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The New Amy Winehouse Documentary Accidentally Exposed Our Sexist Double Standards
http://mic.com/articles/121831/this-is-what-everyone-should-be-talking-about-in-the-amy-winehouse-documentaryAmy Winehouse sang like a jazz diva, yet carried herself like a punk rocker.
She, better than any other artist, could gracefully meld classic jazz instrumentation with devastatingly modern lyrics. Delicately crooned lines like "What kind of fuckery are we?" fit right alongside classical truths like "Love is a fate resigned" without the slightest friction. She had "a voice to kill, and a habit of fearless inquiry into the unsightly innards of human emotion," SF Weekly wrote after her death in 2011. She co-wrote every song on Back to Black, and her producer Mark Ronson told the Telegraph in January, "When she wrote, there was no editing. It came out like, this is the truth and this is how it's gonna stay." You'd never learn these facts watching Amy.
That's because beside the occasional shot of a lyric sheet or snippet of concert footage, Amy Winehouse the artist is largely absent. The film prefers to explore Amy Winehouse the tragic spectacle — the tabloid figure the media pursued throughout the last few years of her life.
A double standard that stretches beyond death. Winehouse is not the first female artist to have her artistic achievements overlooked in favor of a close read of her erratic behavior. In her look at Amy for Pitchfork, Molly Beauchemin offers an exhaustive list of female artists who have suffered the same postmortem treatment as Winehouse, including Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday and Whitney Houston.
Unfortunately, the documentary's angle fits an all too common trend in the highly gendered way that the media celebrates our artists and their legacies. Male artists can count on their artistic contributions receiving lengthy discussions following their deaths. Female artists, on the other hand, will struggle to have their art recognized through the scandal.
She, better than any other artist, could gracefully meld classic jazz instrumentation with devastatingly modern lyrics. Delicately crooned lines like "What kind of fuckery are we?" fit right alongside classical truths like "Love is a fate resigned" without the slightest friction. She had "a voice to kill, and a habit of fearless inquiry into the unsightly innards of human emotion," SF Weekly wrote after her death in 2011. She co-wrote every song on Back to Black, and her producer Mark Ronson told the Telegraph in January, "When she wrote, there was no editing. It came out like, this is the truth and this is how it's gonna stay." You'd never learn these facts watching Amy.
That's because beside the occasional shot of a lyric sheet or snippet of concert footage, Amy Winehouse the artist is largely absent. The film prefers to explore Amy Winehouse the tragic spectacle — the tabloid figure the media pursued throughout the last few years of her life.
A double standard that stretches beyond death. Winehouse is not the first female artist to have her artistic achievements overlooked in favor of a close read of her erratic behavior. In her look at Amy for Pitchfork, Molly Beauchemin offers an exhaustive list of female artists who have suffered the same postmortem treatment as Winehouse, including Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday and Whitney Houston.
Unfortunately, the documentary's angle fits an all too common trend in the highly gendered way that the media celebrates our artists and their legacies. Male artists can count on their artistic contributions receiving lengthy discussions following their deaths. Female artists, on the other hand, will struggle to have their art recognized through the scandal.
The rest at link.
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