UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING BLOG

I wasn’t a major fan of Amy Winehouse but I appreciated the fact that she was one of the rare ones: wild, twisted, raw talent that broke all of the rules, saw the boundaries and dove over them and lived a grand wreck of a brief life that was tragic and triumphant.

Amy did everything wrong. Amy did everything right.

Her lyrics told stories that were reflective of who she was and why she did what she did. But they were also a form of S.O.S. put to music in a way that was intended to disguise the pain and morph it into a make believe party. If you are super cool, the thinking goes, can you really be a lonely freak?

I doubt anyone knows what Amy said right before she died. We never do. Not from any public figure whose speeches and books and indie hits bring them fame and fortune and define who they are in broad strokes. In the arena. Under the klieg lights and before the roaring crowds.

But this is all the packaged goods. When something goes awfully wrong, when the star sees that she has run full bore into the jaws of the suicidal set she has built and teased at life from, does the bravado melt into fear? Remorse? Or does she go out the way she came in, putting up a bloody fight, giving death the finger, confronting the fears the way she turned her back on the rules.

Amy Winehouse was but a shooting star. She will not be remembered with the passing years. Her name will not be engraved in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. But this convoluted child from another planet– a vastly different place and time– did something so few ever accomplish: for a brief and shining moment, she changed things.

Can you guess what she said before the lights went out?

Mark Stevens
CEO
MSCO | The Art and Science of Growing Businesses
www.MSCO.com
www.YourMarketingSucks.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 27th, 2011 at 10:35 am and is filed under Unconventional Thinking . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.