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Music

An Obligatory and Pointless Debate About Amy Winehouse

It's the moral tussle over the legacy of a singer who died at a young age in mysterious circumstances that everyone's talking about.

It's the moral tussle over the legacy of a singer who died at a young age in mysterious circumstances that everyone's talking aboutAmy Winehouse, should we be releasing her half-completed demos even though she's not alive any more?

Every hack we know is scoring easy coin forcing themselves into a clear (yet controversial) position on either side of the argument, appealing to your overactive senses of indignation and vicarious sadness in the process. So we created two journalists out of thin air to wrap the warm blanket of self-righteousness around you and whisper in your ear: "It's okay, baby – it's the world that's wrong."

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AMY WINEHOUSE SHOULD BE REMEMBERED FOR HER MUSIC. NOT HER OTHER MUSIC.
by Neil Lester

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I still remember where I was the moment I heard Amy Winehouse had died. The text flashed up on my phone, as I was stood next to my grandmother, who was in intensive care, entering the final hours of her battle with colorectal cancer.

“Oh my god guys, Amy Winehouse is dead!” I exclaimed, to the alarm of my grandmother, who misheard and started to believe that she herself was already dead. She began saying things like: “The afterlife’s very nice, actually,” and “I miss you all so much,” in the mistaken belief that we couldn’t hear her, then got quite confused when we started responding. But I had already run from the room. I was bereft, my face hot with tears. She was gone. Poor, tragic Amy. Where was I going to get my jazzy sixties-tinged R&B pop from now? It wasn’t exactly the sort of stuff major labels spent a lot of money producing in industrial batches, so my loss was already doubled.

These past few months, we’ve all grieved for Amy in our own special ways. Some people have expressed it through flowers or trinkets left outside her home. Others through candlelight vigils. For my part, I have expressed it through a series of ponderous articles in broadsheet newspapers about her significance as an artist and the importance of preserving her legacy.

But now, it appears that all our heartfelt grievings are going to be shattered by her posthumous so-called "album", imminently due for release. Yes, the vultures are back to feed on her carrion again. They chased her into the grave. Now, even in the grave, Amy Winehouse is still being chased by people who want to extort money from her. She’s having to run in her own grave. And in the grave, there’s just nowhere to hide. For make no mistake, if you go into a store next week, and you buy her album, you are essentially buying what killed her – the music industry.

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Let’s not forget that these evil vultures sunk millions of pounds into recording and marketing her. Had they not done so, it seems entirely plausible that poor, wee Amy would still be alive today. In my mind’s eye, I like to think she’d probably be wearing big-bowed pink and white dresses, running a cake shop outside Harpenden, happy as can be, doling out lots of little marzipan squares from beneath the ivory awnings of Back To White.

Those who knew Amy will recognise her as an intensely private person. She was someone just trying to make it from one day to the next with the minimum of fuss, as she stumbled beneath a massive beehive hairdo and micro-skirt between a series of celeb-filled Camden boozers. So why should we be foisted with an unnecesary glimpse into what she got up to in the privacy of a multimillion-pound recording studio?

If she were alive today, I’m sure Amy would have only one message for us: “Please, don’t release my record. These songs have me in them, yes, true. But they are not finished. To release them would be like looking into my diary. PS: My soul won’t rest until someone warns Pete Doherty to change his ways. Someone needs to stop him from making the same mistakes I have. Before it’s too late.”

Infuriated and appalled by this opinion adopted by a fake journalist for money that doesn't exist? Try out page two for some immediate TLC. Everyone's right on the internet!

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AMY WINEHOUSE IS DEAD. SHE CAN’T HEAR US ARGUING ABOUT HER LEGACY.
by Paul McCormick

I remember hearing Back To Black for the first time. It was revolutionary – like hearing Adele for the first time, or Coldplay. ‘Big’ you thought, 'Just big.' It was a jazz-soul explosion in my ears. I immediately knew that the name Amy Winehouse was going to become very significant to the future of British music, especially given as she’d been at number one in the charts for a month by then.

Bowled over, I soon conspired to meet her. We were transfixed. “She’s so beautiful, such charisma. And yet so unstable. I feel like this girl will die tragically,” I suggested to my colleague. “So if you’re thinking of putting anything on eBay memorabilia-wise, well I’d wait a few years if I were you.”

Sadly, my tragic prediction came tragically true. They tried to make her go to rehab. She said “Gurgle, choke, croak…” But now that she’s dead as a doornail, is there any reason to keep on shoving her unreleased product in the bottom drawer?

I would argue "No." Firstly, and most obviously, because she’s dead. She is an ex-parrot. She has ceased to be. She can’t hear you. She can’t see you re-dubbing her vocals and adding a string section, no matter how high you turn the amps up. And unless the Golder’s Green Crematorium made a major mistake, there’s very little that can be done for her career, either positively or negatively, because she’s not going to be around to enjoy it. People who talk about artists’ careers in those sorts of sentient terms might as well be trying to divine the wishes of Yogi Bear.

Secondly, for all the boo-hooing over legacy, it’s by no means certain that an artist's posthumous work has to mean a crapslide anyway. Often, the material an artist releases after death is amongst their very finest – who can forget Biggie’s "Hypnotize", Queen’s Made in Heaven, or indeed, Raul Julia’s Street Fighter: The Movie?

I liken it to the hullabaloo created when Michael Jackson’s posthumous record came out last year, to similar howls of protest. Did it really deserve it? “Yes, he’s done 'Billy Jean',” we all thought. “But that one’s already in the bag. It’s not like it’s going anywhere. So wouldn’t it be nice to also hear the track he made with Akon, too?” We all know that 2Pac’s "California Love" was a classic. But does that change just because his record label are curious as to what would happen to sales if Chamillionaire added a couple of verses to an old tape that Pac once flowed on? So surely it’s just good LOLs to have them digitally add a Nas verse to one of Amy’s old B-sides because, according to the press release, "Nas was one of her favourite artists."

In fact, I like to think that, if Amy Winehouse were alive today, she’d have only one message for us now: “Please, please, release my record. I worked hard on these songs. They were my life. But now my life has ended. So I hope that they can be yours. PS: I am very happy in heaven. I am finally off the drugs and at peace.”