British signer Amy Winehouse performing at The Riverside Studios for the 50th Grammy Awards ceremony via video link in February 2008 in London. Picture: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Jeez, for once, the American tabloids outdid the British tabloids in tasteless coverage of a celebrity death.

Not that the British tabloids did all that well in reporting on the tragic death of British singer Amy Winehouse. They did the usual speculating and reporting as fact unproven theories as to why the poor girl died – cocktail of drugs, alcohol, etc etc, ad nauseum. The autopsy was inconclusive.

But the New York Post really takes most of the rotten cake with a front page picture of Winehouse the day after her death with the lurid headline that screamed: They wanted her to go to rehab, but she said NO, NO, NO (their capital letters).

The British red top tabloid, The Sun, was surprisingly muted, and syrupy soppy this morning, the day after the singer’s funeral with a  front page headline that read: Good night. Sleep tight, my angel. Mummy and Daddy love you ever so much  – the last words of her father’s eulogy in heart-wrenching farewell to his troubled daughter.

But overall, as a columnist in The Guardian, Hadley Freeman, has noted, coverage of the singer’s untimely demise has been pretty rotten, when not just tasteless and stupid.

Just one example is lurid reporting about Winehouse having joined the “27 club” – the age at which other famous singers, such as Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain, died. (There has even been a reported suggestion that Cobain chose to kill himself at that age, so he could be in the club in the clouds somewhere, with his idols).

The fact is, as Freeman points out, celebrities tend to die like the rest of us lesser mortals. And the “ 27 Club nonsense”, as she calls it, “awkwardly hoiks separate individuals together and insinuates that their deaths are part of a great rock’n'roll tradition”, which it clearly isn’t. Other rockers, singers and musos have died at other ages, stages, times of day, from different causes.

But it’s the emphasis on the inevitability of the singer’s demise, the suggestion that her death was somehow “foretold”, that is especially irritating.

Clearly, she had problems, in particular serious addictions, but so have many other celebrities, and non-celebrities who have successfully overcome them. And of course her family feared the worst, but there were positive signs: Winehouse appeared to be happier in the days before her death, than she had done in the past, and had expressed a desire to get better.

And she was nothing if not a feisty, strong character, even as she was beset by demons – just one sign was yelling U2’s boring Bono to shut up at an awards ceremony. As another Guardian writer has noted, there have been many occasions where many people would have loved to have had the gall to tell Bono to put a sock in it.

It would be so nice if writers would spend less time trying in vain to make sense out of the senselessness and dreadful waste in the death of a hugely talented young woman, with a big, strong and hauntingly beautiful voice belied her small and increasingly frail physique.

Tags: #Amy Winehous, #Tabloid