2012 music roundup

This list is not in any order, and there's certainly some that I've forgotten. These are the songs that made an impact on my consciousness in 2012. I listened to a lot more chart music this past year, primarily because I joined a gym that played Channel V non-stop. And while that was a largely painful experience - 99% of music today is still aimed at helping moronic 19 year olds shake their azz and get with all the hotties at da cluuub - some good stuff managed to sneak in there too.


Gotye featuring Kimbra - Somebody That I Used To Know
Belgian-born Melbournian Wally De Backer, aka Gotye, notched up some impressive feats in 2012 - among them, the first Australian artist to hit number 1 in the US since Savage Garden, over 300 million views on Youtube, topping the charts in 23 countries, and apparently the most popular song ever in the history of the Dutch charts. Quite a feat for an "alternative" artist, whatever that tag means these days.


Kendrick Lamar - Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe
As someone who still remembers the Golden Age of Hip-Hop (aka 1988 - 1994, give or take), I pretty much hate every rapper who comes out these days. But Kendrick's all right. We can hang.


PSY - Gangnam Style
The first song ever to amass a billion views on Youtube, a worldwide phenomenon that had everyone doing the horse dance, making videos or their own versions (see the video below) and singing along to words in Korean that they didn't understand. Gangnam Style might be a sign of the weird times we now live in, but it is also the triumph of infectious pop music to overcome the barriers of culture and language.
While a whole lot of people are undoubtedly sick to death of hearing Gangnam Style and seeing its associated dances, this shouldn't detract from what is a pretty good song. Yes, on one level it is lowest-common-denominator dance music (it borrows liberally from LMFAO's Sexy and I Know it, which was clearly not designed for people with high IQs). But it functions on other levels too: a poke at the Korean establishment (even if non-Koreans won't quite understand that), and a complete reversal of many of the conventions that most pop stars play by.


Guy Sebastian featuring Lupe Fiasco - Battle Scars
The inaugural winner of Australian Idol back in the day, Guy Sebastian seems like a lovely dude, but he's also seemed kinda lame in everything he has released; a waste of one of the better talents to have graced that show. With Battle Scars, he has achieved the feat of actually recording something credible without sacrificing his pop instincts, and it is far and away the best thing the Malaysian-born and Adelaide-raised singer has ever . Lupe Fiasco's rap on the song is a nice addition because it doesn't seem tacked on like many rap-cameos do. In fact, the two vocalists blend so well together that they can be featured on Letterman as "Lupe Fiasco featuring Guy Sebastian" and it doesn't seem completely off.

Rudimental - Feel the Love
This British collective took a genre of music many of us had forgotten existed (drum n bass), dressed it up with jazzy trumpet solos and Stax-era soul touches, and somehow had a major worldwide hit. And then did it all again with Not Giving In. Who knew the world was crying out for this style of music? Both tracks have amazing videos too.


Azalea Banks - 212
(This is actually from the back end of 2011.) One of the dominant trends in popular music is the fusion of hip-hop with club music. This is hardly a new trend – back in the late 80s and early 90s there was a lot of this stuff going on, some of it pretty good – but it is ever-present at the moment. And much of it is pretty awful, to be frank, epitomized by the dubious likes of Flo Rida and Pitbull. A better example is Azealea Banks’ 212, which succeeds largely because it samples Lazy Jay's Float my Boat, which can stand on its own merits as an instrumental track, and is not as mind-numbingly populist as most of the big club-rap tracks around. But Banks' quirky personality is also a huge drawcard, and makes the video eminently watchable, while her fairly confronting lyrics take sexual braggadocio into dimensions rarely explored in hip-hop.


The Bamboos featuring Megan Washington - The Wilhelm Scream
Melbourne's top purveyors of deep funk give this James Blake tune a smoky, majestic makeover.


