At Atlas Rocked, we aim to celebrate music for its quality and call bullshit when we see it. And also make dick jokes, because music writing needs more dick jokes (we’re looking at you, Pitchfork!).
With that in mind, we present Jay Caspian Kang’s never-ending diarrhea squirt of pseudo-profundity regarding the death of Amy Winehouse. The Grantland piece is a wobbling Jenga tower of overwrought post-modern buzzwords interlaced with labyrinthine, nebulous prose disguised as “deep musings.” We read the whole rancid pile of music-writing offal so you don’t have to, and we’ve proceeded to eviscerate it, FJM-style:
The first time I heard “Rehab,” I was sitting in a bar in the Mission District of San Francisco.
Oh Jesus Christ, do I really wanna put myself through this?
I was with an old friend of mine, who, for some unknown reason, refuses to listen to music recorded after 1975.
I believe that “unknown reason” is that your friend is a fucking asshole, and so are you for being friends with such a person.
We both liked this particular bar because the jukebox was good —
Spoiler alert: there is no “larger point” here. You will finish reading this excruciating opening paragraph and learn it’s too tepid and superficial to have any sort of gonzo value and it sure as shit has nothing to do with ruminating on the demise of Amy Winehouse.
in San Francisco, especially in the Mission,
“Did I mention that I was hanging out in an uber-cool section of an uber-cool city, just getting my juke on? That’s uber-cool squared. You would think it’s uber-cool times two, but coolness operates like Inception — uber-coolness rises exponentially as you move to deeper levels of uber-coolness.”
you are always choosing between the white noise of dozens of bloggers and social-networking entrepreneurs yelling about the Internet,
“Broadband!” “Information superhighway!” “WordPress!” “Search engine optimization!”
or some bearded bartender’s idea of what is both hip and ironic, which usually means AC/DC or Metallica.
“Yeah, hipsters and their hipster beards and their hippity hipster irony and that hipsterdipster way they drink cheap beer and stuff!” If lazy hipster mockery is the new hipster, then that sentence is this asshole.
I don’t remember what we were talking about,
That’s a shame, because now you can’t lead us down that rabbit hole of tangential afterbirth.
but at some point, after about an hour of Sam Cooke and Steve Earle, someone got tired of our lame, hipster-dinosaur choices and put on “Rehab.”
Self-deprecatingly mocking your own musical taste while flaunting said musical taste at the same time. Bravo. I wonder if you’ll be included in your colleague’s humblebrag list next time around…
At first, I wanted to dislike [Winehouse]. Mostly because the dregs of my hard-knock hip-hop wannabe adolescence objected to the idea of a white girl fronting what was undeniably the coolest doo-wop band in the world.
UGH — the “white girl with a black voice” thing is still a thing? We have a black president but we’re still not past this?
The next day, I downloaded Back to Black, played it on repeat, and wrote something very bad and very earnest
I think we’re reading it.
…but when I heard the news on Saturday that Amy Winehouse had been found dead in her apartment in London, I dug that document up out of my hard drive, read it over, and wondered if there would ever again be a moment when the process of building pop-star golems out of vintage threads would yield someone as charismatic, and, yes, authentic, as Amy Winehouse.
Heroin = Authenticity
…Our hyperlinked society has ported itself into a thoroughly referential era, where the nods to the past no longer evoke something real, but rather, the nods are just nods to the nods themselves.
PO-MOGASM!
…Within this circuitous landscape, where does one place a hatchet-faced neo-doo-wopper whose songs were deliberate anachronisms,
I dunno, the Pop/Rock section probably?
but whose live shows always straddled the ravine that separates genius from a discomforting debauchery?
HAVING A GREAT SOUL VOICE DOES NOT A GENIUS MAKE! COOL THE FUCK OUT, PEOPLE.
That was always the strange duality of Amy Winehouse — she was a product of our synthetic times, but the force of her performance and the unfolding tragedy of her battle with addiction seemed to hearken, earnestly, back to an era when music demanded its own significance.
“I am the rightful owner of that significance, and I DEMAND that you give it back posthaste!” said Music angrily.
She, somehow, was a predictable creation who took her given music contraption and blew it out.
Gah — Jay, what the fuck does that even mean. I want you to explain to me what you envisioned as the concrete idea behind the statement. What. Does. That. Fucking. Mean.
The limits of language
You would know
and our postmodern hoods preclude earnest conversation about music — all that’s said, really, is that music is music and corporations are corporations
Who? Where did corporations come from? What?
and we should just shut up and either appreciate it or ignore it altogether.
Sooo, you’re either with music or against it.
Outside of pulling from a grab bag of ornate adjectives and music-speak adverbs,
You mean like what you’ve been doing for the past 10,000 words?
there is simply no good way to describe the fact that Amy Winehouse was realer than, say, Katy Perry — her music, more authentic and earned;
I think the general rules is that a musician who doesn’t sing about alien sex and ejaculate whipped cream from her tits is more authentic and earned than an artist who does sing about alien sex and ejaculate whipped cream from her tits.
her spectacle, more compelling. I suppose the best way to put it would be this: If we indulge both fantasies, it’s just better to believe a British girl obsessed with Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Dinah Washington,
Behold my references that you are RIGHT NOW feverishly looking up on Wikipedia! HA! I Wikipedia’d them HOURS ago, but you, YOU feel foolish RIGHT NOW AT THIS VERY MOMENT.
and hip-hop would pull together a drug-fueled hybrid of those influences and deliver it without hesitation or modesty.
