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Discussion: The New Sound of the UK: The End is Here
Member Since: 6/1/2010
Posts: 65,177
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Amy is #1 for one of her songs, for sure. It better be "Back to Black."
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Member Since: 2/17/2012
Posts: 33,611
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2 amy songs next, please.
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Member Since: 11/7/2011
Posts: 14,651
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I'm ready for the Amy domination
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Member Since: 8/30/2011
Posts: 22,432
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1. Back to Black
2. The Fear
3. Valerie
4. Rehab
5. Dog Days Are Over
6. You Know I'm No Good
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Member Since: 6/1/2010
Posts: 65,177
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I would prefer "Dog Days Are Over" to be #1 out of the choices left, but I'm sure Amy will make #1. If so, I want "Back to Black" to be #1.
1. Back to Black
2. Dog Days Are Over
3. You Know I'm No Good
4. Rehab
5. Valerie
6. The Fear
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ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 10/3/2010
Posts: 12,334
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You Know I'm No Good is probably next.
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Member Since: 12/5/2009
Posts: 9,974
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SLY
Amy's slaughtering everyone but it isn't very surprising. ATRL has always been Team Amy.
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ATRL Moderator
Member Since: 2/19/2003
Posts: 34,484
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Quote:
Originally posted by Qwerty
I rated Back to Black too low.
Still, that and Valerie need to come next.
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Your wish is my command.
06.
Mark Ronson - Valerie (featuring Amy Winehouse)
Average Rate: 8.969
Highest Score: 10 (18x)
Lowest Score: 6 (1x)
UK Chart Peak: #2
US Chart Peak: N/A
Valerie, the third single off of Mark Ronson's Version, was initially recorded by the Zutons - but it's Amy's version of the song that the world knows and loves. Amy began covering the song in live sets prior to re-recording it with Ronson, as this performance attests. Once they recorded together, though, the single took off. It became so synonmous with Winehouse that, when she passed away, Bruno Mars chose it to cover for his tribute at the 2011 VMAs. This is both the highest ranking collaboration and the highest ranking cover in this rate.
Quote:
Originally posted by Andy Hutchinson
I can’t praise “Valerie” any better than anyone else here can — Winehouse sings it beautifully, with a balance between the black loneliness (“Since I’ve come home, yeah…”) and the sweetness (“Why doncha…”) inherent in a song to a love not quite lost — but I can praise how the “Valerie” video both gets Amy Winehouse right and shows her wrongs. It’s Mark Ronson’s show, really, with a weirdly shorn Wale being his 100 Miles-era charming self (“I’m feeling myself like I’ve lost … my … keys” gets acted out), and with an “Amy” whose resemblance is uncanny plucked from obscurity to give “Valerie” a go before “the Winettes” come up, one by one, each belting it in Winehouse’s distinctive voice.
There’s something appealing about that as a bizarro origin story: the video supports the thinking that Winehouse (“Winehouse,” maybe) had chops enough to do whatever she wanted musically, that she contained multitudes, and that she could make “Valerie” her own and sweet and sapphic and spurned; that’s what you’re supposed to get from the flawless rendition by the dopplegänger and her coterie. But the video also makes it seem like Winehouse needed help, especially from Ronson, to get it right; the lead “Amy” is only vaguely comfortable in the video, gussied up in a far nicer version of the pixie-harlot-junkie-chic marketing/********/couture that the real Winehouse never quite fit, and Amy’s unavailability is what necessitates all the karaoke, and there’s a bit of being shown the words. It’s frustrating and gorgeous and great and too much all at once, and that, certainly, is Amy Winehouse. The one thing the video gets completely wrong, though? The chances of competent replacements existing in any number.
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Fun Fact: Amy was too out of it to make the video shoot, so they based the treatment around tracking down an Amy replacement.
05.
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
Average Rate: 8.984
Highest Score: 10 (18x)
Lowest Score: 6 (1x)
UK Chart Peak: #8
US Chart Peak: N/A
Back to Black, the third single from the album of the same name, came to be one of Amy's defining singles, peaking in the top ten of many European countries.
Quote:
Originally posted by Amy Winehouse
'Back To Black' is when you've finished a relationship and you go back to what's comfortable for you. My ex went back to his girlfriend and I went back to drinking and dark times.
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One of the toughest, rawest singles in recent public memory, Back to Black uses uncompromising references to drugs to tell the tale of a heart broken.
Quote:
Originally posted by Katharine St. Asaph
There’s an eerie feeling that happens when you encounter the work of someone who’s recently or distantly passed and finding it hits you too close. If you’d only read those words a week earlier, or a month, or a few centuries, your world would have budded new dimensions. It’s all too devastating, but it’s all too late.
Judging by numbers, there’s an outpouring every time someone dies. Much is sincere. Some is not, like the gasps at Amy Winehouse’s death from those who sneered and cheered it along weeks before or the condolences from who knew her as the trainwreck with that hilarious song about rehab. Pop culture has always been excellent at reducing people, particularly people in pain, into jokes, then making that status permanent. It doesn’t matter how many wino puns you made or laughed at; the osmosis is enough. Despite Winehouse’s clear and immediate impact on music –look at “Rolling in the Deep,” it was right in front of us – for years she wasn’t an artist to be cherished but a punchline to be deployed. Why bother with her back catalogue? All you needed to know was “no, no, no.”