Solange - Losing You
Truth be told, I've never been a huge Madonna fan, and have cared little for the previous output of Beyonce's little sister Solange. So I'm not quite sure why I find Solange's Losing You to be one of my favourite tracks of the year, given that it sounds more like Madonna than anything Madonna has done in the last 20 years. I didn't even think much of it on first listen either, principally for its extreme Madonna-ishness... but once its hooks are in it doesn't let go.


Miguel - Adorn
In a similar vein to the Solange track, RnB singer Miguel gives a big nod to the 80s with his biggest hit Adorn. But in this case, he echoes late-career Marvin Gaye. A great example of how a track that is very obviously synthesised can sound sexy and soulful and not at all plastic; a "commercial" RnB track that is notable for its subtlety. Miguel's album is not all that, unfortunately, but he at least shows that his excellent track All I Want Is You from a few years back was not a fluke.


Carly Rae Jepsen, Jimmy Fallon and The Roots - Call Me Maybe
Worth it for the faces of The Roots as they play away in the background.


Frank Ocean - Thinking About You
It used to be that if you wanted to make proper soul music and avoid making stupid commercial RnB, the only way was to go retro, harking back to an era when people knew how to make proper soul music. Frank Ocean, like Miguel to an extent, is making "proper" soul while still sounding very contemporary. His album Planet Orange is one of the very best you'll hear this year. The revelation, in the lead up to the album release, that Ocean is somewhat less than 100% heterosexual, is a brave move for any "urban" artist. Had he been a white pop singer, of course, no one would have cared.


Chiddy Bang - Mind Your Manners
In hip-hop, a genre that revolves around being a badass, it's often forgotten that the music was once fun as well as cool. (The hip-hop fun test is whether you can dance to the track without making an "attitude" face.) I'm not sure how cool Chiddy Bang really are, but in Mind Your Manners they have a track that is fun and accessible without sounding horrible, which is actually quite hard to do.


Labrinth - Treatment
The charts are full of rock bands fooling around with dance and urban elements (guest rappers, four-to-the-floor beats, DJ scratches and electronic effects). Meh. When an urban/dance artist starts fooling round with rock, I expect it to suck. This doesn't.

Sister Deborah - "Uncle Obama"

If you haven't seen this yet, it is simultaneously the best and worst thing you've ever seen.

As I understand it, it's from Ghana and has nothing at all to do with Barack Obama. And I'm quite sure it has little to do with bananas and monkeys either.

Rudimental - "Not Giving In"

It's been out a few weeks now, but the new single from East London quartet Rudimental keeps growing on me. And its video is also quite wonderful. The song itself does not quite have the game-changing quality of its predecessor Feel the Love, yet it still sounds unlike anything else on the radio since, well, forever. It again combines jungle, which I thought had died out about 10 years ago, with a Stax-era soul feel, built around John Newman's impassioned vocals.

I'm a bit of a cynic and so am not normally one for "uplifting" dance tracks with "inspirational" music videos, yet I still thought Feel the Love was the best song and video I've come across this year. The video for Not Giving In is even better. Beautifully shot in the slums of Manila, it is based on the story of a kid named Mouse who discovered breakdancing and later went on to become the 3-time world B-boy champion.

It's also a reminder of how what to some people may be meaningless pastimes - music, art, sport, dance and so on - can be invaluable in showing people an alternative path to the darker ones we are
so often tempted by.

Hip-hop samples of video games

Courtesy of SPIN magazine. Not quite the nerdgasm I'd hoped for - okay I confess, I'm mostly digging the Super Mario Brothers samples - but still pretty cool.

Fox News analyses "Gangnam Style" as only Fox News can

Following their election loss, many US conservatives have been pondering why Asians so overwhelmingly voted Democratic. Now there are numerous reasons for this, but my take is that Republicans and their allies are frequently revealed as completely ignorant and
vaguely racist when talking about anyone who is not a white American.

