Back To Black

If Billie Holiday and the young Mick Jagger had a savage drunken one-night stand, fucking while still half-dressed and screaming at each other in a hallway backstage, Amy Winehouse would be born as a result. And that's a compliment. I'm an absurdly late arrival to the fan base here, but this woman is electrifying.

The acoustic version of "Back to Black" makes you wonder, how does an 800-pound voice come out of a 90-pound woman? How is that possible?!

The live Eurockeennes version, performed at an outdoor rock festival in the foothills of the French Alps, makes you wonder why no one thought of this combination before: Start with a lacerated grotesque meltdown of a song (again, this is a compliment); play it like it's a Shirelles single released on Motown in 1964; and have percussion and piano provided by the Specials, circa 1982. And make sure you have dudes dressed like the Blues Brothers doing synchronized dancing throughout. With tasseled red bordello lamps decorating the stage. People, you can't make this shit up. It's amazing.

And then of course there's the official album version, in which she slinks ahead of the beat, behind the beat, on the beat, so sinuously it sounds like her voice is pole-dancing around the percussion section.

Kudos, Amy. I just pray this freakishly talented woman survives her twenties. "I took a troubled track," she sings--yes, indeed.