Originally posted at palaverer.com.
We of course regret that News of the World is the source of this video, but we all remember this episode. I have yet to read an obituary that mentions it. Amy Winehouse crossed one of the lines of 21st century whiteness in it: you can think that stuff, we might agree with you, but you don't get caught doing it publicly. Her career clearly stalled primarily as the result of her addiction, but the video didn't help.
If we are to remember her, we need to do so with some understanding. I remember a bit in Tim Wise's White Like Me, about his mother:
The next thing I knew, she was rambling on, spewing out one after another nonsensical statement about lazy black welfare recipients and their illegitimate children...
His mother was drunk, and when sober was the picture of an open-minded liberal white person. Scratch the surface, and a lot of stuff comes out. Why? The entire racist subtext of American, in Wise's case, or England, in Winehouse's case, is always present, if at times slightly below the surface.
So, Winehouse represented us as white people. This is the kind of thing that happens with white people. Sometimes, they get loaded and let out a slew of epithets. Then, when they sober up, it's as if it never happened, as in the innumerable sober obituaries which dwell on the tragedy, in a literal sense, of her addiction and possibly mention her music.
It would be wrong, though, to remember Winehouse without looking at her musical project. She was not untalented. Though I prefer Motown and Brian Wilson's work to Phil Spector's, excepting a real weakness for Ronnie Spector, I remember being somewhat ecstatic when I first heard Winehouse. Ah, now like Phil Spector: this is a real tune, with a real drummer! I heard her a few years after the record was released, and had stumbled across the Dap-Kings alread. Lo and behold, it was the Dap-Kings on the Winehouse record.
The Dap-Kings are instructive, because though the most famous record they've played on is Winehouse's, their real project is with Sharon Jones. The Dap-Kings are racially mixed, just like Motown's house band, but more importantly they, clearly, know from which well they draw water. Sharon Jones is fantastic, and her story is moderately well-known: she made a few records in the 1970's, but the industry didn't have a place for her. Not conventionally pretty enough, or, in other words, too Black. The important variable when you have white musicians operating in a Black form is the question of where the money goes and in what proportions. Black people, Sharon Jones above all, are making money off the Dap-Kings, and that legitimates the operation.
Winehouse took the Elvis approach: white artist uses Black form with no examination of the underlying social, historical and economic relationships involved in the process. This is the story of the last 500 years in microcosm, in, at least, its trans-Atlantic aspect. Amy Winehouse, in spiritu, has been putting out records like this since the Spanish showed up.
If Sharon Jones, to contextualize it, made a record called "Back to Black", she'd get called angry.