Amy Winehouse Research Articles

(Jewish) Rock Stars in a Jewish Museum: Testing the Grounds for a More Inclusive Exhibition at Beit Hatfusot, Tel Aviv

AbstractThis article discusses three exhibitions that took place between 2016 and the present at Beit Hatfusot – The Museum of the Jewish Diaspora (renamed Anu – Museum of the Jewish People in 2021) in Tel Aviv, Israel, and that portrayed three internationally acclaimed (Jewish) rock stars: Amy Winehouse, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. What motivated the museum to curate these exhibitions that clearly deviate from the museum’s traditional narrative of Jewish history, diasporic communities and the establishment of the State of Israel? The article will claim that this can be answered in light of the museum’s recent renovation and new conceptual approach to the portrayal of Jewish culture and identity. The story told in the original exhibition was that Jewish diaspora emerged as a result of destruction and was redeemed with the re-gathering of the dispersed communities in Israel and the formation of the Jewish State; however, the new permanent exhibition, seeks to represent a more contemporary portrayal of Jewish identity. By showcasing internationally renowned and popular Jewish rock stars, the museum moves away from its former traditional, old-fashioned and stagnated mould to suggest a more inclusive and diverse portrayal of Judaism.

Digital eternity: The holographic resurrection of music icons

Holographic reincarnations blend the allure of the past with the possibilities of modern technology, navigating through ethical quandaries and the redefinition of performance art. Central to this exploration is the fusion of memory and digital perpetuity, pushing the limits of what constitutes a live performance. The holographic rebirth of legends such as Elvis Presley, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston sparks debate over the ethics of posthumous consent, the authenticity of such representations and the implications of monetizing the afterlife of artists. This shift towards digital eternity prompts a critical assessment of the moral dimensions involved in resurrecting artists through technology. Exploring the history and development of holography, from historical illusions to contemporary artificial intelligence-enhanced presentations, reveals both the technological achievements and the ethical challenges presented by these endeavours. The drive behind these resurrective projects shines a light on a lucrative industry focused on ‘Delebs’, turning the legacies of deceased celebrities into profitable ventures. Yet the quest to immortalize artists digitally invites scrutiny over potential misuse, privacy breaches and the erosion of the true essence of their legacies. Addressing these complex issues demands a concerted effort from ethicists, legal scholars, technology experts and cultural commentators. The journey into this uncharted domain highlights the necessity of balancing innovation with respect, advocating for a principled approach to honouring those who have passed. The concept of confining artists to a ‘digital purgatory’, where they exist solely for entertainment devoid of self-determination, emphasizes the urgency of establishing ethical guidelines. This digital afterlife, fraught with the risk of diminishing the soul of artistic works to mere commercial assets, calls for a vigilant approach to safeguard the dignity and volition of artists in the realm of digital legacy.

Blue without my Green: A Corpus Analysis on Colours of Grief and Emotive Expressions of Amy Winehouse’s Compositions

Singers and songwriters use their music as a platform for communication, using lyrics to express intimate sentiments - often caused by the pressures of the music industry as well as personal matters such as mental health. In this study, we analysed Amy Winehouse’s songs, exploring the explicit and subliminal affective messages using linguistic techniques i.e., metaphors and colour symbolism. Grounded on corpus analysis and stages of grief theory, we looked at linguistic patterns and intensity of word choice related to Amy’s choices of colours and emotive expressions. The findings show that sadness was the most prevalent emotion in her lyrics and its correlation to her mental health issues; the transition of positive sentiments developing into negative emotions was also evident in the data. Her complex relationships and experiences were also infused into her deliberate self-portrayal of catalytic mental deterioration, self-destruction, and torment. This study offers new insights in corpus analysis research on psycholinguistics and mental health in pop culture.

