HOW DOES MUSIC FEEL TODAY?

#3 Sinead O'Connor and then some...

I hadn’t listened to Sinead O’Connor’s records since the mid-90s. Yes, I know how fucked up that sounds, I mean why wouldn’t I?! It’s really hard to explain, but I’ll try…

I was the human demographic The Lion and the Cobra was aimed at when it came out in 1987, but I resisted it. Why? Because I was a 17-year-old asshole who hadn’t actually heard her music yet, but the hype was deafening which I took to be a red flag because I considered myself pretty fucking punk. (I fought hard for that feeling.) I also didn’t know yet that I wanted to be in a band because I was a dumb fuckin’ girl and who would be into hearing me play? (Turns out I was not so punk.) I already thought I knew the answer to this question in my soul despite never actually asking it. 

I was 24/7 tainted and obsessed with music. It was screaming in my face! But patriarchy is magnificent this way, a perfect predator. It told me without even trying I would be an idiot for even thinking I could play music, and I had no idea what I wanted outside of a fairly narrow territory I was willing to explore anyway… And yes, I thought I was SUPER open minded, but “punk” at that time was anything but. It was just more ridgid conformity and patriarchy. Luckily I had a lot of dear friends who were coming out and beginning to openly identify as queer and something about Sinead’s music was lighting them UP! I thought, OK, show me these goods. Commence with the Sinead O’Connor.

Within the first few seconds of “Jackie” I was trapped forever. She changes character in the middle of the fucking song! Her lower register takes you by the throat like a fist of smoke. Then, without warning, out of that delicious oily witch of a curse she goes straight into a dance club ripper, “Mandinka”. My little mind was blown. Then, in “Jerusalem” she says she’s gonna fucking hit you if “you say that to me”. WOMEN WEREN’T SAYING THAT SHIT IN SONGS! Women and their issues with their own violence had NO PLACE to even be a thought, let alone be in a song on a massive hit record! It did not escape me. It broke a little something open for me. (A less deep tidbit about this song is that there are WHALE SOUNDS in it and they don’t make me want to sue anyone on behalf of all whalekind.)  

By the time the song “Just Like U Said it would B” asked “Will you be my lover? Will you be my mama-uh-uh?” I was openly weeping (and not just because somebody finally managed to sing the word “lover” and not make it sound unbearably stinky…), because I heard her ask me. As me, for me, as a female. It meant so much more than hearing a man ask it in a song – that happened all the time and they didn't fucking mean it! Then I felt the deeper sympathetic crushing (the painful crushing, not the puppy love kind) my friends must have been feeling. I didn’t take my queer friends’ struggles for granted and I tried hard to be there for them, but I wasn’t having to come out for anyone. I wasn’t in a modern music and media desert (at least not the same desert) where no one ever expressed their desire for anyone real or imagined without fear of being shunned, canceled, excommunicated or beaten to death for using the gender pronouns their hearts wanted to speak. I got a glimpse of how much more loneliness is possible, and how endless and horrible the varieties of neglect were, and I cried harder. (And I’m still crying about it today.) In the song it’s irrelevant if O’Connor herself is gay or straight or man or woman or they/them because she sings it like an avalanche, with passion and abandon and desperation, and she respects herself and respects all of us who could possibly be out there listening so hard to hear even a shred of ourselves in a song. The sacredness of vulnerability and intimacy is more religion than performance here. (I feel like it’s important to mention here that “non-binary” hadn’t really happened yet for the fringes, let alone the mainstream back in ‘87, and “trans” was not a term I fully understood at that time either; there just didn’t seem to be any agreed upon terms? The reality is I was naive and ignorant of the proper ways to talk about gender identity respectfully, much less with knowledgably. The patriarchy is a perfect pred…) 

Which brings me to her next album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got which came out in 1990. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” was the second single but you’ll have to come back next week for that. Stay tuned and I’ll try to put into words why I think we sometimes don’t listen to a song or record for twenty-two years. :)