Amy Winehouse Her odds were stacked

• http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/07/amy-winehouse

IT IS grim, if not shocking, to mark the end of Amy Winehouse's life. In an industry of factory-produced icons and committee-born sounds, she stood out as the real thing. She was dark and weird, sad and bawdy—a modern hotchpotch with some richly anachronistic ingredients. And her voice—that voice—was the robust stuff of anthem ballads and velvet growls. "Back to Black" (2006) was a masterpiece of Detroit grinds, tight horns and a hotly aggrieved woman who apparently preferred "no" for an answer. Winehouse's voice sounded like aged whisky left in a juice glass overnight. It was excellent, then it was muffled, and now it is gone.

Winehouse seems to have tested the patience of too many music critics to garner much rapturous exit applause. Her self-destruction was too predictable to be tragic, and her career too short. I had hoped for more from Sasha Frere-Jones at the New Yorker, but found a rather thin-lipped tribute. Still, he does concede that "she sounded like an original sixties soul star, developed when the landscape had no rules".

With death, one craves hyperbole. For this I am surprised to be grateful to Russell Brand. On his own blog, and then republished at the Guardian, he delivers a honeyed memory from a dark friendship (as a recovering addict himself). He recalls watching her perform for the first time, after years of seeing her as "just some twit in a pink satin jacket shuffling round bars": 

The awe that envelops when witnessing a genius. From her oddly dainty presence that voice, a voice that seemed not to come from her but from somewhere beyond even Billie and Ella, from the font of all greatness. A voice that was filled with such power and pain that it was at once entirely human yet laced with the divine. My ears, my mouth, my heart and mind all instantly opened. Winehouse. Winehouse? Winehouse! That twerp, all eyeliner and lager dithering up Chalk Farm Road under a back-combed barnet, the lips that I'd only seen clenching a fishwife fag and dribbling curses now a portal for this holy sound.

So now I knew. She wasn't just some hapless wannabe, yet another pissed-up nit who was never gonna make it, nor was she even a ten-a-penny-chanteuse enjoying her fifteen minutes. She was a fucking genius.

She was a chanteuse for uncertain times, gutsy and raw. Too bad she couldn't stay on stage a little longer.