Case in point - this week on Fox News (the station that is basically a mouthpiece for the Republican Party), Bill O'Reilly and guest, psychiatrist Dr Keith Ablow, attempted an analysis of why Gangnam Style has become such a huge cultural phenomenon. If you are wondering about Ablow's credentials as a cultural commentator, well, he once co-authored a book with Glenn Beck, which right off the bat indicates a fairly skewed relationship to the real world.

Whether or not you like Gangnam Style, I'm sure you'll agree that it seems an odd choice for Ablow to hold up as an example of everything that is wrong with popular culture. But that's what makes Fox News so interesting.
Watch this. The stupidity is amazing.



"The most popular music, apparently, is that without intelligible words..."

Yes, he actually said that. If it's not English, it clearly doesn't mean anything. Reinforced by O'Reilly saying there's no comparison between Psy and Elvis Presley because Elvis' song's "had words".

Now there are a large number of ways in which Presley's music is unlike Psy's, but I'm pretty sure that "having words" is not one of them.

What's even odder about this interview is that despite these two conservative commentators putting forth their esteemed opinion on the internet and popular culture, neither of them seem to have ever heard of Google. Because in the time it took for them to spew garbage about how Gangnam Style is a sign of the times because it "has no meaning", they could have jumped on to Google and found hundreds of articles analysing the satirical nature of Gangnam style. Here is but one: PSY's Gangnam Style is South Korean social commentary.

Even to the non-Korean who doesn't know about the satirical subtext to the song, the video is appealing because it is so different to every other video out there. Psy subverts the conventional notions of cool, of what a pop star is meant to look like, and toys with the stereotypes of conventional masculinity. While many of the odd sights in the video have a particular South Korean cultural context, to the outsider, they are simply weird and random, which lends the video the same quirky oddball quality that Westerners find so fascinating about Japanese commercials and game shows.

And it happens to be an extremely catchy song. As are many other songs, such as those by Elvis and Justin Bieber, some of the touchstones that O'Reilly and Ablow refer to. Yet the popularity of Justin Bieber's mega-hit Baby (the second most popular clip on Youtube) is not being used to illustrate why the world is going to hell in a handbasket and we are all vapid fools for listening to it. Even though, if you compare the meaning of Baby with that of Gangnam Style, it's pretty obvious which has greater depth. Yes, it's possible for a song to have meaning, even if it's in Korean. Shocking!

And really, if you cannot work out why more people might possibly like something offbeat, outrageously kinetic and postmodern like Gangnam Style than a saccharine teenybopper hit by Justin Bieber, then you really shouldn't be in the business of analysing popular music at all. And particularly when your analysis includes the phrase "This is a little fat guy from Yong Yang or someplace."

Lushlife - "Magnolia"

Indian-American rapper and producer Lushlife (aka Raj Haldar) has a new album out this year, in which he continues his quest to be the rapper whose appearance is most incongruous with his sound. It's called Plateau Vision, following on from his 2009 album Cassette City which garnered a bit of buzz around the place. (Check that on my earlier post here.)

Single Magnolia is a thing of beauty, Haldar's Nas-inspired delivery coming correct over production that marries classic boom-bap with nicely sampled vocal harmonies and elegant harp glissando. The video is nice too, featuring an enormous amount of cardboard.
LUSHLIFE "MAGNOLIA" [DIR. LAMAR+NIK] from LAMAR+NIK on Vimeo.

Kudos to me for using the term "glissando".

Racism in Aussie hip-hop (@ Peril Magazine)

I've got a new post up over at Peril, the online Asian-Australian arts and culture magazine. It's about the changing nature of Australian hip-hop, and how there have been recent complaints of white racist sentiments among some sections of its fanbase.

Yet hip-hop is also a special case. It arose from black American street culture in the late 70s and early 80s, and it still wears its ethnic origin on its sleeve. It has exposed both good and bad aspects of African-American life to the world like nothing else before it. New York City remains the epicentre of global hip-hop just as it was over 30 years ago. Unlike some other black forms of music that have become mainstream (jazz, blues, rock & roll), hip-hop is still mostly a black thing. So how do “white pride” and “white power” elements come to exist in an art form that is so intrinsically non-white at its core?

