SPECIAL POST-ELECTION WHAT IS AMERICA EDITION

(1) Amy Winehouse, “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” from At the BBC (Republic). A DVD traces her 2006 appearance at the Other Voices festival in the remote Irish town Dingle: a set of exquisite performances, Winehouse singing in a church, tiny under her bouffant, dressed in black jeans, trainers, a low-cut sleeveless top, two face studs, and her tattoos, accompanied only by bass and guitar. In interview footage intercut between songs she talks earnestly about the people from whom she learned to sing—Mahalia Jackson, the Shangri-Las, Ray Charles, Dinah Washington, Carleen Anderson, Sarah Vaughn, and Thelonious Monk, and the film lets you watch them as Winehouse might have. A CD collects fourteen BBC performances, most of them live, and as she moves through her own songs “Back to Black,” “In My Bed,” “You Know I’m No Good,” and “Tears Dry on Their Own,” and the torch singer Julie London’s 1955 “I Should Care,” you’re pulled into the impeccably edited and lit black and white film noir she acted out on the two albums she made while she was still alive. And then, on the last track, after you’ve admired her sense of style, her commitment to craft, the way her professionalism was inseparable from her fandom, comes the heartbreaker: a 2006 radio-station cover of the first record by the Teddy Bears, with Phil Spector on guitar and contributing the song, a vocal trio that came out of Fairfax High School in Los Angeles to score a number one hit in 1958. Then it was simpering, pious: Spector never failed to mention that he took the title phrase from his father’s grave (“From the words on my grave,” he once said before correcting himself). Now it’s full, rich, gorgeous, and slow, with a step from one word, one idea, to the next, the journey of a lifetime, which neither the singer nor the listener is willing to see end.

(2) Kanye West at 12-12-12: The Concert for Sandy Relief (New York, Madison Square Garden, December 12, 2012). Emerging from a sea of sludge—the critic and musician Tom Kipp’s term for the way rote rock riffs and gestures, in this case uncountable raised arms, brandished guitars, and drawn-out finales, can accumulate until the entire form can seem like the aesthetic equivalent of landfill—the only hip-hop performer to have been called a “jackass” by President Obama and coincidentally the only hip-hop performer on the bill broke the night open. First high-stepping, then bending low and all but tiptoeing, he made a drama of assault and stealth, upending the parade of stars for twenty solid minutes, raging through parts of...