Amy Winehouse and 27 club: the blinkered romance with celebrity death

“Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse,” advised John Derek in the 1949 flick Knock on Any Door, offering a surefire method to avoid that dreaded mid-life crisis. The cynical Hollywood edict has long been the signature theme of the rock and roll lifestyle, as evidenced in the “27 club” theme that dominated the coverage of Amy Winehouse’ death. Almost every news outlet took the opportunity to reverentially list the A-list membership of this funereal clique: Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. The usual expressions of regret leavened by the enduring infatuation with the fatally young. The better-dead-than-30 mantra has long possessed a certain romantic cachet in the Western imagination. Long before The Who’s Roger Daltrey sang, “Hope I die before I get old,” there was the 1775 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther . The chronicle of a heartbroken artist made young Goethe a literary star and sparked widespread ‘Werther fever’, leading in turn to the first documented ‘copycat suicides’ by overwrought fans. [caption id=“attachment_48554” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Poetry may have made untimely demise fashionable in literary circles, but Hollywood stars took it mainstream with the deaths of first Rudolf Valentino and then James Dean (in the picture).Hulton Archive/Getty Images”] [/caption] Hot on his heels came the British Romantics with a penchant for love, mortality, and overwrought prose. The likes of Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth found their tragic, young muse in Thomas Chatterton who killed himself at the tender age of 17. Wrote Wordsworth: I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride; Of Him who walked in glory and in joy. Following his plough, along the mountain-side: By our own spirits are we deified: We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness. Poetry may have made untimely demise fashionable in literary circles, but Hollywood stars took it mainstream with the deaths of first Rudolf Valentino and then James Dean. More than 50,000 hysterical fans in 1926 attended the Latin Lover’s funeral, which novelist John Dos Passos describes in his book, U.S.A: “In the muggy rain the cops lost control… the funeral chapel was gutted, men and women fought over a flower, a piece of wallpaper, a piece of the broken plate-glass window.” But it’s Dean’s 1955 high-speed car crash – in a Porsche, no less – that sets the modern pattern of cultural deification: Take one young, beautiful celebrity; add lavish, risky lifestyle; cue tragic death; and voila: instant demigod status. Bad Company summed up this now-hackneyed template in their saga of the small-town boy turned rock and roll star: “Johnny died one night, died in his bed, Bottle of whiskey, sleeping tablets by his head. Johnny’s life passed him by like a warm summer day.” We love those ‘shooting stars’ — or ‘ crazy diamonds ’ — precisely because they die young and famous. [fpgallery id=117] “The death of someone cut down in the prime of life brings home our own mortality. Maybe our rendering them immortal is our way of not facing that inevitability,” writes Jenny Lynn Bader in the New York Times. The fear of death also makes it seductive, and we remain enthralled with those who actively court disaster in their fast-track, glamourous lives. The drugs, prescription pills, and fast cars — when viewed with appropriate cultural baggage — spell a daring life led heedless of mortality. But paparazzi journalism and hard reality may be finally eroding the centuries-old Western infatuation with dying young. When Heath Ledger died in 2008, a Gawker writer wrote : The guilty glamour — drugs! luxe apartments! — has become the clinical: photos of Chris Farley’s corpse online. Shots of methadone in Anna Nicole’s freezer. Heath in a body bag. The hard business of death is more and more visible with each accidental overdose or suicide or overdose-suicide. It very well may be wearing away the glamour — and the possibility — of dying young and staying beautiful. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD With each passing celebrity death, the naysayers are quicker to speak up. In an anger-fuelled essay taking aim at the “repulsively named” 27 Club, Tania Gold wrote of Winehouse: “She died at 27 not because she was the magical mystical twin of Janis Joplin, but because 27 is a normal age for the body of a compulsive user of hard drugs and hard alcohol to give out.” In other words, death is highly overrated, whether you are young or old, beautiful or not, famous or obscure — something we Indians have long known. While our media usually replicates the coverage in the West, most Indians don’t hold a romantic view of young celebrity deaths. Take, for example, Hard Kaur’s prosaic opinion of Winehouse’s death: “Anything in excess is fatal. People should know when to give up certain habits.” Maybe it is our hard-won understanding that the good life is hard to come by, and should not be frittered away in some drug-fuelled moment. Perhaps it’s because we are less obsessed with death as a culture, and also more familiar. Unlike the relatively sheltered middle class in the West, we don’t need to live on the edge to court disaster. It can strike even the staidest life – in the form of floods, riots, bombs, contaminated water, mosquito bite, derailed trains; just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. All good reasons why we don’t have our very own “27 Club”. Life remains far too real in India for death to gain traction as romance. When you live in pissing distance from the abyss, it tends to lose its charm. And it’s why the standard Hindu blessing to our young remains dhirga ayushman bhava (may you live a long life).

Amy Winehouse and 27 club: the blinkered romance with celebrity death

The Western imagination has long been infatuated with the fatally young. Amy Winehouse’s death is finally bringing home a truth that we Indians have always known: death is overrated.

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