Check it here.

The Temper Trap at the AFL Grand Final

Not sure how many people tuned in to watch Sydney beat Hawthorn in the AFL Grand Final this year, but my guess is it's somewhere between "heaps" and "a shitload", in addition to the 99,000 who were at the ground. And apart from those who got up to go pee, millions were watching an Indonesian-Australian guy killing it centre stage as the half time entertainment. Yes, that's Dougy Mandagi, lead singer of Melbourne band The Temper Trap, originally born in Manado on the island of Sulawesi. So forgive my momentary ethnic jingoism as I proclaim my pride that one of my peoples is tearing it up at the biggest event of the Australian sporting and television calendar.



The first song (new single Trembling Hands) is pretty good, the second (Drum Song) is a bit meh, and the third is the money shot - Sweet Disposition, the track that everybody loves. It starts at about the 5:30 mark if you are impatient.

Beat-boxing Miss Philippines

I don't really pay much attention to Miss World pageants. Really I don't. But occasionally something they produce something fascinating/hilarious/bizarre which is too good to ignore. Case in point is this year's entrant from the Philippines, Quenerich Rehman. Her entry in the "talent" section of the competition is surely a world first.

Sure, she's not the best beat-boxer you've ever seen, but it's better than I could do. And don't we all want our world represented by a beautiful lady who can beat-box? 

Unfortunately she didn't win. That honour went to Miss China, who in all fairness, is hawt. But can she beat-box? I'd have to presume not.

Btw, if you are wondering why her surname is unusual for a Filipino, it's because she apparently has a Pakistani father. If you are wondering why her first name is unusual... it's because she's Filipino. They like that kind of whackiness. It's sometimes listed around the place as "Queenierich", which doesn't make it any less odd.

For more beauty contest enjoyment:

Interview with Miss Universe China. Oh man, this is good.

Facepalm-worthy entrants on The S Factor, Singapore's answer to Next Top Model

Is it OK to laugh at this?

Super Mario Theme - Bulgarian accordion version

(h/t: Geeks Are Sexy)

I like to do it Gangnam Style

I'm not exactly sure what the f*ck this is. But it may well be the best thing ever in the history of the universe.



Koreans.

Rudimental - "Feel the Love"

There are a number of reasons this is my favourite song at the moment.

Firstly, despite being extremely accessible, it has a number of features that make it completely unlike everything else in the charts right now. I mean it's a drum 'n' bass type groove with electronic synth stabs that also features churchy organ, a trumpet solo and a horn section. Up and coming singer John Newman does his best white boy Otis Redding impersonation.
It actually sounds like it has real live people playing instruments on it. Which sounds unremarkable in itself, except that everyone else that is a hit at the moment seems like it is purposefully avoiding sounding remotely organic.

The video is cool, too. The images of inner-city black kids riding horses might seem fanciful, but in fact it depicts the very real Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, in North Philadelphia. There's a really interesting article about it from a few years ago, here.

Mostly, I just like that a song that feels unique, and real, is somehow a big hit around the world (number 1 in the UK, number 3 in Australia). I first heard this at my gym, which plays Channel V all day and all night, and this song was sandwiched in between an ocean of music that was either mediocre (Maroon 5, Katy Perry, Rihanna) or really f*cking horrible (Flo Rida, Chris Brown, Pitbull, more Flo Rida). Not since Gnarls Barkley's Crazy has something this different and awesome been so high in the charts that I can recall.

Why Chris Brown is hard to forgive

R&B star Chris Brown has a new album out called Fortune, and one particular review by a Chad Taylor of the Des Moines Cityview has gone viral for its brilliant simplicity.

