Whitney Houston, R.I.P.
By Colby Cosh - Sunday, February 12, 2012 - 0 Comments
Sometimes, news is sad not because it’s surprising but because it isn’t. Whitney Houston, who became a recognizably troubled artist late in the last century, was denying crack use by 2002, and was admitting to it by 2009, has died at the age of 48. Every major news organization had canned obituaries ready (it’s been reported that MTV prepared one in 2001); the CBC’s struck multiple notes of grim accuracy.
The New York Times wrote that Houston “possesses one of her generation’s most powerful gospel-trained voices, but she eschews many of the churchier mannerisms of her forerunners. She uses ornamental gospel phrasing only sparingly, and instead of projecting an earthy, tearful vulnerability, communicates cool self-assurance and strength, building pop ballads to majestic, sustained peaks of intensity.”
Houston’s decision not to follow the more soulful inflections of singers like Franklin drew criticism by some who saw her as playing down her black roots to go pop and reach white audiences. The criticism would become a constant refrain through much of her career. She was even booed during the Soul Train Awards in 1989.
The Times found a polite way to say that Whitney was the possessor of a terrific vocal instrument but no abilities as a song interpreter. It wasn’t a question of “black roots”, or if it was, they were the kind of “black roots” that a young Amy Winehouse was somehow able to find in the record shops of North London. Houston would go on to inspire a generation of performers to overpower audiences with sheer vocal force; it is not quite true that she sang everything loud and high, but it is probably fair to say that in all the classic Whitney Houston hits, the chorus is something you sit through to get to “the moment”. And that “moment” is always loud and high. (Did she really sing in churches as much as she is supposed to have? Imagine the din.)
For every hundred people who know her fire-engine version of “I Will Always Love You”, maybe three have heard the Dolly Parton original—an admittedly schlocky number, but one in which the individual words at least have some emotional impetus of their own. And yet it took Whitney’s rendering to make Dolly unimaginably rich off that song. Houston was, literally and metaphorically, the anthem performer to end all anthem performers. In her songs as in her life, she took a powerful, even innovative shortcut to success. Yet when she reached an age at which emotional maturity must take over from laryngeal athleticism, she had no apparent ability to respond, coming to lean heavily on producers, dance-club remixes, and duets with other singers. Viewed in retrospect, this part of her career was much longer than the time she spent as a leading global star—about twice as long, really.
She did not cope well with the search for a second act, and that is the element that strikes me as the saddest. Whitney Houston’s original public image emphasized, to the point of obnoxiousness, her status as the heiress to a great tradition of song: mother Cissy, godmother Aretha, cousin Dionne. Houston didn’t sound much like any of them, and doesn’t seem to have learned much else from them, either. These are all women who managed to grow old with reasonable grace. Whitney, it turns out, couldn’t pull off either half of that equation. If she couldn’t survive mega-celebrity with such advantages, how the hell does anybody do it?
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Steppin’ out with Tony Bennett
By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 10:15 AM - 4 Comments
Tony Bennett, 85, sings with Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga on his new CD, and has taken up sculpting. Try to keep up.
Photograph by Jessica Darmanin
“Bap! . . . Bap!” Tony Bennett’s unamplified voice, loud as a snare drum, bounces off the back wall of Place des Arts as he tests the acoustics at an afternoon sound check. Standing next to him at centre stage, looking out at the 3,000 seats that will be packed for his evening performance at Montreal’s jazz festival, I ask if some audiences are warmer than others. “The audience is never cold,” he says. “If they’re cold, that means you’re cold. You gotta walk out there energized. Sinatra taught me that years ago.” Energy? It’s not the word that comes to mind when you think of an old master crooning The Shadow of Your Smile or I’ve Got You Under My Skin. But when I gently broach that notion, Bennett gives me a puzzled look. Obviously I’ve never seen him perform.
