A bad girl with a touch of genius

He was right. It takes a kind of genius. And genius was something she possessed in abundance. There were the vocals,lauded for being simultaneously bluesy,jazz-inflected and somehow punk. There was the songwriting,too,child-simple three-note tunes that lodged in your head,and lyrics capable of mauling one’s heart while slicing surgically through gender conventions. Is there another straight woman who could pull off a love song to a girl (Valerie)? Like much else about her,the visual persona she concocted over her brief career fused instinct with cunning. She was a 5-foot-3 almanac of visual reference,most famously to Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes; to the punk god Johnny Thunders; to a lineage of bad girls extending from Cleopatra to Salt-n-Pepa,irresistible man traps who always seem to come to the same unfortunate end.

“Rock ‘n’ roll is about bad girls,” Waters said. Or at least used to be. Yet she was not a born hair-hopper,as photos from her early career make clear. At the start,when she released her first album,Frank,she appeared to be a pretty type shyly unconvinced of her appeal (“I’m ugly,” she said in interviews),a woman whose conservative taste in clothes gave no hint of the transformation she would effect by the time she released her second and final album,Back to Black. By then,her neutral wardrobe had undergone a radical transformation. The lush mane was back-combed into a frowsy beehive,the kind in which hoodlums of legend used to conceal their razor blades. Her basic eyeliner became an ornate volute. Her demure dresses gave way to tart frocks that accentuated a cleavage impressive on a woman of any size,let alone one barely larger than a doll. Her 13 tattoos included markings reminiscent of cheap flash: a pocket above her left breast lettered with her lover’s name.

“In the film about her,you see her look begin to change,but it’s frustrating because you don’t know why,” Karen Durbin,film critic of Elle,said,referring to The Girl Done Good,a documentary about Winehouse. Of the many connections commentators strained to make after her death to other members of the so-called 27 Club,rockstars like Janis Joplin who never made it past that birthday,victimisation was a dominant theme. “Janis,like Amy,is always projected as a victim,” said Ann Powers,a critic for NPR Music. Yet that analysis,based on their shared drug addiction,fails to account for the powerful images they both projected; for the raucous brio of Joplin’s high-hippie style; for Winehouse’s wholehearted embodiment of a look that lent her the air of a slatternly rocker from Camden Town,a tough immigrant neighborhood in London. It’s worth noting that both wore their gang-girl-style tattoos,traditional markers of renegade status,as badges of honour.

What’s odd,she added,is how little room the victim narrative that attached to her death leaves for the possibility that,though sadly in thrall to drugs,she was nobody’s patsy. Her music producer Mark Ronson may have helped shape her award winning neo-retro sound. Her stylish husband,Blake Fielder-Civil,may have influenced her look. But it was she alone,who could pull off feats of vocal and sartorial brilliance without sounding like a karaoke singer or looking as if she were in drag. How come we cannot take the leap and see what went into the creation of Amy Winehouse? Powers wondered.

“The way she looked before she made herself into the Amy Winehouse we know,who beat Lady Gaga to the Cleopatra eye makeup is a demure young lady out on the town. She’s someone outside the conventional world,beautiful but fierce,and making music that means to take possession of that world,” said Joe Levy,editor-in-chief of Maxim.