The women, or woman, in question is obviously his singer ex-girlfriend Rihanna, and while this is a few years ago now, lots of people are in no hurry to forgive Brown. Yet on the other side of things, there are plenty of people, notably young women, who seem determined not just to forgive him for beating and choking her, but to justify his behaviour on account of him being hot and talented, or something like that. If you wanna know what I mean, check here and here.

But is Chad Taylor's 6-word "album review" a justified critique of Chris Brown?

Brown is not the first celebrity to be guilty of heinous violence against women, and he won't be the last. This recent article in the LA Times suggests that his race may be a factor in many people's reluctance to move on and see past his behaviour, since other white stars have done arguably worse yet not been shunned in the same way.

There is possibly an element of truth in that. More of it, I'd argue, is that the women assaulted by Campbell and Sheen are not nearly as well known as Rihanna, who is arguably the biggest singing star in the world right now. That's not right but it's the way the world works.

But there's another layer to it. Like most people, I believe that even the best of us can make terrible mistakes, and shouldn't necessarily be condemned for life because of them. Most people seem willing to forgive a celebrity's sins, to a certain extent, if certain conditions are met.

Firstly, it helps if they are exceptionally talented.Again, it may not be right, but people are more than happy to overlook the domestic violence perpetrated by the Godfather of Soul, James Brown (no relation), largely because James has contributed a phenomenal amount to music in a way that Chris will never do. Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. were sufficiently talented and compelling rappers that most of us will overlook the evidence that indicates they were rather shitty human beings (2Pac did time for serious sexual assault and Biggie for dealing crack cocaine). Michael Jackson may well have been guilty of one of our society's greatest taboos - child molestation - yet millions still worship him.

Suffice to say, Chris Brown the artist is not on a level anywhere near MJ, JB, 2Pac and Biggie, no matter what his record sales might say.

Secondly, we want some contrition from the artist. And while Brown has seemingly said all the right things about that incident with Rihanna, his actions can't help but make us think he's not really all that sorry. Where he originally sang typically innocuous commercial R&B, Brown has increasingly embraced the image of the playa, the bad boy. He was involved in that big nightclub brawl with the entourage of rapper Drake. He and his fans - "Team Breezy", as that pack of idiots call themselves - rail endlessly about "haters". He released the execrable single Look at me now which is all about how much money he is making and how everyone is on his dick. Compare that to James Brown, whose music was always fuelled by positivity and social conscience, regardless of what he might have been doing in his private life.

So given that the album is almost certainly a piece of crap anyway, I think Chad Taylor's review is a legitimate comment on the Chris Brown phenomenon. People don't become megastars without the backing of the mass media, and the mass media is still pushing Chris Brown's worthless music on us like it's gold. I do believe that people make mistakes and can redeem themselves, and as celebrities go, Brown is hardly the worst perpetrator of undesirable acts. But he's still out there trying to act like a badass, and the industry is still foisting him upon us anyway. So to me, this reviewer is in effect saying, "Enough of this shit", and I too have had enough.

RIP Adam Yauch

Adam Yauch, aka MCA, of the Beastie Boys passed away this week after a 3-year battle with cancer. Yauch is known as the Beastie who played bass, was really into Tibetan Buddhism, and was the only one with a rapping voice that wasn't annoyingly nasal. I listened to a lot of Beastie Boys stuff back in the early 90s, and while they weren't always the greatest in pure rap terms, they were usually innovative and interesting. And in an age when hip-hop was getting way too serious, they were one of the few big names in the genre willing to get stoopid and keep it fun. There's a nice obituary of MCA here.

RIP Jimmy Castor (1947 - 2012)

Jimmy Castor, legendary funk and latin boogaloo musician, passed away January 16th aged 64.
Castor is far from a household name but the singer, saxophonist and percussionist had a career spanning 3 decades and encompassing a wide variety of genres.

