Rehab

One track I’ve been listening to a lot lately is Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”. I have a version where Pharaoh Monch spits a verse whence he complains about anorexic stars like Lindsey Lohan cluttering up the place, and the dearth of hydro. Yes, Pharaoh, you cannot smoke weed in rehab.

The song is an uptempo number with the wall of sound and rumbling drums that could be straight out of motor city circa 1963. Winehouse complains that her dad is trying to send her off to rehab, and she doesn’t want to go. Forty-five years ago, the song would have been about how her baby was going to leave her. Now she’s singing about how she’s getting chucked into rehab for drinking away the blues caused by her baby leaving her.

It coincides with a lot of press in recent years about stars going in to rehab, coming out of rehab, and then smashing up their cars while fucked up on multiple illegal substances. Watching young train wrecks in action seems to have become a national pastime, and we all are riveted every time someone snaps a pic of Britney puking on herself. Ms. Lohan has been on the cover of the SF Examiner three days in a row for smashing up her car while drunk, passing out while drunk, and entering rehab to avoid getting drunk.

I’m really glad I’m not a celebrity, and I’m even more thankful that my wild years were not well documented by picture phones and blogs. Almost every one of us has done some stupid shit in our time, and if our drunken escapades were plastered all over www.perezhilton.com, we might seem just as depraved as some of the celebs who we eagerly read about. I am a pretty restrained, cautious, and conservative person in general, and I still have my horribly embarrassing stories of drunken idiocy. To the extent that I don’t want to put them here.

-pst