Death of a guitar hero: The art of metal reputation maintenance

Combining insights from identity, gender and ethnicity studies while incorporating notions of the sacred, the death of guitar hero, Randy Rhoads, in a plane crash in 1982 is addressed to establish how maintenance of Rhoads’s reputation as a saintly, innocent character who died because of a mysterious accident has been constructed and maintained for over forty years. Situating his death in a comparative analysis with premature deaths of other guitarists, Tommy Bolin and Allen Collins, in addition to artists from other musical genres, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston and Donna Summer, frames of similarities and differences emerge to reveal how identity and reputation is achieved and maintained after death within heavy metal but also in other genres. Three specific tropes including accident equals innocence, transgression equals recklessness and transgression equals criminality are defined and applied throughout. These reveal that posthumous identity, be it positive or negative, is actively constructed and is imbued at times with gendered and racial elements. Via the application of criticality, the findings show how the posthumous consecration of Rhoads and other decedents is accomplished via selective emphasis on particular claims and the silencing of others, with locus of responsibility for a tragic death, either internal or external, being crucial.

Strategie mediów wobec uzależnionego artysty. Analiza tekstów o Amy Winehouse zamieszczonych na portalu Pomponik w latach 2008–2012

The main aim of the article is to try to answer the question about the strategies used by the media towards an artist struggling with addiction. The text consists of three parts. The first one explains all the most important concepts related to the chosen topic. The methodological part presents a study to check how the media celebrates the addicted artist and lists the most important elements of this process. As part of it, twenty-four articles from the Pomponik gossip website about Amy Winehouse, a British singer struggling with addictions, were analyzed. The last part of the text presents the conclusions.

Review: Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, by Kimberly Mack

Review: <i>Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White</i>, by Kimberly Mack

Coisa Mais Linda

<i>Coisa Mais Linda</i>

Thanatechnology and the Living Dead: New Concepts in Digital Transformation and Human-Computer Interaction.

In a digital society, shall we be the authors of our own experience, not only during our lifetime but also after we die? We ask this question because dying and bereavement have become even harder, and much less private, in the digital age. New big data-driven digital industries and technologies are on the rise, with promises of interactive 3D avatars and storage of digital memories of the deceased, so they can continue to exist online as the "living dead" in a digital afterlife. Famous rock and roll icons like Roy Orbison, Frank Zappa, Ronnie James Dio, and Amy Winehouse have famously been turned into holograms that can once again give "live" performances on the touring circuit, often pulling in large audiences. Death studies, dying, and grief have become virtual in the 21st century. We live in truly unprecedented times for human-computer interactions. Thanatology is the scientific study of death, dying, loss, and grief. In contrast to the biological study of biological aging (cellular senescence) and programmed cell death (apoptosis), thanatology employs multiple professional lenses, medical, psychological, physical, spiritual, ethical, descriptive, and normative. In 1997, Carla Sofka introduced the term thanatechnology as "technological mechanisms such as interactive videodiscs and computer programs that are used to access information or aid in learning about thanatology topics." Onward to 2021, the advent of social media, the Internet of Things, and sensors that digitize and archive nearly every human movement and experience are taking thanatechnology, and by extension, digital transformation, to new heights. For example, what happens to digital remains of persons once they cease to exist physically? This article offers a critical study and snapshot of this nascent field, and the "un-disciplinary" sociotechnical issues digital thanatechnologies raise in relation to big data. We also discuss how best to critically govern this new frontier in systems science and the digital society. We suggest that new policy narratives such as (1) the right to nonparticipation in relation to information and communication technologies and (2) the planetary public goods deserve further attention to democratize thanatechnology and big data. To the extent that systems science often depends on data from online platforms, for example, in times of pandemics and ecological crises, "critical thanatechnology studies," introduced in this article, is a timely and essential field of scholarship with broad importance for systems science and planetary health.

