Shameless, Seductive and Sincere: 20 Years of Amy Winehouse’s Frank
Winehouse's debut album is the closest we’ll ever get to knowing what she was like before fame, before her death became greater than her life.
Photo by Rob Verhorst/Redferns
I don’t want to watch Amy Winehouse die again. Whether intended as a revisionist reappraisal or a lesson on the consequences of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, Winehouse’s premature and tragic demise has perpetually been rebroadcast and commercialized since her actual death in 2011. With the Oscar-winning success of the 2015 documentary Amy, producers decided to just do it again and again and again. Now, a forthcoming biopic, Back To Black, is set to be released sometime in 2024. She could die a thousand times, but would her story ever really change?
This retrospective canonizing is a symptom of being an ever-so-fascinating Dead Girl. Think Princess Diana—who also got her very own biopic just two years ago—or Frida Kahlo and Billie Holiday. It’s a phenomenon that Edgar Allen Poe once described as “unquestionably the most poetic subject in the world,” as it eulogizes—and inflates—the helplessness of a girl who “could’ve been saved.” All these documentary retellings, exhibitions inside her thrifted closet or deep-dives into adolescent journals are to identify pieces of the greater “what went wrong” Dead Girl puzzle. In this corner is a bad childhood, in the middle a predisposition to alcoholism. But, no matter how many pieces you connect, the picture will never fully match the one on the actual box. So we disassemble truths in an attempt to create a sanctifying image but, in actuality, we create an artifice where women are their tragedy. Or maybe a Halloween costume.
The “real” Amy Winehouse is not that hard to find. Before the drunken lament of Back to Black—before the beehive hairdo and the thick, winged eyeliner reaching all the way back to her temples and before the U.S. even really caught wind of her—Winehouse released her 2003 debut Frank via Island Records. It’s the most literal exposition to her story, as she “wouldn’t write anything unless it was directly personal to [her] because [she] wouldn’t have done it right,” Instead of watching some Hollywood bigwig’s translation, you can listen to her unfiltered memoir. Like a flashback in a movie, Frank paints a sunny picture. Winehouse is 19 with long, combed hair, a wide smile and full cheeks. Both she and the music are less complicated, less jaded. It’s the closest we’ll ever get to knowing what Winehouse was like before fame and it’s been here all along, for 20 whole years—and it begins with a scat.
Now introducing: Amy Winehouse, the jazz singer. Undeniably one of the most recognizable voices of the last century, Winehouse’s North London drawl allowed her to effortlessly curl her syllables, coating them in a rich and smokey glaze—or a short, sharp tang, as if spitting them out. Her contralto range, the lowest female register, sounds as if her notes are hanging in the air: long, vibrating and wretched. This is not unlike the jazz vocalists she grew up listening to, such as Sarah Vaughn and Dinah Washington. She makes these influences known as she samples Ella Fitzgerald’s “Lullaby For Birdland” for “October Song” and covers George Benson’s “Moody’s Mood For Love,” as well as Billie Holiday’s “(There Is) No Greater Love.” According to Questlove, she could “school you in jazz” and her knowledge and reverence is woven throughout each of the 15 tracks found on Frank.
In fact, there are four distinct “Amy trademarks” found on Frank: walking bass, sweet jazz chords, hip-hop beats and a ride cymbal. Akin to the neo-soul fusion of Erykah Badu, Winehouse revives the traditional swoon of a jazz crooner by pumping the heart of her tracks with the swaggering beat of a rap instrumental. In fact, almost all the music on Frank came from live instrumentation with production from Salaam Rami—known for his work with the Fugees—who she’d return to for Back To Black alongside a relatively unknown producer at the time, Mark Ronson.
Most songs on Frank only have a couple moving parts, as Winehouse’s voice is at the center—directing the melody and narrating the story. After the scat intro, a steady beat picks up, accompanied by sweet, sparse guitar chords for “Stronger Than Me.” Although lauded with the Ivor Novello Songwriting Award, to modern ears “Stronger Than Me” is blatantly transgressive. Winehouse is mad at her man for not “living up to his [gender] role,” calling him a “lady boy” because he always wants to talk and be comforted. She even bluntly asks: “Are you gay?” Whether or not she really believed male sensitivity is exclusively linked to homosexuality, the song is quintessential Winehouse: lyrically edgy, but unflinchingly sincere. It’s also indicative of the kind of fiery romance she finds thrilling, famously proven true with her explosive and tumultuous relationship with ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil, the impetus to her follow-up Back To Black.
By nature of her shameless, occasionally ill-mannered tongue, Winehouse is both a natural raconteur and a provocateur. Sometimes her pithy mouth gets her in trouble, but it also gets her a half-million-pound record deal. This isn’t so unlike the namesake of the album, Frank Sinatra. His voice is universally beloved, but the man himself was, as Amy put it, “an arsehole.” And Winehouse also has no problem being an arsehole. Her callousness lends itself wonderfully to quippy hooks and verses. “Fuck Me Pumps” is one of those arsehole tracks, as she satirises the promiscuous, gold-digging party-girls found at the bars every night. It’s full of zingers: She notes how the women “all look the same,” and can’t “sit down because their jeans are too tight.” They’re all “pushing 30 and their tricks no longer work” and their dream is to just be a “footballer’s wife.” She finds them pathetic, much like the man on “Stronger Than Me,” but recognizes that without these pitiful women there “would be no nightlife.”