The inner demons
Amy Winehouse would have turned 38 on September 14 of this year. Unfortunately, July 23rd marks the tenth anniversary of her death. The exceptional artist was only 27 years when she joined the infamous Club 27.
Brian Jones († 1969), Jimi Hendrix († 1970), Janis Joplin († 1970), Jim Morrison († 1971), Kurt Cobain († 1994) and Amy Winehouse († 2011) are the most famous "members" of this inglorious club of music icons that burned out too soon. It's a club where you wish should never have been founded. But unfortunately you enter a world of the subjunctivness, when you start to imagine what the world of music could been like, if things had turned out differently. Would Brian Jones have rejoined the Rolling Stones and shaped their music up to this day? Could Jimi Hendrix still electrify the world with his virtuoso guitar playing and Janis Joplin sing another masterpiece after Pearl? Would Jim Morrison have continued to focus on poetry and eventually won the Nobel Prize for Literature? Would Kurt Cobain have become the Dylan of the Grunge generation, if he had written songs as a therapy for his battered soul? And Amy Winehouse? Perhaps she would have escaped the fatal downward spiral that came with her fame. Free from loneliness, depression and drug addiction she may have found peace in the infinte depths of her musical talent and could have continued to be a celebrated star on the stages of this world. Unfortunately, we will never know.
Vincent Damon Furnier, better known as Alice Cooper and one of the most successful musicians of the 70s, once aptly remarked that only by seperating his fictional character from private person, that he was able to free himself from addiction and self-destruction. Or as the famous German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder remaked "Angst eats the soul". (FS)
