Know Your Audience

I was at the dermatologist's office the other day to get a routine skin check--turns out I don't have skin cancer, despite years of drinking milk from a plastic bottle and not applying sunscreen and sleeping on a pile of radium--and all they had to read was an old issue of The New Yorker. And there it was: a long article about Amy Winehouse, wherein the author attempted to dissect her appeal.

Turning to the person next to me, I asked if he knew who Amy Winehouse is. He said he did. I asked if he subscribed to or read The New Yorker. He said definitely not. I suspected that if he had answered the second question in the affirmative, the first would have been in the negative. Who picked the topic of this piece?

Not to say it wasn't well done; it was. The author, in something less than a revelation, has figured out that Winehouse's "style" is essentially Motown covers, where, like Janis Joplin doing Billie Holiday, she mimics the way black Americans sing a certain form of music. Many critics have proclaimed that her backing band is the difference between Winehouse sounding good and sounding like, well, a junkie acting like a black diva, and maybe that's true. But as the New Yorker writer went on, the article became a commentary on the phenomenon of British white folks thinking they can do black music better than black people do it. Eric Clapton, no matter how slurry he gets, or how randomly he accents certain syllables, will never fool anyone into thinking he's a blues musician. Amy Winehouse, maybe because she's a junkie (have I mentioned that yet?), also puts on a bizarre gloss of "blackness" every time she gets on stage, and were it not for her chemical impairment I think we would rightly call it minstrelsy and dismiss her.

In any case, what the fuck, The New Yorker?