Screw Amy Winehouse!

Yeah, I'll be the first to admit that when I heard Amy Winehouse pouring over the speakers at my shitty retail job last spring I was pretty impressed. I hadn't heard anyone paying tribute to that old motown sound before, AND she was talking about drinking and screwing around and other fun bad-girl type stuff! Who wouldn't love that? And even after that, when she was becoming the adorable train wreck that she is, I was still on her side. I even felt a little bad for her in that fame-makes-some-folks-go-crazy kind of way. But now? I have heard the woman who could kick her ass any day of the week. The woman Mike D describes as "a sassy black woman." And the woman who has been doing what Amy Winehouse is attempting to do without the poppy-sweet dance beats and lame rap stars: Sharon Jones. Honestly, I know very little about Sharon Jones or the Dap Kings she plays with. All I do know is that on a rainy cold and generally crap-ass day such as yesterday, her cd Naturally put me in a fantastic mood. The kind of mood that I once thought I could only get after watching a Pam Grier movie. She is the real deal. And instead of faking it with dreadlocked bee hive, cleopatra eyes, and bad teeth (damn!); Sharon Jones is living it, making all those mistakes we wanna hear about with a full horn section backing her up. So for now, the Amy Winehouse cd is going back on the shelf only to be taken out some day long from now when I remember her antics and hairstyle more than the music she tried to make.