Why I Cried About Amy Winehouse

I'm not famous and I don't do drugs. And I identified with Amy Winehouse all the same.

By E.J. Dickson

Last Saturday, after I found out from Twitter that Amy Winehouse had died, I spent the rest of the afternoon in bed watching YouTube clips of her early performances, eating a block of cheddar cheese, and crying. Considering I had never met her, or even listened to her records in the last six months, my reaction might seem excessive. It shouldn't even have been a surprise — at the time of her death, Winehouse was far more famous for her personal issues — her heroin addiction, her tumultuous relationship with ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil, her spitting attacks on ample-bottomed English socialite Pippa Middleton — than her prodigious singing or songwriting talents.

Yet for whatever reason — sadness, shock, the effects of cheddar-cheese hormones on my endocrine system — I spent a good part of the afternoon quite upset. And as I watched her belt out "You Know I'm No Good" on Top of the Pops, followed by her most recent performance of the same song at Belgrade, I figured out why. I was not sad for Amy Winehouse as a fan, but because I strongly identified with her on many levels. In a strange way, she felt like a talented, famous, drug-addled version of myself. Thousands of people probably felt the exact same way, particularly if they, like me, listened to Back to Black incessantly after it came out and sported black bras under wife-beaters during the summer of 2007. 

I will never come close to encountering the demons that haunted Winehouse throughout most of her adult life — crack cocaine, knife fights with boyfriends, physical dependence on copious amounts of liquid eyeliner. Nor do I have an iota of the talent, musical or otherwise, that she had, and so I'll never achieve the same level of success that she did. (It's safe to say that if I'm ever found dead in my apartment at the age of twenty-seven, no one will ever compare me to those other illustrious members of the twenty-seven club, Jim or Janis or Jimi; I'll be lucky if I get Pete Ham or Kristen Pfaff.)

But, like Amy, I grew up in an upper middle-class Jewish home, with a supportive mother and a loving father who provided my first exposure to the music of his generation: classic rock, pop, soul, R&B, and to a lesser extent, jazz. Like her, I was interested in writing and performing from a young age, and like hers, my family was unwavering in its support. And, as a few of my friends have pointed out, I even bore a passing physical resemblance to Winehouse, which is just another way of saying that we were both pasty and relatively large-breasted and obviously Jewish.

So when I first read about Amy in a 2006 Rolling Stone profile, I felt the tug of a connection to her. For an unconventional-looking, mouthy, fucked-up Jewish girl with performing-arts aspirations, the way I felt about Amy Winehouse was akin to the way I imagine little black boys felt in the '40s when Jackie Robinson started playing for the Dodgers, or how women in law school felt when Sandra Day O'Connor became the first female Supreme Court justice.

Granted, Amy Winehouse was not Rosa Parks, but here was a famous member of the tribe who was allowed to pursue a path other than summer camp in the Adirondacks and a major in public relations at UMich or Indiana and a nose job for her nineteenth birthday. Here was someone who routinely described herself as "a nice Jewish girl," but of course was anything but, whose bad behavior — spitting at debutantes, swigging Jameson between sets, cupping her boyfriend's balls during interviews — was truly a shanda fur die goy. (I took a semester of Yiddish in college.)