Amy Winehouse: Dead at 27

Well, so much for rehab. The London Daily Mail has the grim initial details:

Amy Winehouse has been found dead at her home in London.

The Back To Black singer was found at the property by emergency services at 3.54pm. Her death is being treated as ‘unexplained’ by police.

Winehouse was apparently ‘beyond help’ when paramedics arrived, according to Sky sources.

In a statement, the Metropolitan Police  said: ‘Police were called by London Ambulance Service to an address in Camden Square NW1 shortly before 16.05hrs today, Saturday 23 July, following reports of a woman found deceased.’On arrival officers found the body of a 27-year-old female who was pronounced dead at the scene.

‘Enquiries continue into the circumstances of the death. At this early stage it is being treated as unexplained.’

In reality, this is the most expected “unexpected” development in history:

The photo on the left shows Winehouse around 2004; the photo on the right is from about 2007. Rock deaths are a bit like the Mirror Universe version of Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Recurrence; they’re the Eternal Self-Destruction. Read any book on the history of jazz music in the 1950s, and it’s a history of brilliant musicians consuming an endless amount of pharmacological products; a decade later, rock musicians of the late ’60s and early ’70s became determined to live out the same life — and death — style. A decade after that, punk rockers thought both earlier groups of musicians were pikers when it came to self-destruction.

Keith Richards is celebrated because he’s seemingly indestructible — as the joke went in one of the Wayne’s World movies, “Keith cannot be killed by conventional weapons.” But as today’s latest example highlights, he’s very much the exception to the rule.