La giusta distanza

"Winehouse’s self-destructiveness isn’t a plausible explanation for her popularity, or her awards, no matter how easily it converts into press". Così Sasha Frere-Jones, nel 2008. Photograph by Harry Benson.

Di Sasha Frere- Jones, 8 marzo 2008 – Is there anything surprising about Amy Winehouse’s being awarded five Grammys this month.

A cynic might say that her ability to stay alive is startling, but Winehouse’s worrying series of relapses and collapses could simply be a trick of the light. Actors and singers were misbehaving vigorously before the advent of radio; Winehouse may seem like such a dedicated tearaway because the lens recording her movements is wider than anything a sixties celebrity would have encountered, doesn’t switch off, and continually feeds a twenty-four-hour newsstand. (Winehouse is one of the five or six celebrities—mostly women—whose every action has been “serialized,” to borrow the phrase Harvey Levin used to describe the coverage of Britney Spears on his Web site, TMZ.com.) Winehouse’s misadventures—walking in London barefoot in her bra at dawn, spitting on the set of a TV game show, drawing blood in a “spat” with her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, being filmed smoking what appeared to be crack, heckling Bono during an awards ceremony, stints in rehabilitation facilities—support the tired (if true) template of the Genius Junkie, a story you can find, if determined. But the miserable-circus part of Winehouse’s story unfolded largely in the second half of 2007, well after “Back to Black”—the album that won all the Grammys—had become a hit. It has now sold 1.6 million copies in America, and had won Winehouse several awards in England—including the mobo (Music of Black Origin) for Best U.K. Female—before the Grammys swooped in with their golden stickers.

Winehouse’s self-destructiveness isn’t a plausible explanation for her popularity, or her awards, no matter how easily it converts into press. With the producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, she made a very popular album that looks firmly, and directly, backward. “Back to Black” is a deft and convincing pastiche of the girl groups of the sixties, the jazz singers of the forties, and a variety of rhythms from the seventies and the nineties. (The eighties get a pass.) It’s an entertaining, clever album that benefits from a strategy that makes everyone who isn’t Miles Davis look good: it’s only thirty-five minutes long (and closer to thirty without the bonus track). “Back to Black” is a modified sixties soul album, with one perfect single (the ubiquitous “Rehab,” which allows Winehouse to celebrate, make fun of, and justify her own substance abuse), sung and written by a twenty-four-year-old girl from Southgate, London, who says she has the musical taste of “an old Jewish man” and wears her hair in a vertical pile she refers to as “my hive.” (Is there a TMZ video of anyone else arranging her hair in public? Winehouse is the Marge Simpson of junkie retro soul.) Her label—only doing its job—describes her as “the most talented and important musical artist of her generation,” which would seem like space-cake hyperbole if so many people didn’t seem to agree, at least a little.

Yet what reads as musical innovation in 2008 is blue-ribbon revivalism, a high-production-value version of the songbook logic driving current Broadway musicals. The sounds of yesteryear! Sung by today’s young people! (Who, in this case, enjoy ketamine and margaritas.) Winehouse’s music is reassuring to those old enough to remember the original and novel to those too young to know. And her music refers to rappers while simultaneously avoiding actual rapping and sounding just like the music that rappers first sampled decades ago. So many demographics united through the magic of consumption!

“Back to Black” has grown on me since its domestic release, last year. At first, I reacted badly to what I took as mere imitation, but Winehouse and her crew execute their homage with class and understated force, a quality that overrides—for now—the perils of heavy borrowing. Mark Ronson’s arrangements are knowing; the quick rhythm changes in “Rehab” are unobtrusive but urge the song along and make it easily replayable. This decision alone might have earned Ronson his Producer of the Year Grammy, though there are at least five other producers who deserved it, too. (This is an age of producers.) And hearing a live band working in tight unison with a good singer is a reliable pleasure. The central production conceit is in the voice, though; listen hard to Winehouse’s singing, and you will hear the odd combinations that make “Back to Black” more than skilled aping.

I bought Winehouse’s first album, “Frank,” in 2004 at a Heathrow Airport music kiosk. I listened to it on the plane home and dropped it in a garbage can on the way to baggage claim. “Frank” was Winehouse being showy before her voice could raise the curtain: she sounds thin, misses notes, and lacks any specific character. As sixties soul grounds “Back to Black,” “Frank” was tied to a denatured version of jazz vocals, sung by someone channelling Lauryn Hill and resorting to wobbly flourishes when stuck for an idea. (The lyrics employed curse words to show that Winehouse wasn’t, like, square, a charge that she will never have to worry about again.) The singing style heard on “Frank” started years ago—Lauryn Hill, the dopey singer-songwriter Jewel, and Joni Mitchell are all glossed in this approach—and has filtered down through singers like Nelly Furtado, Winehouse, and a currently rising star, Sia. (“Frank” sounds a bit like a drunken Furtado working a piano bar without the benefit of a decent songbook.) This style provides a way of singing derivations of black music without resembling modern R. & B. In fact, avoiding the sound of current R. & B. may be its guiding principle. White singers generally seem to use it more than black singers, though it is open to anyone who wants to use its limited vocabulary.

“Back to Black” also sounds nothing like current R. & B., but chooses rich, older source material; Winehouse’s collaboration with Ronson catalyzed her songwriting, and a radical change in her vocals pushes the album. Her tone is darker, the control is infinitely stronger, and her range sounds as if it had gained an entire lower octave. And then there’s the accent, which isn’t simply the Southgate speaking voice that makes “cool” sound like “coal.” Winehouse’s singing sounds, even to a nonpolitical ear, like some sort of blackface. She slurs words and drops consonants; you hear “dat” and “dis” in place of “that” and “this” several times. Is “Back to Black” meant to be literal?

The musicians on the record are drawn largely from a band of New York soul revivalists called the Dap-Kings. For many of Winehouse’s shows, including the one I saw at Highline Ballroom last May, the Dap-Kings serve as her live band. (The Dap-Kings also work with Sharon Jones, a fiery fifty-one-year-old singer from Georgia, who is building a body of work based on sixties soul. Jones & Co. are faithfully re-creating the sound of Lyn Collins, a singer who was produced by and played with James Brown. Watching the two singers with the same band is like a controlled experiment. Live, there is no contest. Winehouse can be iffy, but Sharon Jones and the band invariably hit their marks hard and with gusto.)

Pop has room for weird appropriations, even if they don’t always settle or become comfortable. Winehouse 2.0 works because of the number of different modes that she and her band pile up and the way that she resists definition. Ronson directs the band to stay firmly in the territory of Detroit and Memphis soul, but Winehouse is free to roam through Sarah Vaughan’s lower range and Lauryn Hill’s rapturous, disjunct leaps. Winehouse and her band play what sounds like a straight James Brown ballad from the fifties called “Me and Mr. Jones”; the Mr. in the title, though, is not a dapper ballroom dancer or long-lost love—it’s the rapper Nas, whom she claims she can’t be kept apart from. The lyrics are genuinely obscure; someone has made Winehouse miss a “Slick Rick concert.” Later, she sings that “ ’side from Sammy, you’re my best black Jew.” Sammy is almost certainly Mr. Davis, Jr., but the “you” isn’t likely Nas, as he isn’t Jewish. Go figure. Perhaps it’s a jokey reference to her husband, who may have prevented her from seeing the show in the first place. The old Jews and blacks romp, mysteriously.

Winehouse’s delivery, though—take a little time to suss that one out. It isn’t really straight minstrelsy, because her inflections and phonemes don’t add up to any known style. Listen to the mid-tempo shuffle “You Know I’m No Good” and hear how she elongates and deforms the word “worst.” Is she channelling a little-known blues singer? Is she hammered? This mush-mouthed approach is Winehouse’s real innovation—a mangling of language that will pull you in, especially when you want to hear the words. One effective summing up of her style can be seen in a YouTube video of her performing the album’s title track, labelled “Amy Winehouse performing drunk or high. Your guess!” It may be neither—it is Winehouse’s signature, and if she can detach it from the past and keep writing songs like “Rehab” there will be nothing surprising about having her around for a long time. Other than having her around.