Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, and the Gendering of Martyrdom
“In the same season we’ve been presented with two different
comprehensive documentaries of two of our most iconic and tragic,
gone-too-soon figures in recent decades. Brett Morgan’s Montage of Heck
depicts the slow unraveling of Kurt Cobain in the preamble to his
suicide, Asif Kapadia’s Amy depicts a corollary narrative about Amy
Winehouse’s life, and in the process sheds light on how unequal the
treatment of male and female artists truly is, even in death.”“In the course of Amy, a newscaster reports on
Winehouse’s infamous meltdown in Serbia by commenting that “she had the
chance to make a big comeback and she totally BLEW it!” while laughing
through a segment that dovetails with George Lopez announcing that
Winehouse had won a Grammy by saying, “someone call and wake her up at 6
PM and let her know” before calling her “a drunk” with a derisive
scoff. A slurry of ugly tabloid images fly across the screen and we see
paparazzi preying upon her existential nadir– meanwhile, Montage of
Heck posits a cache of neat magazine covers that offer obsequious,
reverential coverage of a man whose drug addiction was portrayed as
incidental to his supreme talent. Even though both deaths were motivated
by depression underscored by narcotics and celebrity, Montage depicts a
context in which the public was willing Cobain to succeed, whereas
Winehouse, when confronted with similar drug-addled obstacles, was met
with ridicule and slander. If Amy proves anything about the life and
times of Winehouse, it’s that newscasters, tabloids, and even respected
media outlets reported on her shortcomings with enough thinly-veiled
aggression to weaken what little resolve the drugs hadn’t already
sapped. Cobain’s struggle with drugs, meanwhile, was all but an open
secret while he was alive, whispered about or written around in order to
maintain good graces and access to the superstar and his band.The unequal treatment here is not new.“
“The pattern is always the same: one Billie Holiday obituary dedicated an entire column to discussing her 1947 arrest and narcotics conviction; years later a Keith Moon obituary mentioned
only that “his death comes at a time when he seemed to have recovered
from the excesses of earlier years”, without so much as mentioning that
those “excesses” included a well-documented struggle with alcoholism and
the 32 clomethiazole pills that ultimately killed him. Whitney Houston,
like Amy Winehouse, was depicted as a substance-addled mess
in the run up to her overdose death, much unlike the courtesy that was
lavished unto Michael Jackson, whose latter-day prescription drug habit
was neatly and often dismissively attributed to the rueful loneliness of
fame, if it was even reported at all.Even when public meltdowns or existential tumult doesn’t result in
death, the media’s depiction of female artists still tends toward
collusion. When Lauryn Hill took a sabbatical from music because she
objected to the way the industry commodified her lifestyle– a choice
that dovetailed with a concurrent broadcast of religious faith– she was
depicted as a crazy person.
When Nas, Mase, Yasiin Bey and even to a lesser extent, Kendrick Lamar
all did the same, they were heralded as noble, bravely pius. The
reportage was damaging and unequal: when Hill left the country it was portrayed as exile; when Mos Def left the country it was to become Black Dante. …“[T]here is a schism and a definite, unfair gender binary that favors
troubled men over troubled women–and their right to be troubled. Men
who grapple with issues that coincide with art and fame are canonized in
death; women who do the same are made lesser, somehow, by their own
unequivocal loss.It’s very likely that the unfair portrayal of women stems from a puritanical notion of the “woman as artist”–
this often unarticulated pedagogical idea that women, by their very
baby-making capacity, are somehow never able to–and shouldn’t– immerse
themselves as fully into art as men, because the question of gender
gets in the way. Women are forever seen as outsiders, interlopers, their
genius owed to the nearest male manager (The Runaways),
producer-svengali (Ke$ha), famous boyfriend (Joni Mitchell) or husband
(Alice Coltrane). This incredibly subtle “othering” of women, coupled
with a culture-wide superficiality that places the onus of physical
beauty more squarely on female celebrities than on men, sets female
artists up for spectacle– the pernicious underbelly of gossip.A
friend of mine once told me about an art historian who lamented that
fact that Yoko Ono would never be as widely-respected as several
contemporary male artists because she was a mother. “Women who live
art– who put their art first, above their families– are seen as
selfish, neglectful parents…Men who do
the same are regarded as geniuses consumed by their work.””