Life? Or Theatre? by Charlotte Salomon

Reviewed by: Life? Or Theatre?by Charlotte Salomon Chloe Julius (bio) Keywords museology, Britain, Holocaust Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theatre?Jewish Museum London, 11 8, 2019– 03 1, 2020 "How beautiful life is. I believe in life! I will live for them all!" —Charlotte Salomon, Life? Or Theatre?, 1941–1943 Like many of its contemporaries in Europe and the United States, the Jewish Museum in London has made death its subject. While the museum exists to memorialize both Jewish life and Jewish lives, in its narration of the history of British Jewry, endings are given precedence over beginnings. In one display, the East End of the early twentieth century is revived through a miniature recreation of one of its streets. In another, filmed testimonies of Holocaust survivors who settled in Britain after the war are relayed alongside vitrines containing their artifacts from Nazi Europe. Approximating shrines, these displays call attention not to the livingthat happened in either the East End or Europe, but rather the absence of these Jewish worlds from the contemporary landscape. In the rare instances where Jewish presence is emphasized, certain fissures emerge, for example, in the gap that opens between the ceremonial objects exhibited in the display Living Faith, and the predominantly secular leanings of those photographed for Through a Queer Lens Portraits: Portraits of LGBTQ Jews. The sum of these various parts does not amount to a whole; on the contrary, the intended effect is to offer a portrait of British Jewry that is fatally incomplete. At first blush, the Jewish Museum's presentation of Charlotte Salomon's Life? Or Theatre?, 1941–1943slots comfortably into its broader typography. Death is both the subject and context of this multi-gouache work, [End Page 281]the narrative of which follows a family devastated by multiple suicides, and whose author was murdered in Auschwitz. Born in Berlin in 1917, Salomon's short lifespan of twenty-six years covered a period of extreme transformation in Germany, bookended as it was by two world wars, and containing within it the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic and the accelerating grip of the Nazi Party over Europe. Life? Or Theatre?traces the contours of Salomon's life without submitting to autobiography's attendant confessions: friends, lovers, and family members are given pseudonyms, and Salomon speaks with and through each of them. This polyvocality is enabled by Salomon's varied use of language; the majority of the work's 769 gouaches include painted text and an overlaid caption, as well as musical cues that give shape to the work's subtitle as a "play with music." Among this chorus, a central protagonist emerges—Charlotte Kann—whose frustrated attempt to pursue an artistic career in an increasingly hostile 1930s Berlin establishes the work's principal theme of unrealized potential, a theme that is mirrored in the experiences of the wider cast of German Jewish characters. Grieving, seemingly, offers itself as a valid aesthetic response to Life? Or Theatre?, which offers a window into a Berlin that once was, and an artist that is no longer. It is in this second sense that the Salomon presentation joins arms with an earlier exhibition mounted by the Jewish Museum, Amy Winehouse: Family Portrait. That Winehouse was both Jewish and a Camden local—where the museum is located—ostensibly justified the exhibition, which was mounted just two years after the singer tragically died aged twenty-seven. Yet that the exhibition was staged again in 2018 in a largely unaltered form suggested something else was at play. Demonstrably, for London's Jewish Museum, mourning sells, and this particular commemorative display drew in a previously untapped audience of grievers. However, what distinguishes the museum's Winehouse presentation from the Salomon one is that in the latter exhibition the work itself was given precedent. Whereas visitors to Amy Winehouse: Family Portraitwishing to pay their respects found a collection of ephemera on which to hang their anguish, potential mourners in Life? Or Theatre?discovered a wholly different proposition. Salomon—and Winehouse for that matter—affirmed life. While an artist's early death undoubtedly punctures the experience of their art, this [End Page 282] Click for larger view...

