Live Oak Blues What happens.

This post is not really about Amy Winehouse–may that tortured soul finally rest in peace–but about how folks are responding to her death. As happens with such events, however expected they may be, Amy fans are coming out of the woodwork. Her voice was a powerful thing, the songs interesting, her early death awful and, one would think, tragically avoidable. And I think it’s that last bit that’s made her fans far more vocal postmortem than when she was still alive.

None more so than the folks at Allmusic. As the graphic to the left indicates (and thanks to Wayback Machine), on December 11, 2010, Allmusic judged Winehouse’s last record, “Back To Black,” to be a very respectable 4 stars. After her death, that record received an extra star. Why? I put the question to them and got back a form response claiming that “star ratings actually can change over time.” Yes, but of course that is not the point. She got upgraded only after her death. I knew they would do that and that’s why I checked.

I call this the “Kurt Cobain Effect,” because nowhere was this tendency more obvious than after his death. I well remember Nirvana before he died. They were popular, rebellious as any chart-topping band could be, but certainly nothing new (see the Melvins, Smashing Pumpkins, and Soul Asylum–all of whom did the “return to slow metal” thang before Nirvana did.)  People loved them, but not out of all proportion.

Until Kurt killed himself. Then the accolades tumbled down like so many gold pieces, Rolling Stone the most sycophantic of them all. According to them, Kurt Cobain (not Nirvana) was the Artist Of The Decade (1990s) and the 12th Greatest Guitarist of All Time (wait…what?). He was a damn good songwriter, fun to watch, but no one, not even Jann Wenner, would have called him these things while he was alive. Dying so tragically, so romantically, did that. Ironically, of course, he would have despised this kind of corporate attention. Oh, and Allmusic gives 5 stars to Nirvana’s last three albums, a distinction that very few artists have.

This is nothing new. How else could one explain how mediocre-at-best actors such as James Dean and Marilyn Monroe are revered today far beyond their output? Why them? Why Cobain? Why, when the Great Joe Strummer died (nothing less than a god in the music universe) was there barely a peep? But that is a topic for another post. Amy Winehouse’s music was good enough to stand on its own. I hope that people allow it to.