His best known track is probably It's Just Begun from 1972 (as The Jimmy Castor Bunch), which was never a hit at the time but later became a favourite of breakdancers who love its timbale breakdown and sheer kinetic energy. I still remember the first time I heard the song's distinctive saxophone hook; I was at a house party and I had to immediately seek out whoever owned the CD to find out what the hell was this cracking groove I was listening to.


That was the title track from his second album, yet Castor's musical career started way back in 1957 as a 10 year-old. He replaced Frankie Lymon in The Teenagers and cut the fun doo-wop track I Promise. Soon after he took up the saxophone, and found a home in New York's boogaloo scene, which brought together elements of American R&B with Cuban son and mambo. One of Castor's best-known hits - Hey Leroy, Your Mama's Callin' You - comes from this era, and was a minor chart hit in 1966.

Castor's light-hearted approach to music continued into the 70s, as he became known for what could be termed novelty hits. His biggest hit, Troglodyte, features no singing, only Castor telling a story about a funky caveman trying to get some action over a stomping groove, and also features the sampled-to-death introductory line, "What we gonna do right here is go back...wayyy back... back into time."
A character introduced in that song later became the basis for The Jimmy Castor Bunch's other major hit, The Bertha Butt Boogie. Again, its lyrics are incredibly silly, but the groove is absolutely unstoppable.

With other song titles like King Kong and Hey Leroy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon is Your Father, you get a sense that Castor had a fairly light-hearted approach to his job.


More obituaries: Gil Scott-Heron, Guru, Manute Bol, Amy Winehouse.

Why this Kolaveri Di song so popular?

CNN recently declared Why this Kolaveri Di? (meaning something like "Why this murderous rage, girl?") this its song of the year. Haven't heard of it? It was released in mid-November as promotion for the upcoming Tamil movie 3, and quickly became a viral sensation around the desi internets. Sung by actor Dhanush in a drunken "Tanglish" (that's a hybrid of Tamil and English), the original clip has swiftly racked up over 32 million views on Youtube, while various other spinoff, remix and parody versions in various languages (Malay, Punjabi, Arabic) have garnered another 20-odd million views. It's won a Youtube Gold Award for the greatest number of hits within a certain time frame.



Here is the song itself:


In a sense the song playfully references the way contemporary Tamil speech has co-opted numerous English words, even though the precise meaning of some of them might require translation to the average English speaker. A "soup boy", for example, refers to a guy who has lost out in love.

My first encounter with the song was at a Punjabi Sikh wedding reception, as members of the groom's family performed a choreographed dance to it; anyone who's been to an Indian wedding knows that sort of thing is not unusual. My second encounter was after seeing the CNN report and needing to figure out "why the fuss?" My initial reaction: meh. It's ok.
I then proceeded to sing it to myself on repeat for the next 3 hours.

Is that the key, then? Is it merely the song's catchiness, pure and simple, that has allowed it to win fans across linguistic and cultural barriers? Or is it something more? Because there are many songs that are extremely catchy that never cross into any sort of public consciousness. After talking to some Tamil peeps, this is what I can deduce:

* Dhanush is a popular Tamil movie star.
* Dhanush's father-in-law is the superstar Rajnikanth, who is sort of like the Tamil version of Tom Hanks, Robert De Niro and Jesus rolled into one. Anything even vaguely associated with Rajnikanth automatically gets the Midas touch in South India. Rajnikanth's daughter Aishwarya is also in this clip and she's hot.
* Indian media was plugging this Youtube clip like crazy, so its status as a "viral" hit was somewhat engineered.
* Dhanush's singing drunkenly about getting drunk appeals to a lot of young folks (think Afroman's Because I got high as an example) and the theme (guy getting rejected by a mean girl) is easy to identify with.
* The fact that it's in English, or at least a sort of English, means that Indians who aren't Tamil can also relate to it easily enough.
* The large number of English-speaking Indians and Sri Lankans around the world can be amused by this Indianized variant on the language.

