What Is This Shit?

Dave Marsh writes:

This Amy Winehouse is really being peddled as the next big white soul star? The next Joss Stone? I don’t think she’s the next Belinda Carlisle.

You know who she really sounds like? That faux jazz singer the Brits shipped over here for a spell, Cleo Laine (who did a Porgy and Bess with Ray Charles that might be the worst Porgy ever done solely due to her contributions). Or if you want kinder, maybe Shirley Bassey.

Unpleasantly mannered, no swing (the drummer sounds like his idea of a light touch is substituting a wooden mallet for his usual cudgel).

I don’t know about anybody else, but that “Back to Black”—though it mirrors my response to the record perfectly—sure does sound, in the piano melody, like something that charted for the Supremes around about the fall of ’66, and for Vanilla Fudge a few months later, too.

Would ONE of the radio stations and critics who’ve fawned all over this clumsy pastiche have played it if the name on the cover was Bettye Lavette and the picture of a woman Bettye’s age? Maybe one; it’d be a lot better record of course.