Letâs start where, in a lot of ways, everything started. Â This was Amyâs first big international hit, and her only song to reach the US charts. Â It won her three Grammys and an Ivor Novello award, and was named the best song of 2007 by publications as diverse as Time and The Village Voice. Â
Do you guys remember what was going on, musically, in 2007?  The Wikipedia page for the single tells me that the other hits of the time were Sean Kingstonâs âBeautiful Girls,â and Fergieâs âBig Girls Donât Cry,â Nelly Furtadoâs âAll Good Things (Come to an End)â, and Christina Aguileraâs âHurtâ.  In some ways, then, âRehabâ fits right in: women were already singing about their sadnesses.  They always have; Amy didnât invent that.  What Amy did do differently than others at the time was how she packaged what she was saying.  Where those other hits are ultra-produced pop magic, âRehabâ is all low smokey vocals and backing brass.  Where the other womenâs videos have story lines and hazy lighting, Amyâs is noticeably bare and direct.  Also direct is her gaze; again and again she makes bold and unmistakable eye contact with the camera, sometimes with the hint of a sneer.  Thereâs also an often unnoticed sense of humour at work, here: if Amyâs life hadnât progressed the way it had, âRehabâ would be funny.  As it is, the way that sheâs obviously impersonating someone sheâs interacted with when she sings âthe man said âwhy dâyou think youâre here?ââ still is funny.  What Amy did is take the same emotions that other people were singing about and, instead of making them easily consumable the way most chart toppers are, made the music she wanted to and expected the rest of us to keep up, or not.  What made her a game-changer is that we did want to, at least for a while.
Itâs hard to overestimate the influence that âRehab" had, both on the music industry and our impression of Amy.  Its success paved the way for other big-voiced, âunpolished,â or differently-packaged female singers, especially out of Britain.  Paloma Faith, Duffy, Kate Nash, Lily Allen, even Adele - all of these women owe some of their success to Amyâs paving the way for them, and I donât think any of them would disagree.
But âRehabâsâ also become tangled, poignantly and horribly, with Amyâs legacy and the way her life progressed.  Here, in the cold light of the last days of 2015, it sounds almost like a taunt thrown forward in time: here is what you had, here is what you lost, here it is all laid out in front of you like a map and it still all went wrong.  There was a point in time, after all, that it seemed like every tabloid in the world had a headline about Amy saying âno, no, noâ to rehab again.  But I want you to think, for a second: what is the image that comes to mind when someone says âAmy Winehouseâ to you?  Iâll admit that Iâm the same.  The first thing I picture is the small sad girl, dwarfed by her hair, even if it isnât as grotesque and exploitative an image as those that circled tabloid after tabloid.  Now watch the video again. The Amy here isnât that Amy.  This Amy is big-voiced and bold-eyed.  Sheâs surrounded by musicians and alternately staring us down and rolling her eyes and sheâs singing and alive, so alive.  The trademark beehive isnât even present.  The thing is, âRehabâ didnât really shape Amyâs story as it has been told, even when it was a convenient and horrible joke to use against her.  Whatâs really happened is that weâve taken Amy Winehouse, the story and icon weâve made of her, and weâve reshaped âRehabâ in retrospect.  The song was always autobiographical, of course, but it was about a moment.  Itâs us whoâve been singing it to encapsulate a whole life.
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