Back to Black, Amy Winehouse

We miss her.

But that's missing a real mess.

We loved her mess.

You're going to hate this. I can tell. But I'd like you to give it a go.

This Rio concert is hard to watch because it seems very much like we're watching a person completely cranked out of shape under drugs. Like she used some kind of drug to face the crowd, then once out there she's positively crawling with the creeps, grabbing the hem of her dress, screwing up the lyrics, improvising the lyrics throughout, barely, just barely keeping it together. While her dancers are trying their best to make a good thing out of a bad thing.

The audience knows the lyrics forward and backward. They've sung this song themselves a million times, so each person watching know the lyrics as well as Winehouse does so they each know how far she's deviated from the studio version.

She is dying right in front of us and no-one can do anything.

Your bad opinion of this performance is irrelevant. The audience who loves her is deeply troubled by it. They know what happens to her. This performance brings them to tears. They've watch this performance over and over and over and cry their hearts out. For them, this is the most profound thing. They think this performance encapsulates the pain that she's living. At first they hate it, then they embrace as the best performance of all. This performance makes them understand her. This performance causes them to pray for her. 

The song is very good lyrics with snappy little contrasts here and there. Right off;

He left no time to regret
Kept his dick wet
With his same old safe bet
Me and my head high
And my tears dry
Get on without my guy.

Have you ever heard lyrics this stark, this honest, this resentful this fast? She's absolutely profane, immediately, so casually like that's normal discourse in mixed company.

And that's why her audience loves her. It's like she reaches into her own chest and pulls out her heart and holds it up to display. She Aztecs herself. And she does that stoned. And she's stoned because she's been hurt. She's self-medicating. Wet vs. dry.

Her audience is deeply concerned. Even as they sing along.

The ASL versions are also difficult to watch. There are a couple of ways to say "penis" but nobody does them. What they do instead disappears into their in-between motions from one sign to the next. In any of the interpretations you never see the word "dick."

Penis is a "P" hand shape with the middle finger touching the nose twice.

I do not know why that's the sign. But it is.

I've also seen it exaggerated ridiculously to be funny. Graphically showing the tube shape with two hands plopping out a curved shape forward from the lower abdomen. Used when joking around. And when the penis described is comically large.

Nobody uses these two accepted signs in their translations.

Too bad.

I also see "know" shown as "not know" repeatedly and all over the place.

"Know" is the fingertips touching the forehead. "Not know" or "don't know" is that same thing then flicked away. Like something to know is not there.

"100" is the Roman Numeral "C."

This girl ↓ is showing "100" the same way "year" is shown. I have no idea why she is doing that.

"Back" is shown with "B" sign that moves across the torso and changes to a "K" sign.

But one time Jeff said the word "Back" by showing a "B" very clearly then with the other hand touching the base of the palm hand that is showing the "B" pushed it back to his shoulder. Very clearly a "B" being pushed backward, incredibly graphic "back" so that's the way I've done this forever since.

"Black" is the solid unibrow. An index finger dragged across both eyebrows.

In the studio version of this song, the word "black" is resisted in the lyrics.

I go back to ...
I go back to ...
I go back to ...

b-l-a-c-k
     b--l--a--c--k
          b-l-a-c-k
b-l-a-c-k
b-l-a-c-k
b-l-a-c-k

Then the tempo picks up again as if snapping out of depression.

It's a tremendous compositional relief.

All the while three black dudes are dancing as backup singers unaffected by the depression that Amy Winehouse is showing, living, right there next to them. They have to make the best of it even though their lead is tweaking out of her head with bugs crawling right up her dress. And the suggestion is she goes back to sex with black men, not just back to the darkness of depression medicated with drugs. The male black dancers are highly suggestive.

Amy Winehouse sings like an American speaks. Except stoned. There is no trace of her British accent in her singing. She slurs over the lyrics. But that doesn't matter because her audience knows them. They're singing along. They're in thrall to her amazing talent, her voice. She is a tremendous talent, so vast that she squanders it with drugs slurring her Americanized speech.

When she speaks before singing she's much MUCH MUCH worse. She indulges nationalized  language degradation to the point of being incomprehensible.

Haven't you ever wondered why there are so many extra letters in the French language? Laziness on a national scale. That's why. Those letters used to be useful but they've been elided so much in common speech, in Parisian speech, so frequently, so steadily, over time that the entire nation simply abandoned them.

While we keep them in their spellings as atavistic little anachronisms.

And now the British are doing the same thing with their language.

In Shakespeare's day, the British English sounded much more like American English spoken today. With all the American diversity in English language it's still more true to original English than Britain. The entire island picked up the worst vocal habits so that now their language is commonly degraded. Seriously.

That's how Amy speaks when she was not singing. The consonants are reduced. The range of vocabulary is greatly reduced. The rhotic is displaced. Common overused phrases are substituted for everything so that nothing unique is communicated. Everything is phrased and enunciated at the lowest common denominator. For example see this video introducing this song.

Her audience loves her. A much smaller audience than the concert but they still all love her completely while still empathetic with her tremendous emotional disruption. They are relating to her pain. They feel it. But they recover and she does not.

This is another very capable interpretation, but it is in South African Sign Language. Apparently based on ASL with a few notable dissimilarities.

Where the lyrics read, "We've only said goodby in words" meaning the farewell hasn't been fully acted out satisfactorily for the singer, this interpreter signs "We've only said ILY"

The near-universal I Love You sign.

It's very strange. Why she made that choice is not clear to me.

Other interpretations  the women are made up to look like Amy Winehouse. They're fun to watch but not that fluent.

I don't see any interpreter sign "And I tread a troubled track, my odds are stacked" using the sign for "train track" or the sign for "bet."

I do see "trouble" and "stack" but I'd never get the lyrics from their signs.

The song is graphic as all H-E-Double drumsticks and so perfect for ASL either as transliteration or as translation. What I see instead is a very great deal of off-the-beat goofiness that does not convey the real and raw sensuality that is so powerfully expressed by Amy Winehouse's voice and inflections.

One interpretation of Rehab the woman looks like Amy Winehouse in bed but signing with that sour facial expression that people put on that I find impossible to watch. Throughout the entire video. As if everything that is expressed is distasteful and extremely sour and horribly unhappy. Like she's sucking on a lemon throughout the entire video. Winehouse does not look that sour when she's literally dying onstage of drugs and depression. She knows people will watch her flipping on drugs but they won't watch her putting on facial expressions of complete disgust with the whole world.

In another related video a man does Rehab, "They tried to make me go to rehab I said, know, know, know." *click* I cannot' watch you. That homophone in English does not work as pun in sign.