You're wondering now, aren't you.

You're wondering now, what to do, now you know this is the end
You're wondering how, you will pay, for the way you misbehaved
Amy Winehouse - "You're Wondering Now"

Those who burn brightest inevitably burn out the quickest, somehow.

I still remember when I first heard the news. I was about to turn in for the night, and my brother came over to me saying "Amy Winehouse is dead!"

At first I thought it was a sick joke, then I realised it couldn't be. People joke about others dying all the time, but they won't choose to joke about people who could actually really die, like Amy Winehouse, because it would hit a little too close to home.

In a way, it was surprising, and yet not so, because her personal troubles and struggles with booze and drugs were regular tabloid fodder. But she was also an incomparable talent. Certain people have that, and you know who they are, because when you try to compare them with others, you find that you can't. They redefined music on their own terms.

And online, I see many people expressing shock at her death, but more because she was a personality, and famous, more than anything else. Not many can perhaps understand the true tragedy her life is, and what a loss it is for music that a voice like this is cut short too soon. Just ask the average tweeter to name five Winehouse songs, and watch them fumble. I'll give them points if they can even sing the chorus of "Rehab", which has also turned out terribly ironic in the circumstances of her death.

Amy Winehouse was someone who had a voice bigger than what her persona would suggest, and she paved the way for a string of other soul singers after her, firstly the Welsh blue-eyed soul chanteuse Duffy, then the queen of heartbroken soul, Adele. With a style that mixed soul, ska, jazz and R&B, she took it all and made it her own.

One only has to check out another of her songs, "I Should Care", a jazz standard, sung in her earlier days, maybe before Rehab, to realise the depth of her musicality. She was someone who convention would never have been able to hold back anyway. And she was someone who was more than the drugs, booze and whatever.



But sometimes, we forget that the newspapers and tabloids like to practice a reductionist approach on people. It doesn't matter who you are as a person, I need a catchphrase for you, a soundbite, something I can use to describe all that you are, in maybe three paragraphs, or less. So you're a junkie, and if you do anything else, I won't write about it, so that's all people remember about you. They succeeded. And perhaps, they might have made her believe that was all she could ever become. But we will never know.

And now, she becomes another in the long line of what if's, like rock legends Kurt Cobain, Freddie Mercury, Jimi Hendrix, amongst others who died in their primes. If they had lived, would they have been greater? Or were they great because they died and became a what if? No one knows either.

However, there was one thing we do know. That we are glad that such people lived, because no matter how ultimately flawed they were, their gifts were shared with all of us, and we are all better because of them.