and bulimia – all under the all-seeing eye of the tabloids. Each and every stumble, each small blunder was spread crosswise over pulp fiction covers and webpages in light of the fact that that was the thing that the general population needed, and one of stimulation media is to give the general population what they need. It was not really a shock to the public when Amy wasted away.
When “Rehab” was released, Amy became a ceaseless pray of scandal sheets, as well as a payback for shutterbugs, and – after her problems with hard drugs got a lot of publicity – there opened a way to a new area of activity – prime-time TV shows pinnacle. Her decrease corresponded with an uncommon ascent in the media, and 'til her death, Amy met her deepest demons in plain view for all the planet to gape at, from each daily journal and computer screen.
Mass media is driven by traffic. And without exception, all celebrity scandals create this traffic of clicks, views, lakes, and shares. There is an opinion that Amy’s personality was literally murdered by media. A record of her concert fail in Belgrade, or a video of her in singing racist songs were just a part of the information media freak show, because these events sell themselves. The mass media industry makes it clear that one person’s crash is one media’s triumph.
At the point when the tabloids put your soul in a cage of headlines and captions, again and again, you can't help but correspond. Amy was not well prepared to handle her fame. She was fiercely frail yet had a blessing and insufficient individuals around her to secure it. It's not the first occasion such things happened, but it is the first occasion when we had the modernization to observe it develop from start to finish. We watch paparazzi provoking her until she rushes at them, giving them a dose of the “wild” Amy at her eeriest. We watch Terry Richardson tranquilly snapping photographs as she cuts the words “I love Blake” into her belly with a piece of glass. During her tragic last show in Belgrade, she remained in front of an audience, disoriented and generally quiet. We watch anchors publicly condemning and mocking her. Nobody was all the more freely wiped out, nobody was all the more openly in peril, and nobody got less sensitivity than Amy.
Of every last bit of her affections, music was the most grounded. She was excessively awesome, making it impossible to hush. Winehouse was a casualty of discouragement. There was mistrust that her issues could be that awful on the grounds that her works were that great. Each time we hear her music play, we can't disregard the genuine Amy, a real individual whose cries failed to attract anyone's attention.
The nature of media images consists in the fact that we imagine knowing the public person we either admire or despise, but the truth is that we are allowed to be aware of tiny bits of that person passing them to mass media. To all of us, was the lady who dependably had a half-blazed cigarette hanging from her lips and an excessive amount of skin appearing. The person who sang about not going to recovery, and afterward passed on maybe in light of the fact that she ought to have. That is how paparazzi made us think of her, in a completely wrong way. To all of us, Amy was a hackneyed young starlet who was destined to become a drug addict, an alcoholic, and obtain an eating disorder.
Amy's verses are intense on the grounds that they are genuine, helpless, and on the grounds that so huge numbers of us can relate. She asks, at an opportune time in her vocation, "What is it about men?" knowing she initially took in agony and dismissal from them, later pointing the finger at herself for being subjected to what she's savvy enough to know is an example that is greater than her.
Without a doubt, Amy was capable and unshakable. She was no tremulous flower, holding up to be advised what to do by anyone. In any case, she, similar to all people, was entitled to sympathy and care, but she rather was exploited and utilized by those she loved. She could have been alright if she’d gotten the bolster she desired and was proposed a getaway from the regularly prying paws of the spotlight. Amy's awful passing was not genuinely or singularly about her decisions, it was about a great deal of other numerous individuals who are responsible. On the off chance that despite everything we can't see the ways our life actually slaughters, and we keep demanding wiping our hands clean of that, let’s conclude there is little hope after humankind. Numerous people will say that these famous personalities like Amy Winehouse comprehended what they were agreeing to, and that it's all part of the arrangement. But we often forget that all of us are people, blood in our veins. We often forget that each of us has at least once been arrogant, rude, drunk, stoned, angry, crying, or, in general, human.
References
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