rgr-pop:

There actually isn’t a lot of undoing or unmaking in Amy’s performances, she was always already made undone. In thinking of the significance of dried tears versus very wet ones, I am faced with the fact that Amy’s #feminist crying, Amy’s #feminist makeupping, Amy’s #narccissism even was

1. not a process
2. not an unapologetic performance of public hysterics

There’s just so much not doing about Amy’s performances. In all her videos she almost refuses to perform. She sits, she lets her songs kind of come out of her. She sits, she walks. It’s so begrudging, it’s so unplayed. It’s not passive as much as it’s very, very private. Or anyway, it’s unpublic.

As much as I wanted to make tears on Back to Black about being unashamed of public crying, it was about the opposite of that. The crying isn’t Adele-wet, it’s Amy-dry. Where we are always talking about not giving a fuck about who we make uncomfortable with our tears, I think Amy’s songs are about refusing to grant anyone access to her tears. So they are dry before they are wet, so they stay on her floor.

So she walks stoic through Echo Park and saves all her singing for the hotel room. And even then, that singing is only barely a performance.

I can theorize her eyeliner-to-tear ratio all day, but that shit was almost never all over her cheeks, even when she was at her worst. Even in her saddest songs, I don’t think she ever used mascara tears as a visual tool.

As feminists we always talk about Amy as an shameless train wreck, another fable about fame. But I think we need to remember the ways that she was so carefully composed and private all the time.

This is the kind of music writing that matters.

(Source: youtube.com)