Toward the end of “Amy,” a new documentary about the singer Amy Winehouse in theaters July 2, we witness what many people in her life considered one of her lowest professional points. In front of thousands of people at a 2011 concert in Kalemegdan Park in Belgrade, Serbia, she refuses to sing. While a tense audience serenades her with a chorus of boos, she stands firm and waits out the 70 minutes she was contractually required to present herself on stage. As we learn, she had not wanted to do the show, had even begged to cancel. But the people around her, oblivious or simply ignoring her requests (and her quickly declining health), forced her to make an appearance. And make an appearance she did. Where others saw career suicide, I saw an artist wrestling over control of her life and career, from the people closest to her and from the audience itself. I felt much the same way during the opening scene of “What Happened Miss Simone?” The documentary about the singer Nina Simone, released in theaters June 24 and on Netflix two days later, begins with a scene at the Manteaux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. The year is 1976 and Simone had just retuned from a two-year self-imposed exile in Liberia, where she and her 12-year-old daughter were invited to live with Simone’s friend, the singer Miriam Makeba. Simone had virtually stopped performing and removed herself from the spotlight of the press, telling the Washington Post around that time that she needed a break to “gather myselves together.”It’s not clear if she had gathered her different selves, or if they had fractured even further apart, when she arrived in Switzerland. But something had changed. Already a fiercely outspoken personality, Simone channeled her anger, always evident and even championed in her singing, back at the audience. The scene is nerve-racking, the singer standing above her piano staring back at the people in the crowd with nothing but fragile contempt. It’s not hatred. The audience claps, and when she doesn’t move they begin to talk nervously. When Simone finally sits at the piano, there is more silence. “Hello,” she says into the microphone, uncomfortable. “We’re ready!” somebody shouts suddenly, like a shot in the dead of night. She grins, almost a laugh, not out of genuine humor but recognition. This is what she had been trying to get away from.Later in the film, we return to this scene. “You didn’t forget me, huh?” Simone asks, fidgeting with the microphone, the crowd anxious. “That’s what’s so wild, you didn’t forget me.” She pauses, frustrated: “I didn’t expect you to, but I’m tired. You don’t know what I mean. And there are many people in show business who said, ‘Oh, she — you know, she used to be a star, she’s gone all the way to the bottom,’ and all kinds of crap which means nothing to me at all.”You could imagine Amy Winehouse, staring back at the audience, wanting to say the same thing. While the two are completely different kinds of singers, popular in different periods are for different reasons, they were both victims of the scandal-loving press and the audience who consumes it. Both were branded as “difficult women” for their refusal to hide their painful struggles and, in many ways, for their insistence that we, the listeners, were part of the problem.What’s missing from both documentaries is blame directed back at the audience. Would it be wrong to say that some of the traits that caused Nina Simone to suffer were also things that we championed in her work — intensity, temper, outspokenness — and still do? Why then, by the end of her life, were we calling her crazy? And is it inaccurate to assert that Amy Winehouse died from living a life that we all actively praised as authentic until it became too much so? Should we be surprised that the singer of stirringly personal modern-soul, who penned an ode about her refusal to go to rehab, ended up with a life-ending substance abuse problem? We loved them as difficult women — bought their albums and went to their concerts — but then condemned them for that same trait in the end.This is not to brush aside the very real problems both women faced in their lives, and the very real blame that should be placed on their families (both films clearly acknowledge this). Simone’s physical and mental abuse at the hands of her husband/manager, and Winehouse’s exploitation by her father, among many others, should always be considered when talking about these artists. Another important factor that should be considered when thinking about Winehouse and Simone is their fragile mental health, evident at all times and even spoken of plainly — In “Amy,” Winehouse declares, “I write songs because I’m fucked up in the head” — but rarely acknowledged for what it is: a disease, not a wrong path that could have been avoided.But we also need to think about the role we played in the fates of both. The audience paid for a narrative of realness — of conflict, of agony — and then it became evident that it wasn’t a construction, that it was real life blasting through the speakers and sprawled out on televisions screens and tabloid pages. The press turned on them, and so did the fans. We watched them fall from a distance, separating ourselves from the action. We loved both Nina Simone and Amy Winehouse for the ways in which they were not obvious, manufactured pop-stars. They wanted freedom to make music their own way. We let them — until it wasn’t pleasant anymore. Then we stopped, and so did they.
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