'I Told You I Was Trouble'

I just sighed when I read the lede in the Los Angeles Times this morning: "LONDON — Amy Winehouse, the beehived soul-jazz diva whose self-destructive habits overshadowed a distinctive musical talent, was found dead Saturday in her London home, police said. She was 27." Of all the events that might shock me in our untidy world, Winehouse's passing is least among them. I mourn her death. But among musical prodigies, talent and trouble are often of a piece, a blended cocktail that invites tragedy. History is crowded with it progenies. It was only a question of time before Winehouse joined them. The trajectory of her barely lived life — rags to riches to rigamortis — is all too familiar. Eerily familiar. Like Winehouse, age 27 was the last flashing signpost Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain saw before they, too, careened off the cliff in a drug-induced haze. Soul-jazz diva Billie Holiday (whom Winehouse most resembled) drove a bit further along the continental divide of madness before, at 44, she finally let go of the wheel. Like her predecessors, Winehouse's meteoric rise was as inevitable as her premature demise. Perhaps she understood that on some level. "I cheated myself / Like I knew I would / I told you I was trouble / You know that I'm no good," went the stanza of a popular single in her acclaimed "Back to Black" album. Sadly, she may have believed it. Art is a revolt against fate, as writer Andre Malraux once said. Yet fate is hard to deny. Rest untroubled, Amy Winehouse. Rest in peace.

"Teach Me Tonight" in December 2004: