Why Amy Winehouse Endures
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A twenty-something co-worker of mine recently let slip that her go-to karaoke selections are the hits of Amy Winehouse. “Those songs come on and instantly everyone freaks out,” she said. I asked why she thought they still hit so hard. “Mainly it’s the attitude and sass,” she explained, adding “I don’t want to say her songs are considered throwback at this point—they absolutely are not—I just think she had a James Dean quality to her, in that there was no one like her and no voice like hers.”
Ten years ago today, Amy Winehouse died at the age of 27, a wretched ending to a life of brilliant highs and too-well-chronicled calamity. But as my friend’s karaoke choices illustrate, a decade later, Winehouse still occupies a strong place in the public imagination, and remains a singular and transformative figure in pop music. At the 2019 Glastonbury festival, Miley Cyrus covered “Back to Black” (the title track to Winehouse’s magnificent 2006 album that has sold sixteen million copies worldwide and won five Grammy Awards), while Lana del Rey recently said that she considered quitting music following Winehouse’s death.
The anniversary is being marked with numerous projects and products. Most notably, despite (or because of) the Oscar-winning success of the comprehensive 2015 documentary Amy, there are no less than three new films examining her life debuting this month: the BBC is releasing Amy Winehouse: 10 Years On, while her mother Janis Winehouse has made Reclaiming Amy, and her goddaughter Dionne Bromfield is behind Amy Winehouse and Me: Dionne’s Story. New books include a brief biography by journalist Kate Solomon and My Amy by the singer’s close friend and former housemate Tyler James.
Another book, based on the 2020 Grammy Museum exhibition titled Beyond Black: The Style of Amy Winehouse, is coming out in the fall, while many of the items from that collection are planned for an auction in November to benefit the Amy Winehouse Foundation. An expanded, three-CD version of Winehouse’s At the BBC live record was released in May; the compilation reinforced both the glorious range of her voice (sailing from jazz standards like “Teach Me Tonight” and “Lullaby of Birdland” to the reggae classic “Monkey Man” and a sizzling version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” with Paul Weller) and the painful limitations of her tiny catalog (three different renditions of “Rehab” and “Tears Dry On Their Own”).
So why is there such continued fascination with this daughter of a London cab driver who released just two albums, only one of which was actually a hit outside the UK? Let’s start, for once, with the music. Winehouse was an extraordinary vocalist, rooted in classic soul and contemporary hip-hop, creating a feeling that was truly both timeless and modern. As the Amy documentary chronicles, she started out as an aspiring jazz singer, and her depth of emotion and inventive phrasing were stunning (Tony Bennett was a fan and collaborator); meanwhile, she concocted a signature style and stance (the beehive! the tattoos!) copped from badass girl groups like the Ronettes and the Shangri-Las.
Her first album, 2003’s Frank, is an interesting, if tentative, twist on neo-soul, but by the time she recorded Back to Black, Winehouse’s songwriting was mature, fully realized, and unflinchingly honest in its expression of heartbreak and defiance. The Guardian named it the best album of the 21st Century, and it placed in the Top Ten of NPR’s list of the “150 Greatest Albums Made by Women,” right between Carole King’s Tapestry and Janis Joplin’s Pearl. When I spoke to Keith Richards a few years back, he singled out Winehouse for praise. “She had real talent,” he said. “I thought she was really something.”
Winehouse’s success was also significant for pop music from the UK. George Michael once called her “the most soulful vocalist this country has ever seen,” and it’s always worth remembering that it’s still difficult for English artists to make the leap onto the US charts. Most obviously, she opened the door for other British blue-eyed soulsters like Estelle and Duffy, but the stateside popularity of such countrymates as Mumford and Sons or Florence and the Machine, all the way up to Ed Sheeran and Dua Lipa today, owes something to her triumph.
“Amy paved the way for artists like me and made people excited about British music again,” said Adele, clearly the greatest beneficiary of the Winehouse Effect, in 2011. “I don’t think she ever realized just how brilliant she was and how important she is.”
Which brings us, unfortunately, to the offstage part of the Amy Winehouse story, the drugs and drink and romantic messes that defined so much of her final years. There’s really not much to say beyond contemplating what it is that we want from our celebrities, and why we stand by and find entertainment in the ways they destroy themselves.
Much like our current reconsideration of the treatment Britney Spears received in her youth, though, we have to try to look with clarity at our complicity in the Winehouse tragedy—gawking as the tabloids screamed about her train wreck of a life and the paparazzi swarmed her. Things have certainly come a long way, with so much focus in today’s music on mental and emotional health, anxiety, and self-care; maybe a 2021 Amy Winehouse would have been more open to that suggestion of rehab.
I only saw Winehouse on stage once. It was her first performance in the U.S., just after Back to Black was released, at the intimate cabaret Joe’s Pub in New York City. I remember how great the music sounded, and how nervous she was—tugging at her strapless dress, bending down to pick up her drink from the floor without flashing the crowd, muttering to herself and her band. The performance was riveting, while it also had the feeling that she might not make it through the show (which I guess is a metaphor for the career that followed).
Amy Linden’s review in the Village Voice caught the vibe. “[A]s the knockout set went on, she appeared increasingly tentative and distracted,” she wrote. “Ironically, the more twitchy she behaved, the more assured she sang…there was no denying Amy’s power, even if she might be more cut out to be a singer than a star.”
Linden was prescient—but at the same time, Amy Winehouse was undoubtedly a star. She was a blue-collar Jewish girl and, at her best, she was a once-in-a-generation vocalist. Her musical gift and her bracing truth thrust her into chaos, much of it her own making, without a net. Following such icons as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain, she is—ten years later—the last superstar member of the 27 Club. May it remain that way.
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