Amy Winehouse’s Parents: Resigned To Their Daughter’s Addiction?

Amy Winehouse‘s death has received much sympathy both in the press and on social media with fans and colleagues remembering the young singer for her talent rather than her demons. But with heartfelt condolences and the support of fans has also been the general acceptance that the Grammy winner would eventually meet an untimely end — even by her mother, Janice Winehouse, who told the Daily Mail that her daughter’s death was “only a matter of time.”

Amy’s image as musician was no doubt rooted in her struggled with drugs and alcohol, as her “Rehab” single placed her addiction in a near comical narrative. But unlike some songstresses who donne media-savvy characters for the sake of record sales, Amy’s problems were real. And yet her open reference to them, both in her image as an entertainer and in her music, seems to have garnered a collective sigh from the public who assumed that things would end this way for the singer. Because Amy herself became so culturally synonymous with drugs and drinking binges, I find that many fans and even her family seemed more or less resigned to her lifestyle — despite that alcoholism and drug addictions are serious problems with fatal consequences. Amy’s playful use of her demons in her music may have been used to make light of her consequences, but the public’s open acceptance of her problems as part of her presentation did very little to save the young woman’s life.

Amy comments on her own stubbornness to get well in her album “Back To Black,” and her parents have since spoken about how their daughter was trying to get clean. While parenting a child with an addiction must be exceedingly difficult, Mrs. Winehouse’s statement suggests that it must also be an experience without little room for optimism,

(photo: telegraph.co.uk)