NEW YORK (AP) — Amy Winehouse released only two albums in her life, one of which sold more than a million copies, won five Grammys and sparked a retro soul movement that hasn't yet stopped.
The small output, in inverse relation to her outsized talent, made her death Saturday in London all the more tragic. Fans will only be able to imagine the unrecorded singles, the never-to-be concerts and the comeback album that didn't come.
It's a sadly familiar script in pop music, the history of which is checkered with greats and would-be greats snuffed out too early in life.
Almost as soon as news of Winehouse's death broke and spread across social media, fans were inducting her into the unfortunate pantheon of music talents gone too soon. Many noted that Winehouse, 27, shared the same age at death as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison.
The British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, though, realized that a meaningful commonality was being mistaken for coincidence.
"It's not age that Hendrix, Jones, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain & Amy have in common," wrote Bragg on Twitter. "It's drug abuse, sadly."
Those names were touted on the Web as the 27 Club, a ghoulish glamourizing of rock star death that makes it sound as though even in death VIPs remain behind a seductive velvet rope.
It's a term, sometimes called the Forever 27 Club, that has spawned a Wikipedia entry, an independent 2008 movie ("The 27 Club"), numerous websites and at least one book ("The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock & Roll").
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hcvwQM_CBRMuogJuhuiuams8PRCw?docId=bd74e102da1844fea98e87d529e5fb6d
The small output, in inverse relation to her outsized talent, made her death Saturday in London all the more tragic. Fans will only be able to imagine the unrecorded singles, the never-to-be concerts and the comeback album that didn't come.
It's a sadly familiar script in pop music, the history of which is checkered with greats and would-be greats snuffed out too early in life.
Almost as soon as news of Winehouse's death broke and spread across social media, fans were inducting her into the unfortunate pantheon of music talents gone too soon. Many noted that Winehouse, 27, shared the same age at death as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison.
The British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, though, realized that a meaningful commonality was being mistaken for coincidence.
"It's not age that Hendrix, Jones, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain & Amy have in common," wrote Bragg on Twitter. "It's drug abuse, sadly."
Those names were touted on the Web as the 27 Club, a ghoulish glamourizing of rock star death that makes it sound as though even in death VIPs remain behind a seductive velvet rope.
It's a term, sometimes called the Forever 27 Club, that has spawned a Wikipedia entry, an independent 2008 movie ("The 27 Club"), numerous websites and at least one book ("The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock & Roll").
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hcvwQM_CBRMuogJuhuiuams8PRCw?docId=bd74e102da1844fea98e87d529e5fb6d
Posted in: entertainment