There’s a Starman Waiting in the Sky

There’s a Starman Waiting in the Sky Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Publisher Editor (bio) “The time,” said David Bowie to William Burroughs, “is five years to go before the end of the earth.” Bowie was explaining to Burroughs some of the ideas underlying his fifth studio album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which had been released about a year and half earlier. The two were meeting for the first time at the behest of Craig Copetas, who was conducting a two-way interview of them for Rolling Stone Magazine. Burroughs was nearing 60 at the time and Bowie was a few months shy of 27 — the mythical age of death of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and many other prominent musicians. The last track on Ziggy Stardust, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide,” grimly recalls the fate of the 27 Club: You’re too old to lose it, too young to choose it And the clock waits so patiently on your songYou walk past the café but you don’t eat when you’ve lived too long You’re a rock ‘n’ roll suicide Though Bowie would far outlive the 27 Club, Ziggy does not. He is taken by the rock ‘n’ roll death drive. Sigmund Freud, who coined the notion of the death drive, regarded it as a mediation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s affirmation of the will and Arthur Schopenhauer’s negation of it. But this is not the death drive that took Ziggy. It was one tempered more by Lacanian than Freudian thought. Slavoj Žižek, the great contemporary Lacanian philosopher, argues that the death drive should not be confused with the return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension or with the craving for self-annihilation. For him, “the death drive, on the contrary, is the very opposite of dying, it is a name for the ‘undead’ eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain.” After the Ziggy Stardust tour, the Ziggy character disappeared as quickly as he appeared — giving way to the titular character of Bowie’s follow-up album, Aladdin Sane (1973). I’d like to think though that fifty years after his disappearance from the Bowie tour stage, he lives on in a variation of the “undead” eternal life described by Žižek — rising and falling in the endless repetitive cycle of the spinning of the well-worn black vinyl of Ziggy Stardust. ________ The setting for their meeting was Bowie’s home in London, which we are told was decorated in a science-fiction mode. A huge painting by an artist who was a cross between Salvador Dalí and Norman Rockwell hung over a plastic sofa. Lunch, reports Copetas, was a Jamaican fish dish served with avocados stuffed with shrimp and a Beaujolais nouveau. It was prepared by a Jamaican in the Bowie entourage and served by, what he describes as “two interstellar Bowieties.” The Starman himself was wearing three-tone NASA jodhpurs — those full-length trousers, worn for horseback riding, that are close-fitting below the knee and have reinforced patches on the inside of the leg. Keep your ‘lectric eye on me babe Put your ray gun to my headPress your space face close to mine, loveFreak out in a moonage daydream oh! yea! (Bowie, “Moonage Daydream”) Burroughs, who lived at the time in a two-room flat in Piccadilly and shared a cab with Copetas to Bowie’s home, must have thought he landed on another planet — the glam psychedelic one where the Starman-in-the-sky-who-would-like-to-come-and-meet-us-but-thinks-he’d-blow-our-minds lives. Their meeting was on November 17, 1973 — two years and two days after the first recording sessions for Ziggy Stardust had ended. While their meeting was not as significant in literary history as say the dinner Horace Liveright had with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce on January 4, 1922, where by the end of dinner that night, Liveright had retained the services of...

Cinema documental contemporâneo, técnica e sociedade: Implicações sociológicas e culturais.

Frames of spots, cuts and movements, are important parts of the world cinematographic language. This cinematographic structure, reveals the intrinsic mixture of technical characteristics with the narrative wishes from the creative view of the filmmaker and the thematic issues which has been approached. In documentary cinema, these aspects come up because of cultural, political and ideological interests of the engaged authors in some social causes. The marketing purposes that currently dialogue with this kind of documentaries have created new forms of production and perception. From a comparative of two documentaries from different nationalities about artistic personalities such as “Amy”, by Asif Kapadia (England, EUA, 2015) and “Chico, Brazilian artist” by Miguel Faria Jr (Brazil, 2015) deals with different phases of life, of Amy Winehouse and Chico Buarque de Hollanda, these documentaries aim to focus on sociological expressions that arise from this process in these both contemporary documentaries.

