Messages from the Brink

On February 11, 1963 Sylvia Plath was found dead in her kitchen. She had put her head in the oven with the gas on. Ariel, her collection of poetry, was published posthumously in 1965. The poems, many written shortly before her suicide, dealt with depression and death with an intensity and authority owing both to her brilliance as a writer and the circumstances surrounding her death. She wrote, it seemed, from the brink of death, and knew and expressed things that no living person could.

Amy Winehouse died on Saturday. Her 2006 album "Back to Black" explored drug addiction and abuse, most famously in the single "Rehab." The causes of her death haven't yet been announced, but no one has much doubt they are drug related. For Winehouse's friends, family, and fans her death is very sad. At the same time, it lends a degree of credibility to her music that is almost unheard-of for a pop artist these days.

In 2011 everything is bullshit, but especially pop music. Everything we hear has been Auto-Tuned, packaged, market-tested, honed down to a smooth cog in a machine designed to extract money from us as efficiently as possible. While some of this music is enjoyable, none of it feels very true. There's just so much between the artist and the listener. Beyonce came out with "Single Ladies" years after Jay-Z put a ring on it. A stellar song, it nonetheless screams "target demographic" from the first line ("All the single ladies! All the single ladies!"). I'm not saying, of course, that every song needs to be biographically accurate. Just that you can often feel a certain amount of calculation and bean-counting going on. But after Winehouse wrote "Rehab," she really went to rehab. Someone who willfully hurts herself, the thinking goes, need not be suspected of bullshitting us to help herself.

But this is starting to sound like a whole lot more bullshit. Self-destruction can be as manipulative as anything else (suicide attempts as cries for help, etc.). And if the only way to declare your authenticity is to hurt yourself, that doesn't leave a lot of range for self-expression, does it?