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Amid an often bizarre, occasionally boring MTV Video Music Awards, the show paused to pay tribute to late songstress Amy Winehouse. But unlike many tributes of years past, the remembrance was tinged with an honest accounting for Winehouse’s infamous battle with drugs and alcohol. “She was kind of like a daft, dopey person… with a peculiar, unknowable talent,” said comedian Russell Brand, who memorably penned a similarly frank tribute right after Winehouse died last month. “She just seemed like an ordinary girl with extraordinary hair,” Brand continued rather breathlessly, before recalling the first time he heard her sing: “That incredible, extraordinary voice coming from that crazy person, a person I knew would wander stinking of the booze, a loopy, loose-cannon person — I thought, ‘How can that be coming out of her?’ After that I gave her a lot more attention, because it became evident upon hearing that divine voice that she was a genius.”

After Brand pointedly noted “there is a solution” to the addictions from which Winehouse suffered, he noted all of the current artists who have been influenced by her, like Adele, Lady Gaga, and his own wife Katy Perry. Then he welcomed jazz legend Tony Bennett to the stage, who put Winehouse’s place in the pantheon of female vocalists like this: READ FULL STORY »