To recap: Amy Winehouse is an amalgamation of her influences, her talent, and drugs. That is Great Pit of Carkoon-level deepness right there.
…In soul music, sexuality should never be self-evident. Stank, a term which
perfectly described Amy Winehouse?
loosely defines the oomf a singer puts into a phrase,
Oh, that clears it up. Stank = oomf. Look, I know that music is subjective, but this essay is now delving into that seventh circle of hell saved for sportswriters who celebrate a quarterback’s “intangibles.”
is at its purest when it comes from an outsider, who, for whatever reason, wants, nay, needs, to assert herself onto the audience. Pretty girls have a particularly tough time with stank — as much as Beyoncé snarls and groans and humps the stage, it’s tough to believe that Queen B. has ever been anything but the Queen.
Jesus Fucking Christ. Again, this is no different than when a hack sportswriter spews forth utter nonsense about undrafted free agents working harder than those glory boys at the top of the draft board because they weren’t BORN with the gift of a 4.3 40, that superstar athletes don’t have to “work for it,” while utility guys get it done using things like “grit” and “scrappiness.”
The evidence of [Beyonce’s] hotness engulfs the timbre of her insistence.
You sound like the fucking mad hatter at this point.
…[Amy’s] stank was borrowed, sure,
The best kind of stank.
from old-school hip-hop, from Etta James, from Marvin Gaye, but the sight of her weird, deteriorating body on stage (did we ever think the breast implants were anything but a middle finger to the expectations placed on female singers?)
“Yeah man, I’m gonna really piss off those mongrels out there who think famous women have to be beanpoles with giant tits by…going out of my way to be a beanpole with giant tits. That’ll show ‘em!”
combined with the stank she put on every note could transport the sight of a gangly woman staggering around on stage into that rare, sexualized arena where the song becomes an incandescent thing, where the audience collectively holds its breath as the thingness of the song spreads out into their chests.
Amy Winehouse performs stanky ghostsongs.
Mr. Kang proceeds to breakdown Winehouse’s 2008 Grammy performance, mentioning Billie Holiday and a bunch of dead singers as well as Mary J. Blige and 50 Cent…because, what’s old is new again, and all that shit that everyone is already WELL AWARE OF. WE GET IT. WINEHOUSE IS INFLUENCED BY SOUL’S GREATS, AND YOU HAVE NO PROBLEM LISTING EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM.
And then…commence the “Here’s what it would look like if Chuck Klosterman got a lobotomy” experiment:
5:40 This is where the postmodern, music-blogging brain implodes into a chorus of apologies. I want to apologize for pointing out (fervently) a meaningful (possibly) moment in the life of someone who has just died. I also want to point out that same moment, fervently, for earnest reasons. I want to pooh-pooh anyone who would have the gall to suggest that any televised moment is “real,” I want to write 500 words
Please God, not 500 more!
about what the word “real,” means in the “zeitgeist,” I want to tweet out the video link and the hashtag,
I AM TECH SAVVY!
but hide behind an ironic emoticon, I want to make a joke about the Grammys and link to the time when Homer Simpson threw his Grammy off the balcony.
“Lest you thought my bank of references contained only classic soul, I am well-versed in a bevy of Simpson jokes, too.”
Despite all these interruptions, it’s touching to watch a young woman realize that her life is probably not exactly what she thought her life had been.
The only plausible explanation at this point is that he’s on a pay-per-word basis at Grantland.
…Despite the escalating body count and the recorded evidence, we will probably never know whether musicians need to live out their lives on the ugly side of that ravine. Would Kurt Cobain have been better without the heroin? What about Hunter S. Thompson? Jack Kerouac? Billie Holiday?
STOP EQUATING AMY FUCKING WINEHOUSE WITH THESE PEOPLE. YES, SHE HAD A GREAT VOICE AND A COUPLE GOOD ALBUMS. SO DID THE FUCKING CRANBERRIES.
…the torrent of her relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil submarined her down into uncharted depths of rapture and depression. There, she found the inspiration for Back to Black, the 33 minutes that carried her into the international spotlight. Then, as the myth ultimately dictates (every debt must be paid), the same gyre that inspired her was also what took her life.
Yeah, that’s what took her life. Unless it was the heroin. Yeah, it was the heroin.
…we wanted her to be half-drunk, staggering around, mocking what we had made of her.
You see, it was US, all along.
…Nobody would have been surprised, really, if Amy Winehouse’s problems had been marketing ploys, just as nobody was surprised at the news of her death. Until the corpse shows up, there is a collective suspension of disbelief, where we put aside the reality of the icon in favor of our desire to turn her into social-media chaff…she was reduced to a talking point.
“Gossip rags frequently wrote about Amy Winehouse.” THAT’S SOME PROFOUND STANK UP IN THIS BITCH.
…Amy Winehouse showed us that there is a way to put down stakes in the flood that turns everything into everything else, what once was into what is now, and what is now into a hodgepodge of what can be repackaged and resold.
So after weathering Kang’s word typhoon, the grand conclusion we’re rewarded with is: if a performer channels his or her influences into a unique and new sound, people will pay attention to it. I HOPE WE HAVE A LOT OF SPONGES RIGHT NOW BECAUSE MY MIND GOO IS BLOWN ALL OVER THE MOTHERFUCKING CEILING.