A estética do sucesso vocal: discursos engendrados na construção de vozes de sucesso midiático

Este estudo visa analisar como é produzido um tipo de estética vocal, a partir de uma performatividade acerca de dizeres sobre vozes de sucesso. Acreditamos que, por conta dos discursos veiculados sobre a materialização da voz que (re)produz sujeitos e sentidos do sucesso, exista também uma discursivização complexa da estética da recepção do sucesso. Para a observação de tanto, empregaremos o aparato teórico metodológico da Análise do Discurso francesa, especialmente norteado pela noção de pré-construído, de pressuposto e subentendido, de intra e interdiscurso, bem como de deslizamentos (efeitos) metafóricos. Assim, investigaremos os funcionamentos discursivos midiáticos que tornam possível afirmar que a recepção da voz, em boa medida, engendra uma estética vocal de sucesso e, consequentemente, dá suporte à manutenção dessa determinada escuta. Em específico, analisaremos matérias da revista Rolling Stone, “Quando Michael se Tornou Michael” (SHEFFIELD, 2010), “Amy Winehouse 1983-2011” (ELISCU, 2011), e “Voz Imortal” (CAVALCANTI, 2015), publicadas nos anos de 2010, 2011 e 2015 respectivamente.

Some lines for Amy Winehouse (in the rain)

Some lines for Amy Winehouse (in the rain) The first time I heard Mary Wells sing The one who really loves you— I was eighteen in a place called Tam Ky where it rained for two months straight. I learned how to dance there in the rain, listening to soul music trying to get my shoulders into it. Soul brothers taught me—singing back up doing the dap, the drop down, dancing together. Now your voice brings back that fall the songs I learned—too young to know their lyrics would last, li...

Amy Winehouse: Back to Black and the Gothic

This article considers Amy Winehouse through the lens of the Female Gothic. With a specific focus on her song “Back to Black” (2007) and its accompanying video, an attempt is made to Gothicize the artist: to delineate an identity forged out of a variety of personalities and metaphors drawn from the Gothic. The various themes and tropes which emerge from this genre speak to a sense of continuity in terms of the structural constraints and anxieties that women face in society. To deploy the Gothic in relation to Amy Winehouse aims to give voice to gender related issues of power and autonomy. As part of the discussion I will foreground the significance of place in relation to both her narrative and music, by embracing a psychogeographic approach. This is to exploit a natural connection between Psychogeography and the Gothic by considering the possibility of darker currents and resonances via a relationship with the uncanny which they both share.

Amy Winehouse and the Mind of the Artist

The link between great creativity and psychopathology remains highly debated, but still a firm- ly established finding by many studies during the last century. Whereas biographic evidence for psychotic affective disorders has often been reported for creative artists, the present study takes into account the recent discussions about the traits of autism spectrum and ADHD that are found in high creativity. The most recent book by the Irish psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald, The Mind of the Artist serves as the frame of reference.The case under study is the British jazz singer Amy Winehouse (1983-2011). Two biographic narratives, one by each of her parents, are an- alysed for her cognitive and behavioural profile and personality traits. The cognitive strengths and weaknesses observed, as well as the descriptions of her social and non-social behaviours, closely match the ADHD and autistic symptoms. The identity diffusion that is a characteristic of highly creative artists according to Fitzgerald, also occurs as the prominent feature of singer’s persona with multifaceted ways of expression. Both autistic and ADHD traits were high in her persona which enhanced her creativity, but also caused problems in everyday life.

The dissonant personas of a female celebrity: Amy and the public self of Amy Winehouse

ABSTRACTCelebrities strategically perform their public selves in a culturally constrained context. A celebrity from a marginalised group may find that the persona they seek to construct is dissonant with prevailing social discourses and as a result their celebrity image becomes imbued with meanings contradictory to those they intend. This article uses the growing literature in persona studies to analyse and compare the public self created by the late British musician Amy Winehouse during her lifetime with the persona assembled posthumously by the filmmakers of the critically acclaimed documentary Amy. The article argues that while Winehouse presented herself in terms of excessive performativity, the film relies on the archetypal construct of the creative woman as a victim. In an act of public absolution the filmmakers seek to rescue Winehouse from her trainwreck tabloid image, but their cinematic depiction of a psychologically damaged feminine subject obscures the rebellious agency that was central to her self-presentation. The production and critical success of Amy is an exemplary case study of a wider cultural pattern in which the subversive persona created by a transgressive celebrity is displaced by a conventional persona that is produced by influential intermediaries and functions to reproduce dominant social discourses.

