ABSTRACT
There are approximately 40 years, a generation, between Helen Shapiro's and Amy Winehouse's popularity. First of all, unlike Shapiro, Winehouse's Jewishness is frequently remarked on both by the media and by Winehouse herself. Unlike Shapiro, Winehouse is visibly Jewish. Second, Winehouse, singing styles of music associated with 'blackness', is working in a social environment where there are many British singers who are identified as black. Winehouse went to Ashmole School, as had Rachel Stevens, who is also Jewish, a few years earlier. Much more than Stevens, Winehouse asserts her Jewishness. Through the media reports, Winehouse was increasingly constructed as the excessive, demonized, beautiful Jewess, and, in the process, her connection to blackness by way of jazz and the Motown influence on Back to Black, as well as her Jewishness, linked her with the qualities McKay identifies: female threat, male desire, criminality, drugs.