That night, from the standing ovation that greets him as he bounds onto the stage to the one that bids him farewell, Bennett’s energy is miraculous. This, after all, is a man who would soon celebrate his 85th birthday on Aug. 3. His scuffed velvet voice seems enriched, not diminished, by age. Still muscular and elastic, it ranges from intimate jazz detours to flights of operatic grandeur—reminiscent of Sinatra, but infinitely warmer. Bennett works the microphone like a musical instrument, pulling it close for a confidential aside, but holding it just above his waist much of the time. At one point, he has the soundman turn off the mikes, then sings Fly Me to the Moon a cappella and unplugged, beaming his voice to the upper balcony. Near the end of the song, he opens the throttle. He hits a note, holds it, and his voice fills the hall like a floodlight, with a power that seems to come out of nowhere.
Oh, and he also dances. Occasionally, he’ll finesse a phrase with a pirouette, a switchblade flash of Vegas that draws a roar from the crowd. When his 37-year-old daughter Antonia comes onstage for a duet, Bennett joins her in a nimble soft-shoe. Throughout the show, he almost never stops smiling. And why not? His music, plucked from the Great American Songbook, summons up a golden age, when jazz and pop were happily married. Spanning Gershwin, Cole Porter and classic strains of Hollywood and Broadway, it exists in an emotional utopia—a wonderful world with skies of blue, where love comes just in time, little cable cars climb halfway to the stars on the sunny side of the street and the best is yet to come. It’s how America was meant to be.
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Amy Winehouse’s 33 perfect minutes
By Stephen Marche - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 17 Comments
We still have “Back to Black,” one of the greatest albums of all time
Hedi Slimane/Trunk Archive
Nobody was surprised that Amy Winehouse died last week at age 27 in her north London home. Only a month before, she had been caught on YouTube at a concert in Belgrade, so slurring-drunk and forgetting-the-lyrics-high that she was booed off the stage. The performance was alarming enough that the organizers cancelled the European tour she had just started. They had been optimistic even to try. In 2007, at the cusp of her rise to prominence, Winehouse’s in-laws had begged her fans to stop buying her records because the proceeds were being poured directly into self-destruction. Her father publicly worried that his daughter was smoking so much crack she was developing emphysema in her mid-twenties.
If her death was not surprising, it was nonetheless shocking. Creatively, she was like a bullfighter sidestepping phoniness at the last possible moment, dodging the prefabricated sound or image while allowing the familiar and comforting to suffuse her being, letting the clichéd ride as close to her as possible and then suddenly pulling away. The horn section, the backup singers, the beehive, the Cleopatra makeup, the pin-up girl tattoos—we had seen them all before, but her way of wearing them was so personal they became brand new. But in the end, despite her freshness, she lived out the old, old story, another entrant into the 27 club, the exclusive arrangement for rock ’n’ roll stars who die at the standard age: Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain. Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse, blah, blah, blah.
She has left us with Back to Black, one of the greatest albums of all time. Or rather, I shouldn’t say “greatest” because that’s to say it exists on a spectrum or in a hierarchy, when really Back to Black does that nearly impossible thing in art: it is what it is and it is not something else. Music critics who described the album’s sound as “retro” after its release were wrong. (Many have had the good sense to recant.) Soul cannot be appropriated and remain soul; that’s Starbucks soul. Back to Black is just soul.
Unfortunately, the death of Amy Winehouse has transformed the meaning of Back to Black. It’s hard to remember this, now, but the opening track, Rehab, when released in 2006, was a joke song, something like Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl. A witty play on tabloid culture and on the drama of addiction captured in shows like Celebrity Rehab and Intervention, it teased itself about the rock ’n’ roll cliché of wild living: “They tried to make me go to rehab / but I said no, no, no.” The first thing Amy Winehouse gave her audience was a laugh. The joke is all too real now.
