Revisiting Back to Black: Rehab

This installment is part of a retrospective on “Back to Black,” the most acclaimed album of Amy Winehouse who died 10 years ago this July. I’ll revisit one track every month in order of their appearance on the album

Career making and earth shattering, this “song of the summer” lives in each of us ‘rent free,’ as they say. Simplicity rules in music. Beyond that, this daring song stuck its middle finger up in 2006 as so many other female celebrities tucked themselves away in treatment centers for “exhaustion” and “chemical imbalances.”

Amy was the only gal to call it out: “Yeah I’m fucked up and yes I’m on some shit, but I’m sad and I’ll handle it on my own.”

Semantics are there to be read into, but the song stands on its own legs; it’s a bop. Everybody will rise to sing along in any bar, restaurant or club it is played in, and it grabbed the attention of the public from her birth into the limelight until the end of her life. Amy simply wouldn’t be told what to do. Enjoy her delightful decline to better advice.