What Is It About Men

I love Amy Winehouse's music, and I remember feeling that her death was tragic, though I didn't realize how tragic until I saw the movie Amy. I highly recommend it. It's a powerful tale about a brilliant songwriter and musician who had parents who didn't pay attention or respond appropriately to the warning signs that something was very wrong when she started throwing up all her food and getting high all the time.

Besides shitty parents, she fell in love with a man who wanted to get high as least as much as he wanted to be with her, so that didn't help matters.

This song is one of the first she wrote about this lover who eventually became her husband, and it stuck out to me during the movie as such a great example of her sophisticated lyrics and complex sound:

Understand once he was a family man
So surely I would never, ever go through it first hand
Emulate all the shit my mother hated
I can't help but demonstrate my Freudian fate
My alibi for taking your guy
History repeats itself, it fails to die
And animal agression is my downfall
I don't care 'bout what you got I want it all

It's bricked up in my head, it's shoved under my bed
And I question myself again: what is it 'bout men?
My destructive side has grown a mile wide
And I question myself again: what is it 'bout men?

I'm nurturing, I just wanna do my thing
And I'll take the wrong man as naturally as I sing
And I'll save my tears for uncovering my fears
For behavioural patterns that stick over the years

It's bricked up in my head, it's shoved under my bed
And I question myself again: what is it 'bout men?
My destructive side has grown a mile wide
And I question myself again: what is it 'bout men?

This song is from her first album -- and already she knows just how much trouble she's in. Over and over again in the movie you watch her vacillate between the music she loves and her love for the wrong man and getting high.

There is one point in the movie where she's feeling really done singing Back to Black on tour, but she doesn't feel like she has a choice about it. That, for me, was the biggest tragedy. That this incredible woman with all the money and fame and talent in the world felt that she didn't have a choice, and no one even tried to convince her that she did, in fact, have a choice.

Sorry, Amy. Sorry so many people let you down, including yourself. I wish you were still here with us making music, but at least you are no longer in so much pain. RIP my lovely.