33. Amy Winehouse, "Back to Black"

 

“Show me a person who hasn’t got a darker side, and I’ll call them 'boring!'," Amy Winehouse told an interviewer in 2007, and Amy Winehouse was never boring.  This album, her second and last before her death in 2011 at the age of 27, is a masterpiece, a nearly-perfect set of songs that recall old-school girl group sounds of the 60s while remaining firmly in Winehouse's own inimitable style.

The songs are often nakedly personal, vulnerable to the point where it's hard to listen to them.  Winehouse did more than bare her soul; she ripped her chest open and invited everyone in for a look:

He left no time to regret
Kept his dick wet with his same old safe bet
Me and my head high
And my tears dry, get on without my guy
You went back to what you know
So far removed from all that we went through
And I tread a troubled track
My odds are stacked, I'll go back to black

In this one verse, Winehouse casually admits that her lover went back to an old flame, flirts with resilience, and eventually admits she can't help but go back to "black," to the depression that troubled her from a young aged and to the alcohol that would eventually kill her.  It sounds awful but the music it's set against is so beautiful and casually brilliant that the song ends up being almost uplifting.  How's that for a songwriting trick?  Winehouse, btw, wrote almost the entire album herself, and is now recognized not just for her one of a kind voice and ability to command a song but also as one of the great songwriters of her generation.

"Love Is a Losing Game," the next track, is a sad ballad that immediately recalls Diana Ross and the Supremes, and again spins out a story of heartbreak and pain ("Know you're a gambling man/Love is a losing hand," god that tells it all in two lines, doesn't it?).

The first single was "Rehab," a sassy soul-tinged romp that could be sung by Ella Fitzgerald, if she ever sung about refusing to go to rehab.  In it, Winehouse sardonically nods ar her musical progenitors:

I'd rather be at home with Ray
I ain't got seventy days
'Cause there's nothing, there's nothing you can teach me
That I can't learn from Mr. Hathaway

(That's Ray Charles and Donny Hathaway.)  Expertly produced by Mark Ronson, the horns swell on the chorus, making Winehouse's refusal a moment of elan and grace.  You can picture her descending a staircase in a cocktail dress as she belts it out. 

I have to talk about "Tears Dry on Their Own," a song I listened to three times in a row just this morning!  On the surface, it's another song about losing out in love, but it's imbued with so much style and brass (literal and metaphorical) that it transcends the genre.  Plus, it has a big, proud singalong chorus that makes it hard to be sad about anything.  It samples "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," to perfect effect.

Obviously, I love this album, and I'm more than pleasantly surprised to see it this high (I was starting to worry it was overlooked).  It raises some of the appropriation issues we've talked about with other albums, since it draws so heavily and so specifically from 60s soul and R&B and singers like Ella and Aretha.  I happen to think it's not as direct a lift as something like Graceland because Winehouse definitely used that music as a starting point, not as an ending point.  As Pitchfork put it (in a fairly good review with a bafflingly low 6.4 rating- what the fuck, Pitchfork?), "The references to girl groups, northern soul, and ska are there, but no one would confuse these approximations (split evenly between Ronson and Salaam Remi, who produced Winehouse's since-disowned debut) with the real thing."

One final note: if you haven't seen it, the 2015 documentary Amy is well worth your time.  She was truly a tragic figure, and a lot of people tried to help her, but in the end she probably never wanted to be helped at all.

Is this album in my personal Top 100? I'm not sure!  I think so but I'm still playing with my list.  It's very hard.