All I could tell you a few weeks ago was “no, no, no.” I’d heard Back to Black once or twice, years after its release and diluted by its peers and successors, and I knew its legacy, intellectually at least. But none of the songs took, certainly not enough to displace the meme-stream of Winehouse headlines that appeared instead of new music. After her death, I listened to both albums again. Undoubtedly the shock had much to do with it, but what I heard wasn’t a curio or reproduction or knockoff, but a human who could feel and express and devastate.
On “Back to Black,” I heard it most. There’s the opening: a filtered piano line with another galumphing behind every bar, rickety as old floorboards and twice as eerie. Then Winehouse sings. Much has been made of her voice, but it’s her songwriting that startles you – specifically the opening couplet: “He left no time to regret / kept his dick wet….” This is frat-boy talk. Logically, it’d be followed up with “with his same old slampiece.” It excises all humanity from the proceedings. Here, it accomplishes two things: it shows us just how Winehouse thinks the guy thinks — slightly callous, completely unhurt — and it shows us her affected braggadocio, the same that’ll be undone as her voice cracks on “head high” and “tears dry.” If that wasn’t enough, every line ends in a sudden minor note; anything slightly hopeful in this song is a pretense.
When talking about “Back to Black,” everyone mentions the drug references, picking their every entendre to shreds. But they’re distractions, just as they are in real life. Here, they take up two lines. Life might be a pipe, but Winehouse only dwells on the drug reference long enough to set up the line “and I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside,” completely changing the metaphor into something lonely and small. The rhythm may be singsong, and Winehouse might sing it that way, but it’s not for jaunt but for emphasis. Then there’s the bridge. Ronson’s production implodes, replaced by funereal bells and vague strings. Winehouse’s voice might as well be gone, muddled in its lowest range, wisping off its syllables and sounding like she’s miles from the mic. The instrumentation resumes for three-quarters of a chorus, but it’s unconvincing, and it too falls away for the final note.
To see Winehouse, who built her biggest hit and her continued career around embracing her tabloid image, thus negate herself and become lost in stagnant nothing, is devastating. To realize her point, that he goes back to something and she goes back to nothing and to being nothing, is worse still. “I loved you much,” Winehouse sings, right before the drug stuff so you’ll miss it. “It’s not enough.” Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you love, or how great your talent or how moneyed your entourage or how known your name. You’re not enough, and amid addiction and mass jeering and label machinations, nothing could be. If there’s hope in “Back to Black,” it’s that Winehouse didn’t go back to obscurity. Her songs are public. It’s too late for anyone to hear them in the way she needed, but hearing them now will have to suffice.
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ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 10/3/2010
Posts: 12,334
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What the ****?!
Oh ****, the top 5 just got interesting as ****!
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Member Since: 8/30/2011
Posts: 22,432
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Not Back to Black
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Member Since: 6/1/2010
Posts: 65,177
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"Back to Black"
"Rehab" has to be #1 based on what's left. I can't see "You Know I'm No Good" taking #1, and I can't see "The Fear" or "Dog Days Are Over" slaying like THAT, even though I'm hoping for an upset from "Dog Days Are Over."
"Rehab" would be too predictable, and it's not Amy's best.
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Member Since: 11/7/2011
Posts: 14,651
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Valerie
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Member Since: 2/17/2012
Posts: 33,611
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It's good but yeah it should go out now.
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ATRL Moderator
Member Since: 2/19/2003
Posts: 34,484
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So, was this the top four everyone was expecting? I wanted to end it now because the last four songs are the only songs to have averages of nine or above.
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Member Since: 11/7/2011
Posts: 14,651
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1. Rehab
2. The Fear
3. You Know I'm No Good
4. Dog Days Are Over
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Member Since: 8/30/2011
Posts: 22,432
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I really thought it would be
1. Rehab or Rolling in the Deep
2. Rolling in the Deep or Rehab
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Member Since: 2/17/2012
Posts: 33,611
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4. You Know I'm No Good
3. The Fear
2. Rehab
1. Dog Days are Over
that's my prediction.
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Member Since: 3/30/2009
Posts: 9,982
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10 and 8.5, but Back to Black probably deserved a 9.5.
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Member Since: 6/10/2011
Posts: 6,946
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YAAAASSSSS at You Know I'm No Good outlasting these two!
I gave Valerie a 9.5 and Back to Black a 9 - but it probably should've been an 8.5.
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ATRL Moderator
Member Since: 2/19/2003
Posts: 34,484
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Quote:
Originally posted by ImpressiveInstant
YAAAASSSSS at You Know I'm No Good outlasting these two!
I gave Valerie a 9.5 and Back to Black a 9 - but it probably should've been an 8.5.
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I gave Back to Black it's lowest score.
Top that!!
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