| Google Search |
|
| Advertiser |
|
|
| Recommended |
|
| New In Amazon |
|
|
|
| April 1, 2007 |
| Singer's 'debauched' image not whole story |
First off, there's the diminutive singer's look: a black beehive of hair, mascara-drenched eyes, old-style sailor tattoos. It's part Dusty Springfield, part Morticia Addams.
Then, there's the 23-year-old's extraordinary voice, like Billie Holiday channeling the Shangri-Las.
The combination helped push Winehouse's second album, the soaring, Phil Spector-ish "Back to Black," to the top of the British charts and many critics' year-end best lists in 2006. It was released in the U.S. in mid-March. But her music is not the only thing about her that garners attention. Her high-voltage personality and reputation for heavy drinking and smoking, and blunt speaking, have landed her, time and again, in the pages of the tabloid press.
It's an image Winehouse's songs do nothing to dispel. "Back to Black" spawned the hit song "Rehab," with its autobiographical refrain: "They tried to make me go to rehab/I said no, no, no."
"I listen to a lot of '60s music, but society is different now," said Winehouse, fresh from winning a Brit Award as the year's best female British act. "I'm a young woman, and I'm going to write about what I know."
It's a winning formula -- "Back to Black" is a compelling combination of the retro and the risque.
Whereas Winehouse's first album, 2003's "Frank," drew on hip-hop and jazz, "Back to Black" turns for inspiration to the dense harmonies, soaring, orchestral arrangements and heart-on-sleeve emotion of early Motown and 1960s girl groups.
If the sound is shimmering, the lyrics are lacerating. "I told you I was trouble/You know that I'm no good," she sings on "You Know I'm No Good."
Winehouse says it's the unashamed emotionalism of the decades-old music that appeals to her.
"A lot of music now is trying to be cool and like, 'Yeah, I don't really care about you' -- a really blase attitude," she said. "I think it's much nicer to be in love, and throw yourself into it, and want to lie in the road for that person.
"It's like the difference between having a dance in the middle of the party and standing around the outside with a beer bottle trying to look cool."
She says the Shangri-Las -- the girl-group behind "Leader of the Pack" and other drama-drenched '60s singles -- "pretty much had a song for every stage of a relationship: being lonely, then finding someone, being in love with them, then breaking up with the boy, then crying about it. They've got a song for every occasion. Saw me through a fair few good and bad times, definitely." |
posted by viraks @ 5:36:00 AM  |
|
|
|
|
|
