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Saturday, 23 July 2011 @ 18:42

In memoriam - Amy Winehouse.

One of the saddest things about Amy Winehouse’s untimely passing is that the floodgates are about to open on her recorded vaults and most of what comes out will not be properly representative of her talents.

Winehouse, who was found dead of indeterminate causes at just 27 years of age in her London apartment on Saturday morning, only left us with a two-album legacy. So while 2003’s Frank and 2006’s smash hit Back to Black — both showcases for a genuinely gifted singer with a classic, saucy R&B purr and audible star power to burn — will now inevitably return to heavy rotation for a few weeks, there’s a gaping hole in the Winehouse market that someone will soon see fit to fill.

We’ll have a greatest-hits compilation by the end of the year, no doubt, and then it will come time to start excavating unreleased material from live recordings and the various aborted sessions that were reportedly attempted over the past five years. If she had a standard recording contract, Winehouse’s estate likely owes her label another three or four albums’ worth of something. And the music business being what it is, a business, we’re gettingsomething. Some of the music will be okay, some of it perhaps not. Regardless, though, none of the cash-ins on her fate will be the follow-up to Back to Black that poor Winehouse never got around to making. And that’s too bad because that might well have been Amy Winehouse’s classic.

Frank and Back to Black are fine records in their own right, but the latter didn’t have it all in place quite yet. It was the sound of a performer coming into her own, letting her troubled-but-charismatic personality breathe through the songs — oh, how many times we’re going to hear “Rehab” in the days ahead as an easy substitute for trying to understand the complexity of problems that drove her to an early end — and on the ensuing tour for that album you could see Winehouse growing into her growing stardom.

Sadly, rather than rising to the position she might eventually have held in the pantheon of great pop divas, stardom gave her the time, the money and the tools to destroy herself.