When I said the other day that I would do a make up article over the weekend (in a post about The Shangri-Las, appropriately enough) I certainly wouldn't have wanted it like this.
Amy was one of the greatest talents in music today, she was absolutely brilliant, and that was constantly overshadowed by the attention paid to her tumultuous life. Notice I say "the attention paid." Had she been allowed to have a private life, it's doubtful to me that she would've found herself in the predicament which killed her. If you had a crazy time in your 20s, imagine how difficult it would've been to outgrow them if every bad judgement you made ended up in the paper, where it led to you being ridiculed constantly by thousands of people you never met. Imagine a time in your life where you had to dissociate yourself from people and things that were destructive to you, the way you had to pull yourself apart from toxic relationships. Now imagine you're also a millionaire, the people around you never go anywhere but by your side, and every time you try to make a new friend, it's almost certainly because they want to be near a famous person.
People were angry and hateful against Amy. I always wondered why. It says something disturbing about the human condition. In every review, every interview, every time I saw her, she was kind, funny, and endearing. In concert, I watched and just wanted her to get it together the way I knew she could and knock it out of the park. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she didn't. Now she never will again.
Tears dry on their own...
