東區學英語 | 菁英東區聽力大補貼染毒歌后艾美懷絲陳屍自宅

For Winehouse, Life Was Messier Than Music

She was just getting started. Amy Winehouse, dead at 27, was only two albums into a career, and a life, that would be derailed by alcohol, drugs and bad choices.

Ms. Winehouse had not released an album in five years; her masterpiece, “Back to Black,” arrived in Britain in 2006 and in the United States in 2007. Its insolent, savvy but sadly prophetic single “Rehab” won Grammy Awards as Record of the Year and Song of the Year, and it might not even be the album’s best song. Under better circumstances, “Back to Black” would have been a foundation for a long and maturing catalog. Now, it remains as a warning that Ms. Winehouse could not bring herself to heed. “I tread a troubled track,” she sang in the album’s title song. “My odds are stacked.”

The police in London have said that they are investigating the circumstances of Ms. Winehouse’s death, but that “at this early stage it is being treated as unexplained.”

The years after “Back to Black” brought a very public decline. Her performances were erratic or much worse. She planned and canceled tours, went in and out of hospitals. Photos and videos showed her stumbling, bleeding and apparently taking drugs. With her boyfriend and then husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, who served jail time for attacking a pub landlord, Ms. Winehouse shared drug benders and never made it through rehab. The long, pathetic spectacle brought joy only to the jackals of the British tabloids, which sneered in big headlines at each new downturn.

But her self-destruction was a deep loss to listeners. Ms. Winehouse was no manufactured pop commodity. She was a genuine musician: one of the very small handful of British singers whose version of American soul music had a gutsiness and flair far beyond what could be studied.

Ms. Winehouse’s 2003 debut album, “Frank,” made when she was still a teenager, introduced her as a tangy-voiced, scat-singing disciple of Erykah Badu, Esther Phillips, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan. The album straddled jazz and R&B, big bands and bossa nova; the production was sometimes cluttered, but it certainly wasn’t cookie-cutter pop-R&B. Like many pop newcomers, Ms. Winehouse showed off a little, swooping around melismatically when she didn’t have to. But she already had the slide and slur, the way of bending phrases down toward slight dissonance, that always made her sound so nonchalantly willful.

While Ms. Winehouse had many songwriting collaborators on “Frank,” her lyrics already showed her acerbic, unsparing eye on both the people she observed and herself. “I Heard Love Is Blind,” written on her own, has a chord progression like a Tin Pan Alley ballad, with lyrics that describe a tryst with someone who looked like her boyfriend, trying to explain how it wasn’t really infidelity: “You left me here alone, I drank so much and needed to touch/Don’t overreact, I pretended he was you/You wouldn’t want me to be lonely.”

That friction between retro music and bluntly contemporary lyrics — to the point of raunch — was perfected on “Back to Black.” On that album, Ms. Winehouse worked with a disc jockey-turned producer, Mark Ronson, who could recreate the anatomy of vintage soul and R&B down to the studio room tone. (The surprise of hearing cusswords in a classic soul setting was still a fertile enough strategy, years later, to get Cee Lo Green nominated for Record and Song of the Year at the 2011 Grammy Awards for what was called “The Song Otherwise Known as ‘Forget You’.”) In songs she wrote largely on her own, Ms. Winehouse sang about her misery after a breakup, and about temptations she could not fight off: alcohol, drugs, sex and addict boyfriends. But with girl-group harmonies around her, and arrangements harking back to Motown, Stax and ska, she sounded shrewd and knowing, a woman who recognized all her own weaknesses and could see beyond them. Her beehive hairdos and out-to-there eyelashes only made her appear more amused, more in control, at least at the beginning.

In her music, Ms. Winehouse could sketch out her troubles and laugh them off, with a resilient beat and that insouciant flutter in her voice. Outside the recording studio, as a human being separate from her art, Ms. Winehouse couldn’t do that. Her songs, it turned out, would be wiser than she was.