It's chilling to read Byron's poem, "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year." It was one of his last. He writes of being already old. He appears to know that he is to die soon.
When the BBC announced Amy Winehouse's death, the sentence it took was followed by another, delivered in their house style. "She was 27." And in the rolling headlines on BBC news, her age had a line of its own. By now there's no need to start listing the musicians who died at 27. In many ways, it's irrelevant. Some go earlier, some later. Except -- today there was something grimly inevitable about the news. It's just that the inevitability only had a little to do with the number.
In 2008, the British media, with that delicacy the world has suddenly come to appreciate, made a headline out of something Amy's father Mitch had said: that a single cigarette could kill her. He was sharing with us all the news that she had been diagnosed with emphysema, but it was all too easy to read it as another intimation of mortality, as if there hadn't been enough in her music. And then, those glimpses of mortality had become so public: the late appearances; the way in which she was vocally present in the video for "Valerie" but absent physically; the stumbling and the winnowing.
There's a debate worth having about whether some of those glimpses should have been public at all -- how did her night of drug-taking end up, via British magazines, on TMZ? As a result, something primal happened between her and her audience. She seemed to have a knowledge of the end that awaits us all, by seeming so much closer to it than many of us.
A hundred years ago, in his vast examination of sacrifice myths, The Golden Bough, James Frazer recorded that the Albanians of the Caucasus kept their slaves in a temple of the Moon. These slaves were already inspired, prophetic people, but when one was even more inspired and left the temple for the woods, he was captured and maintained in luxury for a year. At the end of the year, he was sacrificed.
These people were sacrificed because there was something divine about them. Frazer puts them in the catalogue he calls, "Killing the God." There was a time, he argues, when to human beings, even gods were mortal. There's something that asserts our own strength as humans when we see that something divine is perishable.
This doesn't explain at all why artists such as Amy Winehouse die so young. It doesn't have to. Scientists have already looked into it. A study by Mark Bellis and others, conducted at Liverpool John Moores University, looked at North American and European musicians who had performed in any album on a list of "All-Time Top 1000 albums," and found that they were 1.7 times more likely to die at an early age than the rest of us. The survey suggested that this is caused by "high levels of stress in environments where alcohol and drugs are widely available."
Yes, Amy Winehouse became powerfully addicted to those things, and her gift did bring her into that environment. Her obituarists are already commenting on how fresh-faced she looked as new talent, and how unemaciated she was. But there's the guilty feeling that these addictions had something to do with her gift; or at least, our appreciation of it. As Clive James wrote of her, "When that young woman sings, it's the revelation of a divine gift -- but when she behaves as if the gift were hers to destroy if she feels like it, you can't help thinking of divine wrath." He added, "Can't the force that made her so brilliant give her strength?"
This already suggests the presence of the divine. But that gift is a burden that goes way beyond the clinical anticipation of "high stress levels." If anything, Winehouse's art directed that conflict directly, appearing for a moment to find something life-affirming in the refusal to go to rehab. In reality, she went to rehab. But, like Billie Holiday before her, she articulated a pain that goes far enough beyond ordinary experience to offer a kind of consolation to anyone who shares any measure of it. Her line, "Tears dry on their own," was so neat that it seemed found rather than planned; as though she had been given a unique understanding of tears.
So it will be that her very death will appear part of her art, and that very number 27 will become the key note of a narrative that is ultimately not so much inevitable as predictable, even derivative. This, too, will be part of the tragedy. As Paul Gambaccini noted tonight, "We've lost 20 years of great records, and Mitch Winehouse has lost a daughter." There are many reflections that it's the fame she enjoyed and endured that destroyed her.
This, too, fits in with a sort of predetermined pattern; but the shock and sadness of Winehouse's death must remind us that her tears really were unique, and the way in which she bore that fame was her own story. It remains her own story, even when you compare her to Byron. In that poem, written on his last birthday, he wrote:
The fire that on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze -
A funeral pile.
That image of a volcanic isle does convey the loneliness of the artist, especially when we all feel we "get" what he or she is going through, and often simply can't. But it also evokes the splendid un-predictability, the stark uniqueness, of a real gift.