Pop Eats Itself: Amy Winehouse and Herbie Hancock

While Herbie Hancock was getting on stage last week to receive his Grammy for River: The Joni Letters, the other star of the night was thousands of miles away. The Grammy Awards this year was a tale of two very different artistic trajectories indeed. A year ago, Amy Winehouse was virtually unknown outside of her native UK market; Hancock has been a force on the jazz and pop scenes since the mid 1960s. On the heels of her retro masterpiece Back to Black and a series of media exposes on her troubled personal life, Winehouse catapulted into the global pop music consciousness virtually overnight. Girls dressed like her on Halloween; her often-unkempt face appeared on magazines from Boston to Beirut; she took home five Grammy awards, although visa problems prevented her from showing up in person to collect them. All this time, Hancock has quietly pursued his usual string of jazz-pop albums and touring. Two events - the rise of Amy Winehouse and the crowning of a Herbie Hancock jazz record as album of the year - speak to a potent and intriguing force in today's pop culture. How did Amy Winehouse get so popular so quickly and what does the wild success of her album say about the contemporary pop music market? And how is Hancock's long career and Grammy triumph reflected in the young diva's work?

It's hard not to absolutely love Back to Black, no matter what your normal musical proclivities. From the first grimy attacks on the Wurlizter electric piano and the entrance of Winehouse's sultry alto, it is clear that this isn't your typical 2007 pop record. Gone are all the electronic swirls that define so much of modern pop (and dance) music; absent is the wailing, forceful vocal style of many of today's divas. Yes, Back to Black is deliberately, self-consciously retro, and the detailing of the production work on the album is truly awesome. From soulful horn lines to swooning strings, all the sonic signatures of Motown are here. And while there are thoroughly modern touches throughout (turntables, a punchier drum sound than the classic records), the old-fashioned tone of Back to Black stays consistent to the last note. In a stroke of pop magic (and studio wizardry), it manages to be both modern and classic at the same time; it is a triumphant amalgamation of the old and the new.

Winehouse effectively communicates age in five interconnected ways: 1) Her whole persona amplifies the retro impression, with a beehive hair-do and vintage dresses. 2) The songs themselves are formally structured in a very similar manner to classic soul tunes. 3) The instrumentation she employs is straight out of the Motown sound. 4) She has effectively assimilated stylistic elements of classic soul and jazz into her personal performance style. 5) The album was actually recorded on retro analog gear, or at least used digital analog simulators that are virtually flawless. What we have, then, is a complete strategy for reproducing the old feel. Unlike Christina Aguilera's recent retro project Back to Basics (2006), which employed extensive sampling to capture the old sound, Winehouse has managed to mimic every component of the classics, from the song composition to the vocal style to the recording quality itself. She doesn't let the past speak for itself through samples - she becomes the past.

Paradoxically, this is the quintessentially modern aesthetic approach in pop music. The scholar Andrew Goodwin wrote that "pop eats itself," and nowhere can I find a better example of this principle than in Amy Winehouse's work. The success of her album, in addition to the wonderful song-writing and singular vocal talent, is precisely her use of age to signify meaning. She has taken soul music's past, broken it down, reintegrated it, and spit it out in a new context.

But more than dealing with a schizophrenic (and totally convincing) approach to chronology, Winehouse blurs racial lines. Reading the title of the album in a different way than she perhaps intended, then, is quite instructive: Winehouse is "going back to black music." Again like Aguilera's album from a couple years ago, there is a complex racial commentary taking place in this album. Not only is she reproducing past pop styles - she is reproducing past black music. Oh, and I should mention, Winehouse is an English Jew.

The success of a white girl's totally convincing take on black music underlies the differences between the US and the UK in regard to racialized elements in the arts. In the United States, artists are painfully conscious of our long history of white appropriation of black talent (read: rock and roll). This has led, in the opinion of New Yorker critic Sascha Frere-Jones (an opinion I share) to a "whitening" of white music and a "blackening" of black music. Both sides are so afraid to borrow from the other because of the tense racial climate here that both musics end up suffering for it. In addition, central radio programming in the states makes it quite possible for people to target exactly their own tastes on the radio and listen to nothing but that.

Britain is a completely different story. There aren't the same racialized tensions about musical borrowing over there, and a brief look at some of England's most successful pop acts proves this succinctly: Led Zeppelin, Clapton, and The Rolling Stones all stole from the early Delta blues masters; The Clash took from reggae and ska. Also, radio in the UK doesn't have the same level of formalization, so people are exposed to many more styles of music - instead of an exclusively hip-hop station, for instance, pop stations mix it up with a variety of genres.

This situation has created a very interesting dynamic in pop music. In Aguilera's album, for instance, there is the same degree of indebtedness to black styles as in Winehouse's - however, Aguilera defuses the tension associated with musical borrowing by giving near-constant, overt shout-outs to black artists and black history. She is constantly proving that she is the copy artist and they are the authentic source. Winehouse never apologizes for borrowing. She steals with aplomb and sassy verve. And this is why the album is so great. In an ironic turn (the same irony exists with the British rock groups mentioned earlier), it is a white English woman who is bringing classic black American music to masses of young people around the globe.

But where does Herbie Hancock fit into all this? There is no more venerable a representation of the last 40 years of black American music than Mr. Hancock (especially after the death of James Brown, RIP). The brilliant pianist was involved in all of the seminal acts that brought soul into jazz (Watermelon Man, Canteloupe Island), jazz into rock and funk (Chameleon), and electronic dance beats to the world (Rockit). No doubt Hancock's music has shaped the development of Amy Winehouse in one way or the other, consciously or unconsciously. To add another interesting level to the Grammy results, Hancock's winning album (the first jazz record to win since Getz/Gilberto in the early 1960s) was a set of interpretations of the songs of a white female singer, Joni Mitchell. Therefore, as Winehouse borrowed from black music and Mr. Hancock, Mr. Hancock was borrowing from a white woman.

I don't want to read too much into the Grammy awards, but I do believe that what happened last week represents, on some level, the story of popular music right now. The venerable black artist got the top album honor for his interpretation of white music; the young white artist got 5 awards for her interpretation of black music. Clearly, some of the most exciting, engaging music coming out these days is a result of that thing that many Americans are loathe to admit to - cross-racial musical borrowing. And this lesson is being brought home by two seemingly dissimilar artists, a newcomer from Britain and a living American legend.