Amy Winehouse links

I've been listening to Amy Winehouse's blue-eyed soul music (though hers are brown) recently, watching interviews and reading articles about her. I thought I'd post the best of those links. Of course, there's quite a bit of twitter about her drug problems, but I wasn't interested in that as much as the music.

She's an extraordinary singer and songwriter. She's such a Londoner but she's also so deeply influenced by USAmerican jazz and soul. She's extremely expressive in her singing. Expressive without emphasizing volume or power/strength of voice; the power and strength of her singing is mainly in expression, not so much in vocal athleticism. Though there can be a fine line between being expressive and simply being ornately mannered. Sometimes jazz can just have 'too many notes'.

The profundity of the UK/USA musical bond is nowhere so evident as in Winehouse.

In prominent ways, her work is retro, but she is not simply a nostalgia act. She characterizes her music (I think she means her first album named Frank) as a combination of jazz and hip hop. Back in Black, her second album, is strongly 60's soul and R&B and also has several ska tunes on it. Also, the producers she works with are artists in their own right. They're not doing nostalgia. And Winehouse's lyrics are far saucier than the jazz from the fifties and sixties; as Holly Combe points out in one of the linked articles, "she actually comes across as a tough-minded, libidinous woman wanting a tough-minded, libidinous man".

The music is less interesting lyrically than it is in its sound and vocals, but the lyrics are astonishingly good for such a young writer. Or some of them are. When she's playing in the gutter, she's fine, she's golden. But, as in Love is a Losing Game, when she tries for a bit of lyrical dignity and tragic grace, biff, she's on her nose, she just doesn't have it.

Her attitude, or perhaps her producers' attitude  toward recorded sound is more hip hop than jazz. I don't know of any jazz that has been into the poetics of recorded sound. Instead, jazz emphasizes live performance, emphasizes live communication between the musicians. Rather than studio recording which can be layered and edited ad infinitum. Many of the best versions of her songs are studio versions. She works creatively with various fully creative producers. Though she can be great live, too, as you can see in Teach Me Tonight.

I've never really understood why one would want to privilege live performance so much over recorded sound. They're different things. With books or films, we wouldn't insist that the thing, at any stage, not be edited.  We say 'go to town on that thing, edit it to be the best it can be'. But with music, there's still what seems like a misunderstanding of 'liveness' in art. 'Liveliness', in art, is the important thing, not 'liveness'. What is 'lively' is what sounds the best, what inspires us most. Not simply what's live versus what's pre-recorded.

MUSIC

She's most famous for her songs Rehab and Back to Black, but here are some of my favorites.

He Can Only Hold Her (Pnut Demo) : The whole 'old feel' of this recording is quite remarkable, and so is the song itself.

Valerie was written by The Zutons. This particular version is slower than the version produced with Mark Ronson.

Love is a Losing Game is delivered with relative vocal simplicity in this version, and the instrumentation and arrangement are perfect.

Teach Me Tonight was originally sung by Dinah Washington. Compare with Dinah Washington's version. Dinah Washington is a legendary jazz singer, of course, but I prefer the sensuality of Amy Winehouse's version.

I Heard Love is Blind has very humorous lyrics, as do many of her other songs. Often the humour is sexual, as in In My Bed, where the speaker tells her boyfriend “The only time I hold your hand/ Is to get the angle right”. That's quite a line.

Me and Mr. Jones: "What kind of fuckery are we / Nowadays you don't mean dick to me (dick to me) / I might let you make it up to me (make it up) / Who's playing Saturday?" This is hilarious, and the music and singing are terrific.

You Know I'm No Good (Skeewiff remix): A remix by loung/breakbeat/nu-jazz artists. Here's the original version.

Back to Black is the title song from her second album that won five Grammy awards in 2008. Here is a live version.

Rehab is her most famous song. She wrote this after being urged to go to rehab. The song won record of the year and song of the year at the 2008 Grammy awards.

INTERVIEWS

There are quite a few good video interviews with Amy Winehouse on youtube, but these four, which are in sequence, are the best ones I found:

ARTICLES

POSTSCRIPT

As Holly Combe points out in her article, Winehouse productions are quite image conscious. And there are various references to products in various of her songs. And if you Google Amy Winehouse, you find that there's considerable industry devoted to keeping her name in the celebrity buzz channels. And, of course, she is undoubtedly inundated with offers for business endorsements and her own brand. Amy jeans or bras or booze, etc.

She's had a boob job already, she's hooked on crack and any number of drugs...this is not the 'tortured artist' but the artist as emblematic consumer marketed ceaselessly to young adults for her 'edgy' consumer appetites.

Drugs seem to help the creative process, in the early stages of consumption, but eventually cause all sorts of awful problems. We hear Winehouse is having lung problems. Great for a singer, of course. Can she survive her early success?


7 Responses to “Amy Winehouse links”

  • eddeaddad: October 19, 2010 at 12:23 am

    Amy Winehouse is all right. Every time I listen to her, something bad happens. It’s like magic.

    I know you dig Nina Simone, right? She had worse problems and handled them better. Now that’s art.

  • Jim Andrews: October 19, 2010 at 1:56 am

    What kind of bad things?

    About Nina Simone, well I like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8tuTSi6Sck till the instruments start up. And http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8tuTSi6Sck is pretty interesting as a musical performance. But, to tell you the truth, I’d only heard her sing a few songs, didn’t know much of her work. The Internet musical experience is criminally good, isn’t it? One is able to look up most artists and listen to lots of their work and even see videos of them.

    So thanks for Nina Simone.

    I think one of the things Amy does is keep the conversation going.

  • eddeaddad: October 20, 2010 at 2:29 am

    > What kind of bad things?

    When I listen to Amy Winehouse, within the next hour I’ll have problems either in my personal or professional life. No lie! But if I listen to Stevie Wonder only good things happen.

    > The Internet musical experience is criminally good, isn’t it?

    Ah, but it also poses constraints! If I provide too many links, this comment may be flagged as spam, so I have to be selective! Oh gosh let’s see….

    Carmen McRae, “Imagination” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c__VoMQYS4 “your whole perspective gets hazy”

    Nina Simone, “Little Girl Blue”, Montreux 1976 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8yIpH_VI50 This is the song that first made her famous, re-interpreted years later after she’d become a Civil Rights activist.

  • Jim Andrews: October 22, 2010 at 2:28 am

    Beautiful.

    I did a little with a couple of great vocal pieces sung by Sarah Vaughan: Stardust and Black Coffee. The piece is at http://vispo.com/audio/shockwave/stardust.htm . I don’t think this worked out all that well, for the most part, but there are interesting aspects of it. And, of course, the music of Sarah Vaughan is the best thing about it.

  • eddeaddad: October 29, 2010 at 1:28 am

    http://vispo.com/audio/shockwave/stardust.htm

    dude that is cool. I could get lost in audio. what kind of audio editing software do you use?

  • Jim Andrews: October 29, 2010 at 1:34 am

    why thanks.

    to create the loops, i used sony sound forge. but the piece you saw is done in director which produces shockwave output. it could as well have been done in flash.

    here is some interactive audio work i did: http://vispo.com/nio http://vispo.com/jig/arteroids

  • edde addad: July 25, 2011 at 6:46 pm

    I gotta admit, when I heard Winehouse died, my first thought was: “I wonder how Jim Andrews is gonna take it…”