The self-consciousness of the lyrics in Back to Black make Winehouse’s death all the more pathetic. Her humour, her knowingness, seemed like such obvious escape hatches from the operas she lured herself into. Billie Holiday stared down into the abyss of her addiction and depression as she plummeted through it. Even Nina Simone, incredibly wise about her own suffering and its meaning, could not look away from her passion long enough to see its folly. Amy Winehouse was forever looking over her shoulder, winking at the paparazzi and at herself in the mirror. With sparkling clarity, she understood the silliness of her antics. In Tears Dry on Their Own, she gives herself a good talking to: “We could have never had it all / We had to hit a wall / So this is inevitable withdrawal.” Then she gives herself exactly the right advice: “I cannot play myself again / I should just be my own best friend.” She seemed too intelligent, too familiar with the by-now-established pitfalls of hedonism, to walk into such obvious traps. She seemed too darkly clever to die so stupidly.
Not that Back to Black doesn’t revel in the glamour of its own melodrama. Her breakup and then reunion with Blake Fielder-Civil, Winehouse’s muse, is always the “five-storey fire” described in Love is a Losing Game. But what is so attractive about Back to Black, so refreshing, is the intimacy of the portrait of self-obsession and collapse, the unglamorous details of the narcotic dream and nightmare. Her most memorable and idiomatic songs are like Mary Pratt paintings accompanied by doo-wop backup singers, as in You Know I’m No Good: “I’m in the tub, you on the seat / Lick your lips as I soak my feet.” A portrait of the domesticity of self-abuse, the album glows with authenticity, with little in-jokes and pop culture references and other bits and pieces of conversation.
The album is also riddled with a wonderful confusion about what’s important and what’s not. Winehouse uses her voice, a deliriously thrilling instrument that raspingly conjures the most organic passion at will, in counterintuitive ways. She can be amazingly blasé and de-emphasize lines like, “I cheated myself / like I knew I would,” while unfurling the whole of her soulfulness in Me and Mr. Jones for the line: “Who’s playing Saturday?” Her heart shrinks and expands in the most unlikely places. Before her death, this variability was merely a superb piece of vocal technique; now it’s something darker, evidence of the spiritual confusion and the lived chaos of the confirmed addict.
Most terribly, the meaning of the title track has changed since Winehouse’s death, changed painfully and completely. The video for the song shows Winehouse attending a funeral, which turns out to be for “the heart of Amy Winehouse.” Before she actually died, this tired iconography was a piece of kitchen-sink romanticism, a cheap but lovely rip-off of Keats being “half in love with easeful death.” In the middle of the song, chimes ring out—a strange and powerful moment, unlike anything in popular music, dull resonances over which Winehouse croons the word “black.” In hindsight, the chimes were her death knell. Right in the middle of Back to Black she rings the bells in her own memory. Back to Black was a funeral elegy to herself that 11 million people have so far purchased. How else to interpret these lines: “I love you much / It’s not enough / you love blow and I love puff / And life is like a pipe / And I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside.”
Amy Winehouse was an extreme example of the singer who attains in song what she can’t manage in reality: in her case, self-awareness. In her music, she knew exactly who she was and where she was going. Not in her life. In a 2007 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, at the end of her North American tour for Back to Black, she said she didn’t care whether she had a future career. “I don’t want to be ungrateful,” she said. “I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and look after my family.” What self-conception could be more in error? What statement could be further from the truth?
With talent, as with everything else, those who have too much throw away what they have. The very luxuriousness of Winehouse’s abilities made them so easy to waste. But we still have Back to Black, which is perfect. The dream of pop music has always been that you could capture the urgency of life lived, the proverbial lightning in a bottle. That’s exactly what Back to Black is, an album of such intensely vivid expression that it feels live while also being so perfectly articulated that you wouldn’t change a single line of phrasing.
It’s only 33 minutes long. Other than a pretty decent but forgettable first album and a couple of covers, that’s all we have of Amy Winehouse. Sometimes 33 minutes can be worth more than 27 years.
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Winehouse laid to rest
By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 11:55 AM - 0 Comments
Celebrity friends bid farewell to troubled troubadour
British soul singer Amy Winehouse was laid to rest in North London Thursday. Friends, including reality television star Kelly Osborne and DJ Mark Ronson, were on hand for the private ceremony. Winehouse, 27, was found dead in her home Saturday. A cause of death has yet to be determined.
