Amy Winehouse, rest her soul.

Back to Black was a ridiculous record, one that seemingly came from nowhere. Very few had heard her first album, Frank, when "Rehab" broke through and the fucked-up, funky neo-soul of Back To Black hit our ears for the first time. With that one song, that one album, she created a genre and gained almost instant celebrity. Back to Black was released in October 2006 and went platinum by the end of the year; those three months solidified the neo-soul genre as the next big thing. In the time since, neo-soul has become almost a ridiculous past trend, a genre for mixtapes played on road trips with aunts so that everyone can agree on the music and get along. But, like the subversive music she herself was nodding to, Winehouse's Back to Black is anything but inoffensive: it's dirty, confessional, snotty, at times even a little racist (I beg you to take a close look at a lyric sheet). And as we got to know Amy herself, we realized how honest it was, and loved her even more for it. It shouldn't have worked, it shouldn't have made millions, it shouldn't have even been produced it's so jarring and raw and absolutely horny, no pun intended, for everything bad and dirty in life. And in that way it stands as a brilliant record, even timeless in its out-of-timeness. I'll trade a million "Rolling in the Deep"'s for that comeback tour to have actually happened. Rest your fucked-up soul, Amy. We'll go back to Back to Black, again and again.