Back to Black Amy Winehouse Scary Drag Parody (critique, tribute)

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tribute/parody/crituqe
made about a year before her death.

In "Slurred Hag Shtick" and "Bak to Blak," I take on Amy Winehouse's voice, appearance, and gesture to test the limits of sadistic, male appropriation of masochistic, feminine spectacle. Taking on Winehouse's persona challenges the sadistic, male impersonator in the videos to trivialize pains that are too personal and tragic to laugh at, pushing passive-aggressiveness to a hysterical breaking point: causing the distanced, controlling, detached, masculine drag impersonator to become the image of vulnerability he seeks to impersonate. The videos dramatize the performance process I imagine Winehouse might experience as she plays "Winehouse" for an audience.

Camp manages the abject, vulnerable, penetratable, naïve body by trivializing and parodying images of weakness in spectacles of gender play. In contrast, Winehouse's performances expose the limits of such play. Her persona is created through a tangled web of parody, disguise, and artifice; she channels the styles of the black singers that influence her, such as Ronnie Spector, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughn. Her deteriorating mental health brings danger to her performances: Will she fail to parody and trivialize her own image and fall into the gloomy depths of her miserable persona?
When Winehouse attempts to perform her shtick drunk at "Rock in Rio," she alienates herself from the expectations of mainstream camp, slipping into unintelligible, dangerously real, slurs and trips. Rather than dismissing her "tragic" failure to perform as an effect of illness and drug abuse, we might see the genius at work: taking a subversive stance against successful appropriation and commercialization of suffering; forcing painful, feminine wounds into the eyes of a numb, misogynistic audience. Exposing the faults of a culture that attempts to feed us soulless cartoon clichés and stereotypes, she endows her street-trash persona with unbearable reality.
-FB

Performed and Directed By: Felix Bernstein
Lights: Eugene Moye
Make-Up: Marla Bazan
Art Director: Baroness Sherry von Korber-Bernstein
Special Thanks To: Shelley Hirsch

Category:

Music

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[yongchunptolemais]

ise malakas. megalos malakas!!!!!!

[yongchunptolemais]

ise malakas. megalos malakas!!!!!!

[yongchunptolemais]

ise malakas. megalos malakas!!!!!!

[szfruzsi]

delete this video, is not funny! r.i.p. amy

[ohmysparticus]

she might be a drug addict or a manly looking woman, but she is an amazing (studio) vocalist with plenty of soul! FUCK HATERS!