Amy Winehouse, for all the typically Machiavellian marketing behind her early development and signing, was an atypical star to launch, even before the drink, drugs, bisexuality, tattoos and self-harm and sprawling domestic disharmony on the streets of Camden set in. 2003 was a year of slickly manufactured, crowdpleasing pop anthems spawned by reality tv or established industry hit machines: Britney, Christina, Avril, Beyoncé, Sugababes, Rachel Stevens, Girls Aloud. In this climate, Winehouse’s debut Frank, an engagingly personal and subtly powerful blend of jazz, soul, dub and heavy drinking, stood out as an album of grit among gloss, accomplished and ambitious, recalling the eclectic and impeccably imperious style of Dinah Washington and Nina Simone.

Equally, despite her status as a product of the Sylvia Young and Brit stage schools, Winehouse was hardly manufactured, having been a genuinely talented singer, guitarist and songwriter from a young age. The lyrics she produced and her delivery of them were cool, critical and cynical – ‘Fuck Me Pumps’ is a punchily sung and scathing dismissal of the dominant gold-digging paradigm. Her definitive, self-mythologising single ‘Rehab’, despite its refrain’s predictable propensity to generate tasteless jokes and mawkish headlines in the wake of her death, is a staggering song of self-awareness, wiped clean of messy emoting or self-pity and resolutely swerving any courting of sorrow or sympathy. Its protagonist does not bewail her fate in the clasp of addiction but makes her refusal to be pathologised an active and empowering choice – ‘no, no, no’ means no. Like much of Winehouse’s material, the song addresses and analyses addiction, dependency, depression and the complexities of female independence with a wry, arch, clear-eyed and mocking wit that could have leavened the weight of many a confessional memoir.

To evaluate Winehouse’s career as a story of potential unfulfilled, as many obituaries are doing, is to ignore the quality of second album Back to Black, with its clutch of BRITs, Grammys and Ivor Novellos, as well as the sheer depth of its influence. Winehouse’s international success began a scramble by record companies to scrounge up similar eclectic and experimental female artists. It is perhaps unfortunate that all this process actually got us was an indistinguishable female-centred quirk-quake comprised of Little Pixie Roux and the Machine for Lashes, as well as current favourites Adele and Duffy – both well-behaved, clean and immaculately blue-eyed biters of a vintage musical style which Winehouse had almost singlehandedly reinvigorated. For all their undoubted technical ability, such singers purvey blandly perfect reproductions of retro soul, whereas Winehouse was able to inhabit past musical modes like she wore her Ronettes-inspired beehive, investing them with something contemporary and compelling through that awesome, syrupy, rolling contralto. Her aesthetic – glamorously grubby, leonine and Cleopatra-eyed – was similarly inimitable and atypical. Even Lady Gaga credited Winehouse with smoothing the path to mainstream success for other ‘strange girls’.

The tributes to Amy Winehouse clotting the front pages this past weekend reflect the other aspect of her fame: the purpose she served as media cipher. The narrative into which she was coralled – discovered, lauded, rewarded, exploited, drug-ravaged and wrung dry by the cynics and sycophants around her – is a traditional trajectory for women in the public eye, from Marilyn to Britney. Mixed in with the clichés of the demon-driven artist, Winehouse’s dedication to the life of a good-time girl provided an obvious temptation for the press to shoehorn the shapeless and slippery business of living into a rigid mould of Meaning, to make her a signifier of the plagues afflicting modern womanhood – not all of modern womanhood, of course, just those of us susceptible to the lure of urban independence and its giddy, glittering thrills.

There is an obvious irony in the fact that the media’s very concentration on her as a reliably scandalous page-filler embedded her in public consciousness as not an artist but a cautionary tale of misjudged relationships and worse-judged substance indulgence, eliciting a weird and volatile mixture of compassion and contempt. There was, too, a ghoulish and lascivious edge to public concern over Winehouse – as there was, back in the day, over Courtney Love and, latterly, Britney Spears – which is seldom present in attitudes to their male counterparts. The same organs which engorged themselves with pictures of Winehouse in her various stages of decline, distress and debauchery are continuing to objectify and sensationalise her as, inevitably, a ‘brilliant but troubled’ combination of tragic loss and dreadful warning. She deserves a better class of memorialist.

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Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.

“The whole message with [Adele] is that it’s just music, it’s just really good music,” said Russell. “There is nothing else. There are no gimmicks, no selling of sexuality. I think in the American market, particularly, they have come to the conclusion that is what you have to do.”

The main reason why Russell’s claims about Adele should be regarded with scepticism is that Russell is the head of Adele’s record label. Even leaving aside such vested interests, his argument that she represents some kind of paradigm shift has been ably deconstructed here by Laura Snapes.

The Guardian article linked to above has a few frustrating facets of its own. I’m not sure why Rihanna’s ‘S&M’ should be hoicked in to illustrate Russell’s point: there’s a difference between having a sexualised image – usually, when it’s the subject of criticism, one that’s been externally imposed on an artist – and singing about sex and sexuality. Especially when ‘S&M’ is a more complex song than that framework allows for – arguably one in which Rihanna presents non-mainstream sexuality in terms of female agency. Finally, the idea of good-girl, sexless Adele vs bad-girl, sexualised Rihanna is a false dichotomy with problems in abundance.

Adele’s own image is hardly free of contrivance, harking back as it does to the blue-eyed soul divas of the 1960s – classily sexualised, perhaps, but sexualised nonetheless. In her chosen brand of popular music, a degree of sex in your self-presentation is, as Russell correctly identifies, inextricably linked to commercial success. It’s even arguable, unfortunately, that it’s Adele’s very distance from the currently acceptable aesthetic norms of her genre that has necessitated she be marketed with a different, ‘desexualised’ focus. Had Adele possessed her own voice but the body of, oh, let’s say Katy Perry, would her image have been sexed-up business as usual?

Russell is taking issue, of course, not with the marketing and self-presentation of all women in music, but with a particular branch of commercial pop, and the marketing therein of female artists by predominantly male management, which was ever thus. If his comments do kickstart a new way of measuring the money-making potential of women in music, then great, but it’s going to be an uphill struggle in view of the constant and increasing pressures on female performers – as well as male – to conform to a blandly beautiful industry standard.

Is Adele’s refusal to bow to that standard, as Russell claims, as radical today as the Prodigy were in the early 1990s? Let’s face it, mainstream acts are so limp and colourless right now, and popular culture so devoid of ideas, experiments and imagination, that yeah, it probably is. Never mind that the Prodigy were highly politicised and engaged with a wider oppositional culture, while Adele is outspoken in bemoaning her tax burden.

While no one can begrudge Adele her success, or deny that it’s refreshing to witness, the fact that she can be said to occupy a radical position is more an indictment of contemporary music than it is a compliment to her. The most positive thing about Russell’s remarks is the opportunity they offer to reiterate a greater truth: that commercial profit-driven pap purely designed to generate a profit is more than socio-culturally damaging for women, it’s dull.

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Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.