I dunno. Just enjoy.

The lure of black music (@ Peril Magazine)

My latest post for the Asian-Australian online arts & culture mag Peril is up and it's about how much culture and ethnicity may influence into liking certain kinds of music, including my own personal journey in musical taste. Check it here.

If you are a wannabe anthropologist like me you can start to speculate about these sorts of things. Why, for instance, do Pacific Islanders have such a love of reggae and soul music? I’d guess that a large factor is that those genres are deeply rooted in the church’s traditions of harmony singing, which is a huge part of Islander culture. In addition, there is clearly something in the meaning and feel of music from black America that resonates with the culture and experiences of the people of the Pacific. Likewise, it’s not hard to see why so many young Sudanese-Australians are so strongly drawn to hip-hop, which shows black people taking pride in themselves. Some things are a bit harder to work out… for instance, what is it with the whole of East Asia and cheesy ballads? That one is still a mystery.

RIP Howard Tate, 1939-2011

60s R&B singer Howard Tate passed away this week aged 72. Tate was another sadly unappreciated soul giant who is revered amongst crate diggers for his blues- and gospel-tinged recordings, primarily from 1964 and 1968.

Probably the quintessential Howard Tate track is the majestic Get It While You Can. This is perhaps better known as a Janis Joplin song, but it's hard not to argue that Joplin's later version pales beside Tate's original.


Another favourite of mine is Ain't Nobody Home, also better known for being covered by BB King.


The composer of both songs, the great Jerry Ragovoy, also sadly passed away in July this year.

How I learned to stop worrying and love karaoke (@ Peril Magazine)

If you haven't read it already, I have another post up at Peril (an online Asian-Australian arts and culture magazine). It's about my journey toward becoming a karaoke enthusiast.

And a weird world it was, where my preconceived notions about what music males were meant to like were to be severely challenged. One time I was invited by a Chinese friend, who also brought along a posse of guys who I knew from the basketball court; they were Vietnamese dudes from Springvale, they had fringes that hung dangerously low over their eyes, and I was nervous around them because I figured they must have been in some kind of gang. But as soon as they arrived at karaoke and started selecting only songs by Celine Dion and Mariah Carey, I realised they clearly weren’t as scary as I had first thought.

Full post here.

RIP Amy Winehouse (1983-2011)

British singer Amy Winehouse was found dead in her London home from causes yet unknown. She was 27.

Winehouse's dysfunctional personal life and troubles with substance abuse were legendary and had become something of a running pop-cultural joke. But that aside, let's focus on her music. She only released two albums, but each made a significant impact. Frank (2003) was nominated for a Mercury Music Prize, while Back to Black (2006) was a multi-platinum-selling number 1 hit around the world. The two albums when taken together show the breadth of Winehouse's singing and songwriting ability. Frank is a jazz album with soul and hip-hop inflections, while Back to Black is strongly influenced by 60s girl-group soul.

Winehouse deserves a lot of credit for re-introducing retro-soul to the mainstream; it was a style bubbling around in the early 00s waiting for a larger audience, until Back to Black put the genre back in the top 10. The key was Winehouse's use of Mark Ronson and Salam Remi as producers, and NYC's fabulous Dap Kings as her backing band. It is fair to say that the huge success of two other British female singers, Adele and Duffy, owes a lot to Winehouse's breakthrough with Rehab.

One of my all-time favourite dance-and-get-wild tracks is Winehouse's guest appearance on Mark Ronson's Versions album. Valerie is a cover of the Zutons' 2006 hit, which is very different but also awesome in its own right.


But while Winehouse's best-known work was similarly brash and brassy, her slower, tender moments were often even better. Love is a Losing Game, off her second album, is just amazing in it's timeless beauty.


Frank to me is an uneven album stylistically, and Winehouse herself said she was only 80% happy with it. But it has some wonderful songs, particularly this one, Help Yourself. The song title is sadly ironic.