The New York Times-20080124-In Real Time- Amy Winehouse-s Deeper Descent- -Review-

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In Real Time, Amy Winehouse's Deeper Descent; [Review]

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It was witty, with a fillip of transgression, when Amy Winehouse sang, They tried to make me go to rehab/I said no, no, no on her album Back to Black, which was originally released in 2006 and has brought her six Grammy Award nominations, including Album of the Year. But there was nothing amusing, and barely any surprise, in Ms. Winehouse's recent, notorious and possibly inadvertent public appearance: on a video released by an English tabloid, The Sun.

The homemade clip is time-stamped Jan. 18 and shows Ms. Winehouse, with her recent blond hairdo, in her London apartment, using a glass pipe to smoke what The Sun says is crack. And it was no surprise because she has been a very public wreck. Performers thrive on attention, and sometimes admit that it's an addiction; now, the Internet enables that addiction all too easily. The unintended consequence is that we can now watch stars self-destruct in real time.

Images of Ms. Winehouse looking intoxicated, disheveled, half-dressed and wild-eyed are all over the tabloids and the Internet. She has appeared to be drunk onstage, barely able to get through a song, and after a lamentable concert in Britain she canceled her fall tour there, stating, I can't give it my all onstage without my Blake -- her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, who is in jail for perverting the cause of justice after a bar brawl. The glass-pipe video surfaced just as Ms. Winehouse -- who was arrested and fined for marijuana possession in Norway in October -- was seeking a visa to perform on the Grammy telecast Feb. 10.

Ms. Winehouse is not the first, nor likely the last, celebrity to show a self-destructive streak. In gloating tabloid coverage she's usually paired nowadays with Britney Spears, whose bizarre behavior -- shaving her head, smashing a car window -- has been documented just as thoroughly. But Ms. Spears's songs have been chipper, impersonal exercises in pop flirtation, up until Piece of Me, a song on her 2007 album, Blackout, that taunts scandal watchers and paparazzi (joining a mini-tradition of resentful celebrity songs like Michael Jackson's Tabloid Junkie).

Ms. Winehouse, who writes her own lyrics, has been far more self-conscious from the start. She is no naif; Back to Black is her second album, and she attended the BRIT school, a performing-arts high school in London that counts other British hitmakers like Lily Allen among its alumni. Ms. Winehouse has often sung about harmful appetites, not just in Rehab but in Addicted (about a freeloading pot smoker) and in Back to Black, in which she sings, You love blow and I love puff/And life is like a pipe. Back when the album was released, it sounded as if she already had some wry perspective. She didn't have to get any more real than that.

Rock history is punctuated with sad stories: suicides like Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake and Ian Curtis, and the excess-induced deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Gram Parsons, Sid Vicious and Jerry Garcia. Yet there have also been countless tales of abuse, bottoming out and survival, from the Rolling Stones to Metallica. What made Rehab amusing when it appeared was that Ms. Winehouse was mocking what had become such a standard celebrity way station.

Addiction might start with experiments by performers so young they feel invulnerable; it might seem to be, at first, a way to ease the stress of a peculiar job. It might be a way to act out the old Romantic image of the artist as daredevil. And there's no shortage of temptation in a musician's work environment of bars, clubs, late nights and party people. Rock stars weren't the first musicians to drink or drug themselves to death.

What's different, in the 21st century, is that we can watch the breakdowns almost as they happen. One day there's a grainy video of Ms. Winehouse spreading across the Internet. Now the video has been given to the British police for investigation while Ms. Winehouse, black-haired and neatly made up, is photographed professionally on the way to a doctor visit.

In the '60s and '70s there were occasional photos of Janis Joplin hoisting a bottle of Southern Comfort, and word-of-mouth about many bands' backstage excesses or drunken exploits, but those were occasional glimpses and dispatches. Rockers dosed themselves, mostly, behind closed doors.

Now digital video and photography, coupled with the Internet, can add up to near-constant surveillance. It's voluntary for people who post daily photos on their Facebook pages, perhaps less so for celebrities trailed by paparazzi. There's an entire industry in celebrity scandal, much of it remarkably callous.

In their times the deaths of Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain were sudden and shocking, leaving them a legacy as handsome rock martyrs. Now paparazzi and cyberazzi would be posting frequent updates, turning trouble into spectacle, and bloggers would be mocking fat Jim and krazy Kurt as they struggled, vying to see who could be more cruelly iconoclastic. But they were pre-Internet stars. Now, there's a sleazy symbiosis that connects instantaneous worldwide visibility, publicity, marketing and narcissism. Attention addicts can get their fix with a few mouse clicks.

Why, for instance, was Ms. Winehouse letting someone shoot video, in a private setting, of her puffing that pipe in the first place? Maybe it's some version of keepin' it real, the fallacy that insists art must be autobiographical to be worthwhile, as if art were documentation rather than storytelling. Maybe it's obliviousness, although, since the camera followed her around, she was likely to know it was there. Maybe she mistakenly trusted that whoever made the video would resist another temptation: the potential profit to be made providing it to a tabloid.

Perhaps Ms. Winehouse misunderstood what should be clear in the age of the Internet: Everything recorded can be duplicated and distributed. And possibly the video was, in its own bleary way, a kind of performance. She is keeping her audience informed if not exactly entertained.

Mostly, however, she's just supplying material for the sphere of celebrity interaction that only wants to see idols torn down. Her fans -- those of us who believe she has more superb songs yet to write -- would prefer she grow less visible and considerably more boring.

Maybe it will have to wait until she wins or loses at the Grammys. But she would do well to disappear for a while, into rehab or private recovery, and then to hole up in a recording studio and work up some new songs. (She definitely has enough ups and downs to write about, realistically or not.) In the era of total exposure Ms. Winehouse would serve herself and her listeners best by working behind closed doors.

[Illustration]PHOTO: The Sun tabloid trumpeted Amy Winehouse on its cover.