This is a tour de force from Ms Winehouse. A tribute to soul/jazz classics, but performed with a cheeky wink and edgy, dirty lyrics. This first hits you as anachronistic, but enjoyably so. Billy Holiday would have been proud – I mean old jazz classics have been cleaned up a bit by the process of being respected and hailed as high art, but that music was made by the people for the people. The themes are still the same and still relevant – troubled love, drug and alcohol abuse – but the barriers of what is accepted in entertainment have been pushed back, so why shouldn’t Amy swear like a sailor and talk about ‘vulgar’ things?
Winehouse brings that brutal honesty to her songs that is so like Holiday, tearing your heart out one second and jackknifing to make you smirk the next. She deals with her flaws and addictions in an endearingly frank and often humourous way. Her well publicized problem with drinking is dealt with in a way that couldn’t be anymore up front in first single ‘Rehab’, and she laments a spell of cheating in ‘You Know I’m No Good’.
Like all the great jazz divas, she has the tortured soul, man troubles, and a strong yet fragile character and, of course, the voice. This album really shows off her versatile range. She has moments of Holiday’s huskiness and syncopated intonation, sometimes Fitzgerald’s sweet timbre, other times an amalgamation of female Motown greats. Her voice twists and turns from one style to another, buttering you up with a gentle smooth note then hitting you where it hurts with a powerful snarl. Her accent adds to this effect, a mixture of South London twang and an adopted Southern States drawl.
Me and Mr. Jones – obviously playing on Gamble and Huff’s classic ‘Me and Mrs. Jones’, describes her ambivalence to this guy, one of the many troubled affairs on the album. There’s a contrast between the classy music and the [inventively] dirty lyrics and has a funny call and response: ‘What kind of fuckery are we?/ Nowadays you don’t mean dick to me’ (Backing singers: ‘Ah dick to me’)
Back to Black was written with Mark Ronson, who also produced half of the album and recently had a hit of his jazzed up version of Radiohead’s ‘Just’.
I’d go as far as to say it’s a modern masterpiece, with ‘Baby Love’ piano, a chorus fit for Nancy Sinatra, and minor chords that cut like a machete, it is really something.
Other great tracks are, ‘Tears Dry On Their Own’, which has great Motown harmonies, and ‘Wake Up Alone’ is sexy, poetic, and gentle – this is the flip side to Amy’s brassy front. After all the heartache related in the songs before, in ‘Addicted’ Amy concludes the album with her tough-ass brave face on, she argues the case that smoking pot is better than having a boyfriend anyway. ‘Don’t make no difference if I end up alone/ I’d rather have myself and smoke my home grown./ It’s got me addicted/ Does more than any dick did/ Yeah I can get mine/ And you can get yours.’
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