From unwilling celebrity to authored icon: reading Amy (Kapadia, 2015)

Asif Kapadia’s cinematic biography, Amy (2015) is a critically and commercially successful documentary feature that portrays the life and untimely death of celebrated singer Amy Winehouse. The film emphasises Winehouse’s ambivalent relationship with fame, while tracing the damaging effects that unwanted celebrity had on her physical and mental health. In this forum article, I assess the merits and problems with the film as a biography/obituary. I focus particularly in its representation of a disorderly female celebrity (Holmes and Negra 2011) and in its disavowal of the authored construction of its subject through a tonal register and stylistic structure that implies intimacy and authenticity.

Introduction: farming fame, memorialising Amy Winehouse, and recuperating Salman Khan

In this issue of the Forum, Mike Goodman and Michelle Phillipov make an intriguing intervention in the field by offering up the figure of the celebrity farmer as an under-explored and increasingly ...

‘Your Face Looks Backwards’

In his Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher argues that in the 21st century Western culture is in a state of stasis, which ‘has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of “newness”, of perpetual movement’. To substantiate this claim Fisher contrasts contemporary pop music, particularly that with a ‘classic’ sound – such as recordings by Adele, Amy Winehouse and Arctic Monkeys – with the pop of the 1970s and ‘80s, the ‘mutations’ of which enabled listeners of his generation to ‘measure the passage of cultural time’, concluding that today it is ‘the very sense of future shock which has disappeared from’ music and from culture generally. In this paper I apply Fisher’s observations to science fiction cinema focusing, on three recent time travel movies – Sound of My Voice (2011), Looper (2012) and About Time (2013) – and arguing that only the first can truly be considered science fiction, even though its relationship to the genre is the most problematic, since it may not involve time travel at all, and that the others, where time travel is used unambiguously, are instead exercises in what I term ‘genre-splicing’ – the introduction of elements of one type of narrative to another – a process which, like the ‘classic’ pop sound, is an indication of the lack of a sense of the future in current Western culture. A key element of Sound of My Voice is the promise of a future in which the culture industry has been replaced by an authentic folk culture; while this may appear merely a nostalgic fantasy, also identifiable in Looper’s fetishism of aspects of the Old West and the use of ‘nu-folk’ on About Time’s soundtrack, I argue, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s writings on nostalgia, that the Sound of My Voice’s representation of a ‘folk future’ is not an escapist fantasy but, like the uncertainty of the film’s generic status, a provocation, which asks us to reconsider our relationship both to contemporary capitalism and to the future which can be made to happen.

The history of rock 'n' roll in ten songs

Unlike all previous versions of rock 'n' roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points that everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs recorded between 1956 and 2008, then proceeds to dramatize how each embodies rock 'n' roll as a thing in itself, in the story it tells, inhabits, and acts out-a new language, something new under the sun. Transmission by Joy Division. All I Could Do Was Cry by Etta James and then Beyonce. To Know Him Is to Love Him, first by the Teddy Bears and almost half a century later by Amy Winehouse. In Marcus's hands these and other songs tell the story of the music, which is, at bottom, the story of the desire for freedom in all its unruly and liberating glory. Slipping the constraints of chronology, Marcus braids together past and present, holding up to the light the ways that these striking songs fall through time and circumstance, gaining momentum and meaning, astonishing us by upending our presumptions and prejudices. This book, by a founder of contemporary rock criticism-and its most gifted and incisive practitioner-is destined to become an enduring classic.