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They tried to make her go to rehab. At the time of writing, that hasn't exactly worked out.
I've got to admit, Amy Winehouse used to irritate the hell out of me. At the time of her first album, she appeared to combine the kind of 'sophisticated' faux-soul smugness that makes tiny Jools Holland come in smug suit pants, with irritatingly reactionary political opinions ('Stronger Than Me' exerts a lover to be a real old-fashioned man, complete with a "what's the matter, are you gay or something?" taunt)... like Joss Stone with Julie Burchill's gobshite mouth. It wasn't an appealing combination.
And so I did not expect myself to be in this position, a few years later: I think I love Amy Winehouse. Specifically, I love the two singles to date from her new album Back To Black. YouTube links:
'Rehab'
'You Know I'm No Good'
Discussing what I like about these songs, without falling into such platitudes as “they’re just really great songs, man” – although I will say that Winehouse has developed a nicely elliptical turn of phrase that could probably apply to any subject – is pretty quickly going to take is into the kind of territory that raises questions about life vs. art and the morality of enjoying the presentation of a persona in art which may have a very real connection with a lifestyle that is damaging to the artist.
Or may not, blah blah blah. Many accounts such as this one seem to portray Amy Winehouse the individual as very much in line with the lyrical content of these songs: unlucky and unwise in love, and in a more monogamous but even more self-destructive relationship with the bottle. Then again, music fans can never agree even on whether various male drunks in rock and pop are heroic or tragic, and it's even more complicated when the figure in question is a Woman Who Drinks, and therefore twice as likely as to be told "to a rehab clinic, go!" when she has more Vino Collapso than is advisable of an evening.
I suppose some people may not care either way, and may simply find the persona boring. With her throaty, guilt-wracked confessionals of booze-soaked late nights in smoky bars and heart-breaking yet compulsive infidelity, with her twin musical obsessions of old soul music and contemporary hip hop, with her slavish devotion to a singer's costume that borders on drag (the absurdly OTT tattoos of topless pin-up girls and 'Daddy's Girl', the enormous eyelashes and equally huge Ronnie Spector beehive, the ever-present decolletage), Amy Winehouse in her current incarnation reminds me oddly of nobody so much as... Greg Dulli, or rather his gender-reversed duplicate (with Winehouse's thuggish fistfighting foulmouthed tomboy side the counterpoint to Dulli's occasional submissive falsetto). And some people find that kind of schtick tiresome, outdated, boorish, obnoxious. Me, I'm fascinated, I can't get enough.
If she met me, she would like me, or so I like to think. |
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