Amy Winehouse this weekend – recorded at the Tempodrom in Berlin on October 15, 2007.
One of the things that’s particularly sad about artists who have a meteoric rise, only to be met by an equally catastrophic demise is that, after the initial shock and the reminders of cautionary tales and the rush to buy any missing items from a rather thin legacy, is that the artist in question fades from our emotional view, winding up being a footnote and largely forgotten in the stampede of new faces and new music straining to get our attention.
The subject of documentaries and fictionalized portrayals, we tend to focus on Amy Winehouse the victim rather than the accomplishments (or in this case the potential, had wretched excess not gotten in the way) of what the Artist was all about – the musical contributions. Although there were many people who felt Amy Winehouse was a mimic; a lifelike imitation of the Classic Soul singers of the 60s and nowhere near being in the same league.
But then you wonder if what Amy Winehouse was doing was an homage, a joyful embrace of a style of singing that is unique and timeless. And maybe Amy Winehouse was the catalyst responsible for people going on a journey and discovering Irma Thomas and Fontella Bass and Baby Washington and the vast ocean of overlooked and underappreciated Soul singers who shaped and gave life to a genre that will always be fresh to those who never heard them in the first place.
We’re sitting in the middle of a time where inspiration and new ideas are not as prevalent as they were even only a few years ago. Chalk it up to Social Media, bedroom studios and all the shortcuts available to those who like the idea, but don’t care for the work and the struggle to flood our streams and whatever is left of our airwaves. By and large, we’ve stopped being curious – stopped reaching out – stopped diving into the world of available music, opting to stay within a very narrow passageway; one that has been rendered anonymous by the sheer number of copies.
And maybe Amy Winehouse sought to change all that – sought to free up all the self-inflicted restrictions and offer a different springboard to new ideas and interpretations.
We won’t know – we’re left with something of an incomplete sentence, the eternal elipsus of what might have been.
But all we have, all we have for sure, are the performances the live snippets, the unguarded moments of a collaboration before an audience – and this performance from Berlin and preserved for posterity by RBB-Berlin is a much-welcomed addition and another piece of an endless puzzle.
Hit play and dig the weekend.
