Grieving Amy Winehouse at Warped Tour (Revisited)
I arrived stoked for A Day to Remember's set, but soon wanted nothing more than to listen to Winehouse's "Back to Black"
Thank you for reading! This essay is a revision of something I wrote over a year ago. On Adryan’s POV, I write about the internet and pop culture, exploring the ways they shape our lives. If you enjoy essays like this, consider supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your support helps me continue writing and building a community where we can dig into the weird, fascinating, and often overlooked corners of online culture.
Fall 2005
On the bus ride home, I sat alone in my own seat and routinely pulled out my Dell DJ from the bottom of my backpack. While my peers chatted amongst themselves, I turned toward the window, isolating myself in music.
I pressed play on "Welcome to My Life" and imagined Simple Plan’s leader singer, Pierre Bouvier, serenading me:
Do you wanna be somebody else?
Are you sick of feelin' so left out?
Are you desperate to find something more
Before your life is over
Are you stuck inside a world you hate?
Are you sick of everyone around?
With the big fake smiles and stupid lies
While deep inside you're bleedin'
I didn’t have friends to share music with. Whenever I talked about my favorite bands, my peers teased me. Over time, I learned to suppress my enthusiasm.
Summer 2007
“I have to get to Warped this year,” I typed over AOL Instant Messenger on my clunky keyboard, an already outdated off-white Acer desktop with Windows 95 in front of me.
It was the summer between eighth and ninth grade.
“My older sister says Warped is for degenerates,” my friend Kristen replied.
Kristen didn’t agree with her sister. In fact, she was the only person in my school who liked the same emo bands I did, but her parents also disapproved of her music taste. Even if we could have managed to go—unlikely for two 14-year-olds who couldn’t legally drive—the nearest Warped Tour date was over an hour away.
Fortunately, spending summers indoors alone became its own gateway to discovering music. On Xanga, Myspace, and eventually Tumblr, I expanded my taste beyond Simple Plan. I listened to "Don’t Trust Me" by 3OH!3, a metalcore cover of "Crank That (Soulja Boy)" by I Set My Friends on Fire, and an early demo of "Knives and Pens" by Black Veil Brides. The summer between ninth and tenth grade, I set my profile song to "The Plot to Bomb the Panhandle" by A Day to Remember—a band that introduced me to the fusion of pop punk and metalcore.
Summer 2011
Years later, when a group of college friends invited me to Warped Tour the night before the local tour date, an adrenaline rush overcame me. Memories of summer nights spent fantasizing about seeing my favorite bands live, running between stages and merch tents, and soaking it all in with friends flooded my mind. I gleefully responded “yes.”
Without hesitation, I grabbed my shiny, weeks-old MacBook Pro and logged onto Ticketmaster. We all bought our tickets with barely 12 hours to spare before leaving the next morning.
I sat in the backseat while my college friend Ashlyn drove us from Mahwah, New Jersey, to Uniondale, Long Island. Once we parked, she climbed out and popped the trunk, revealing a full case of some pre-packaged beverage. It wasn’t coconut water, but it might as well have been. She tossed one into her drawstring backpack.
“They’re great for hangovers,” she told us.
I looked down at the plastic water bottle in my hand and thought, she’s hardcore. I wanted so badly to be friends with her, for her to think I was as cool as I thought she was.
It was about noon when we approached the opening gates. Security confiscated all our beverages, including Ashlyn’s coconut water.1 I wish I could describe the excitement that coursed through my body as we walked onto the festival grounds, but truthfully, I don’t remember the feeling. I don’t remember feeling anything.
Through the entrance gates, we spotted a large crowd gathered at the Tilly’s/Alternative Press stage. The music was too distant to hear.
“Simple Plan!” someone shouted.
My heart skipped a beat, the way it does whenever I hear the opening melody of a Britney Spears song. I turned to my friends, but they didn’t share my excitement. Whether they were disinterested or simply couldn’t hear, they quickly moved on to another stage.
I followed them to the smaller Skullcandy stage, where the crunkcore band Blood on the Dance Floor—sigh—was performing. BOTD’s frontman, Dahvie Vanity, had a sleazy reputation within the scene. Their lyrics were misogynistic, even by 2010s standards; while Warped Tour veteran Oli Sykes of Bring Me the Horizon screamed, “So why don’t you just fuck yourself, you fucking whore” in "(I Used to Make Out With) Medusa," BOTD sang, “Cheated on me and broke my heart / Gonna show the world your private parts” in their song "Revenge Porn.”2
My friend Freddie rushed into the crowd, throwing up his hands to the beat. I don’t recall his feelings on BOTD, but I suspect his enthusiasm was more about the thrill of watching the first band of the day than any genuine appreciation for them. I tried to match his energy—I snapped a photo, texted it to upload to Facebook—but I still cringed, waiting for the performance to end. To this day, I can still hear echoes of the cursed chorus from "Scream for My Icecream."3
Later, on the Main Stage, the ska band Pepper wrapped up their final song. We stood just a few feet behind the swaying crowd.
“Let’s get close!” Freddie urged. Attack Attack!, his favorite band, was up next.
We pushed our way to the front until I was close enough to touch the stage. We had about 15 or 20 minutes until the set started. The midsummer sun beat down on me, and the heat from the crowd intensified. It was the hottest I had ever been. There was also a continental heat wave that July into August—one of the hottest summers on record in 75 years.
Then, I got a Twitter notification via text message. The screen on my keyboard phone lit up with breaking news: Amy Winehouse had died.
“Amy Winehouse is dead,” I shouted.
No one around me reacted.
I wanted to listen to "Back to Black"—to hear the lyrics, “We only said goodbye with words / I died a hundred times”—more than anything I was about to hear live. But in 2011, listening to a song on demand was impossible without an iPhone, which wasn’t yet common in my social circles. Attack Attack! began their set without any mention of the news.
Amy never performed at Warped Tour, but she could have. In 2008, she released a ska record, the same genre as Pepper. Her signature thick cat-eye eyeliner mirrored the style of internet scene queens. It was jarring that no one, not even the band playing, acknowledged her death.
Around 5 p.m., I fell asleep on cool concrete in the shade, not far from a hardcore band’s set. I woke up half an hour later, exhausted. My friends, equally drained, suggested leaving. I begged them to stay for A Day to Remember’s set at 9 p.m. They agreed to stick it out for me, just as we had for Freddie.
After the sun set at 8:19 p.m., I shivered in my Forever 21 black tank top and denim shorts. I realized I couldn’t last another minute, let alone another hour. Contrary to my earlier plea, I suggested we leave. Sunburnt, drenched in sweat—ours and strangers’—and utterly exhausted, we trudged to the parking lot for the long drive home.
“Did you hear that Amy Winehouse died?” I asked.
No one answered.
I spent at least $30 just on water that day with water bottles $5 a pop each, plus a $10 hamburger that could’ve been served in a school cafeteria. These prices echoed the offerings at Woodstock ’99 where festival attendees paid $4 for water bottles and $7 for a roast beef sandwiches, equivalent to $5.42 and $9.49 in 2011.
Years later in 2019, Spotify removed Blood On the Dance Floor’s entire catalog from its platform, following sexual assault allegations against Vanity.
My inner grammar nerd cringes at the band’s style choice for condensing “ice cream” into one word.