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Amy Winehouse, dead at 27
By macleans.ca - Saturday, July 23, 2011 at 3:05 PM - 13 Comments
Singer found lifeless in her London flat
Amy Winehouse, the English singer-songwriter who was one of the most popular music artists of the ’00s, has been found dead in her London flat at age 27. Winehouse, whose drug and alcohol problems became major tabloid stories soon after she rose to fame, had recently canceled a planned European tour after her substance issues left her unable to perform at a concert. Paramedics were called to her home today and found that she was already dead. The police are inquiring into the circumstances of the death.
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The sporting case for the Grammy Awards
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, February 1, 2010 at 1:01 PM - 6 Comments
The Grammys are to pop music what the Super Bowl is to sports
It is perhaps possible to take the Grammy Awards seriously. But only if you stop worrying about them.
Consider, for a moment, the National Football League.
The NFL is presently the premier professional sports league in North America: a multi-billion-dollar cultural institution that can claim, in the Super Bowl, the biggest single sporting event on the planet. Its athletes are among the world’s most exceptional and most beloved. But success in the NFL is not the ultimate standard of sporting achievement. The NFL does not define the concept of sport. In fact, no league, tournament or event—not even the Olympics—does. And it is generally understood that it is impossible to compare athletes of different leagues and disciplines—any discussion of “the world’s greatest athlete” generally defined by he or she who dominates their particular competition most spectacularly. (Tiger Woods, for instance, wasn’t ever as fast or as strong as any number of Olympians, football players or basketball players. But he was, by virtue of his unique excellence in golf, in the conversation as the best athlete in the world.)
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Newsmakers: Moving in
By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment
The real estate market may be in flux, but that doesn’t mean families everywhere aren’t trading up, and down
George W. Bungalow
After eight years in the White House, the former U.S. president is the proud owner of a brown house. George and Laura (and a few Secret Service agents) are the newest additions to Preston Hollow, an upscale Dallas neighbourhood where the Bushes bought a bricked, ranch-style bungalow for US$3 million. It’s the perfect, peaceful place for W. to write his memoirs—if a publisher ever decides to buy them.Conan the Californian
For Conan O’Brien, replacing Jay Leno as host of The Tonight Show meant more than moving time slots. It also meant moving his wife and two children from New York to Los Angeles—to a US$10.5-million mansion complete with a pool, spa, six fireplaces and a 1,500-bottle wine room. Andy Richter does not live in the guest house. Continue… -
Newsmakers: Breakups
By Anne Kingston - Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment
From the Summer ’09 Newsmakers family edition
Jennifer Anniston & John Mayer
Exactly what caused the sporadic soulmates’ final fade from tabloid covers was the subject of much frenzied speculation. Was it her wanting a baby? His womanizing ways? Her eternal pining for Brad Pitt? The final consensus: the former Friends star became fed up with the schmaltzy singer’s compulsive Twittering.Prince Harry & Chelsy Davy
Commoners learned of the breakup of the blond Zimbabwe-born law student and the ginger-haired British royal stud after five years of yacht-frolicking via that great equalizer, Facebook: Davy changed her relationship status to “not in one”—accompanied by a symbol of a broken red heart. Continue… -
they tried to make me go to magicuts
By Scott Feschuk - Friday, May 9, 2008 at 5:23 AM - 0 Comments
Let’s play the fun and challenging game that’s sweeping the entire world, even the…
Let’s play the fun and challenging game that’s sweeping the entire world, even the parts that have Monopoly and Uno: What the Hell Is That Thing on Amy Winehouse’s Forehead?
- World’s tiniest, most portable cooler holds one-fourteenth of a beer.
- Those incoming messages from her alien overlords aren’t going to receive themselves.
- “Blimey – has anyone seen where I put me baked potato?”
