Amy'S Circus.(Amy Winehouse's 'Back to Black' album)(Sound recording review)

Is there anything surprising about Amy Winehouse's being awarded five Grammys this month? A cynic might say that her ability to stay alive is startling, but Winehouse's worrying series of relapses and collapses could simply be a trick of the light. Actors and singers were misbehaving vigorously before the advent of radio; Winehouse may seem like such a dedicated tearaway because the lens recording her movements is wider than anything a sixties celebrity would have encountered, doesn't switch off, and continually feeds a twenty-four-hour newsstand. (Winehouse is one of the five or six celebrities--mostly women--whose every action has been "serialized," to borrow the phrase Harvey Levin used to describe the coverage of Britney Spears on his Web site, TMZ.com.) Winehouse's misadventures--walking in London barefoot in her bra at dawn, spitting on the set of a TV game show, drawing blood in a "spat" with her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, being filmed smoking what appeared to be crack, heckling Bono during an awards ceremony, stints in rehabilitation facilities--support the tired (if true) template of the Genius Junkie, a story you can find, if determined. But the miserable-circus part of Winehouse's story unfolded largely in the second half of 2007, well after "Back to Black"--the album that won all the Grammys--had become a hit. It has now sold 1.6 million copies in America, and had won Winehouse several awards in England--including the MOBO (Music of Black Origin) for Best U.K. Female--before the Grammys swooped in with their golden stickers.

Winehouse's self-destructiveness isn't a plausible explanation for her popularity, or her awards, no matter how easily it converts into press. With the producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, she made a very popular album that looks firmly, and directly, backward. "Back to Black" is a deft and convincing pastiche of the girl groups of the sixties, the jazz singers of the forties, and a variety of rhythms from the seventies and the nineties. (The eighties get a pass.) It's an entertaining, clever album that benefits from a strategy that makes everyone who isn't Miles Davis look good: it's only thirty-five minutes long (and closer to thirty without the bonus track). "Back to Black" is a modified sixties soul album, with one perfect single (the ubiquitous "Rehab," which allows Winehouse to celebrate, make fun of, and justify her own substance abuse), sung and written by a twenty-four-year-old girl from Southgate, London, who says she has the musical taste of "an old Jewish man" and wears her hair in a vertical pile she refers to as "my hive." (Is there a TMZ video of anyone else arranging her hair in public? Winehouse is the Marge Simpson of junkie retro soul.) Her label--only doing its job--describes her as "the most talented and important musical artist of her generation," which would seem like space-cake hyperbole if so many people didn't seem to agree, at least a little.

Yet what reads as musical innovation in 2008 is blue-ribbon revivalism, a high-production-value version of the songbook logic driving current Broadway musicals. The sounds of yesteryear! Sung by today's young people! (Who, in this case, enjoy ketamine and margaritas.) Winehouse's music is reassuring to those old enough to remember the original and novel to those too young to know. And her music refers to rappers while simultaneously avoiding actual rapping and sounding just like the music that rappers first sampled decades ago. So many demographics united through the magic of consumption!

"Back to Black" has grown on me since its domestic release, last year. At first, I reacted badly to what I took as mere imitation, but Winehouse and her crew execute their homage with class and understated force, a quality that overrides--for now--the perils of heavy borrowing. Mark Ronson's arrangements are knowing; the quick rhythm changes in "Rehab" are unobtrusive but urge the song along and make it easily replayable. This decision alone might have earned Ronson his Producer of the Year Grammy, though there are at least five other producers who deserved it, too. (This is an age of producers.) And hearing a live band working in tight unison with a good singer is a reliable pleasure. The central production conceit is in the voice, though; listen hard to Winehouse's singing, and you will hear the odd combinations that make "Back to Black" more than skilled aping.

I bought Winehouse's first album, "Frank," in 2004 at a Heathrow Airport music kiosk. I listened to it on the plane home and dropped it in a garbage can on the way ...