Personally Amy Winehouse has had a terrible 2007, but professionally? Professionally Amy Winehouse is the new Mary J Blige.
The nominations for next year's Grammy awards have just been announced and, while Kanye West just edges her for the top spot with eight nods, Amy Winehouse has score a very respectable six Grammy nominations. And what must be heartening for Amy Winehouse is that the competition is extraordinarily weak this year, especially in the Most Toothless, Most Bleary, Most Witchlike and Most Supposedly Aggressive Husband categories.
The Grammys are the highlight of every musician's calender. That's partly because there are roughly six trillion Grammy categories – so even Scooch will probably end up scoring one somewhere down the line – and partly because, well, who doesn't love five-hour smugathons made up of several toe-curl 'supergroup' jam sessions between two of Velvet Revolver and that whiny bloke from Creed?
And the nominations for next year's Grammy awards have just been announced. It's an important year for the Grammys, because it will be the 50th anniversary of the Grammys and therefore the 50th anniversary of a noticeably old millionaire plodding out on stage, launching into a burbling hour-long explanation about why home taping is killing music and then introducing Aerosmith.
So the organisers of the Grammys need to make sure that next year's show is the best yet. And Amy Winehouse is one of the leading nominees. Amy Winehouse. Best. Amy Winehouse. Best. We don't get it. Anyway, Amy Winehouse has been nominated for the album of the year, song of the year, record of the year and best new artist, along with two other nominations that won't count because they're probably for Best Dressed Assistant Sound Engineer or something.
It marks the end of an unusual year for Amy Winehouse, who's had to face near-death overdoses, fights, rehab, cancelled tours, jailed husbands and – perhaps most worryingly of all – friendships with Pete Doherty. We'd make a pithy comment about how awful it'd be to see Amy Winehouse perform at the Grammys, but actually we'd quite like to see her offer to punch in Eric Clapton's face. And so would you if you have any sense about you.
True, Amy Winehouse's tally of Grammy nominations was just topped by Kanye West, who got eight, but we all know what'll happen there anyway – Kanye West won't win anything and he'll spend the rest of his life bitching about it like a baby complaining that he got a yellow balloon and everyone else got a blue one. And plenty of other acts got Grammy nominations, too, but if we publish a list of all the nominations we'd be here until the Earth stops spinning. We're doing you a favour, really.
Actually, we'd like to retract that bit about Amy Winehouse being the new Mary J Blige if we can. It'd only take a couple of months of cold turkey for Amy Winehouse to become full of Blige's insufferable recovering-addict emotional diarrhoea. And, if anything, that'd make her worse than she is now.
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