When Amy Winehouse was found dead in London on Saturday, it didn’t exactly come as a surprise to anyone who had followed the British singer’s tumultuous career even casually over the last five years. She had struggled with drugs and alcohol her entire adult life, something she addressed with tragic self-awareness on her career-defining hit single, “Rehab.” Since her career blew up in 2006, the prodigiously talented Winehouse seemed to exist mostly as a running joke in the tabloids, resurfacing every few months accompanied by headlines involving drug abuse, erratic work habits, and cancelled tours. No, if you asked me whether I was surprised to wake up this weekend to hear about her death, I couldn’t say that I was. In fact, I was most surprised that it hadn’t happened sooner.
When news of her death broke, the internet was quick to point out that she had joined the infamous “27 Club.” Winehouse, like Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain, was a wildly talented but also deeply troubled performer whose life was cut short at that fateful age, as just as they seemed to be scratching the surface of their artistic reach. As rock legends go, it’s as clichéd as they come, and anyone who tries to frame age 27 as a curse is deluding themselves. But in this case, I’m okay with it. Putting Winehouse in a category with Hendrix and Cobain may seem premature, but it looks like she’ll be on the list the next time someone joins this club. Because of this, her music may not be forgotten as easily as it might have otherwise. And she didn’t leave us with much music—just two studio albums and a few scattered singles—but what she did record deserves to be remembered and celebrated.
It’s remarkable in retrospect how fully formed Winehouse’s gifts were in 2003, when the 19-year-old released her debut album, Frank. Although the album was reissued in 2007 to capitalize on the success of “Rehab” and Back to Black, it remains decently underrated. Even back then, she was a throwback in almost every respect. The voice on display had more in common with Nina Simone or Ella Fitzgerald than anything in contemporary pop or R&B. Oftentimes, performers with this kind of raw talent but no professional experience will overuse their gifts to prove themselves worthy of attention. Not Winehouse. Her vocal abilities were apparent from the beginning, but never in-your-face. She showed impressive restraint on the ballads “You Sent Me Flying” and “What it Is About Men,” songs a less astute singer would have bludgeoned to death with vocal acrobatics.
But even as she seemingly devoted herself to emulating icons of a bygone era, the album’s stunning centerpiece, “In My Bed,” brought hip-hop into the equation and suggested that she could easily have had a fine career as a Lauryn Hill or Erykah Badu type if she were so inclined. Watching the video for “In My Bed” today is surreal. The teenaged Winehouse had barely any tattoos. She had some semblance of a normal person’s weight. And there was not a lot on Frank that foreshadowed the direction her career would take a few years later. The singles “Fuck Me Pumps” and “Take the Box” displayed a self-deprecation that was fresh and charming rather than destructive.
Since Winehouse lacked obvious the marketability of a Norah Jones, she may never had much more than a cult audience had she stayed in that lane. The Mark Ronson-produced follow-up, 2006’s Back to Black, was bigger, bolder, and flashier, but no less of a throwback. If she sounded on Frank like a modern incarnation of Sarah Vaughan, then Back to Black positioned her as a lost member of the Motown roster. The vocal performance on this record was no less virtuosic than that of its predecessor, but what was staggering was how smooth a transition it was for Winehouse from jazz to soul. The title track and “Some Unholy War” came from the same place as her debut, but gone were any traces of cabaret. The horns were still there, but on Back to Black, they stabbed and punctuated her songs, rather than carry them.
The hit singles “Rehab” and “You Know I’m No Good” dealt with her drug use and personal problems head-on, and lines like “I don’t never wanna drink again” didn’t exactly discourage British tabloids from making a sport of publishing pictures of her and her scumbag husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, in every unflattering physical and mental state imaginable. Winehouse seemed to relish the attention, even as it was clearly tearing her life to pieces. Nobody in the press seemed to be rooting for her to get help—headlines playing on “Rehab” accompanied by drunken photos were too profitable. It seemed at times as though Winehouse was playing herself in a TV show, giving the audience what she believed they wanted, a junkie caricature. The way the media treated her, she could have just been any addicted celebrity. The fact that she made music, let alone music this fresh and vital, never seemed to cross people’s minds. Her tours seemed to exist only to be cancelled and set off a new round of Daily Mail headlines. Reports of Winehouse working on new music surfaced only when the word was that she was too fucked-up to function. Now we’ll never know what she would have done with her career had she gotten it together.
What little music Winehouse has recorded since Back to Black has largely signified what would have been yet another stylistic shift. Judging from the B-sides “Cupid,” “Monkey Man,” and “Jey Little Rich Girl,” her next move was reggae. And, surprise, she crushed that too. Of course she did. She had the kind of voice that could have probably pulled off anything you care to name, and do it with poise, nuance, and a killer musical instinct. It’s tough to assess how Winehouse will be remembered. It was a foregone conclusion that Michael Jackson’s death would allow people to move past his issues and bring his world-class talent back into focus. Winehouse’s body of work is much smaller, of course, but her influence is still felt on pop radio. But while the similar-sounding Adele and Duffy are fine singers, neither of them are as transcendently talented as Amy was. We could have been watching an all-time great. We’ll never know. Her self-assuredness in the recording booth was never matched by her stability outside it, and when a talent like that goes this early, we all lose.
