HOW DOES MUSIC FEEL TODAY?
#4 Sinead O'Connor Part 2
One thing I’ve learned in the past week looking up Sinead O’Connor’s career is how little I actually knew! I feel ripped off! Back then I had to rely on a cassette tape, and occasional appearances on late night TV. I didn’t have cable TV (or any TV really) so I saw her videos from time to time at friends’ houses or random places. And in her videos (until more recently) she’s just singing. Which is glorious! Yes! But she also co-produced her first record (and probably her second) and played a TON of instruments! I also could not afford rock mags and there was no internet, so if she ever spoke about songwriting and the instruments used therein, I had NO idea! Not a clue. It would have meant so much to so many young people to see that …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 is SO much heavier to me than “Nothing Compares 2 U”. When I put it on the other day my first thought was, Can you fucking imagine being in the studio and hearing for the first time the opening count-in of HUGE drums and the rapidfire staccato of muted guitar together suddenly fall off the cliff and land fully upright, mid-stride in an upbeat, jangling pop song?! And then Sinead comes in?! I imagined myself in that control room and was (you guessed it) bawling.
Those are the kinds of moments we all hope for as musicians and engineers and producers. When they happen you feel like you could stop everything and walk out the door full-up and satisfied for the rest of your life. I cried at the mere thought of her possible joy 22 years earlier! Haha! I hope to God she felt it, because things like Grammys and Oscars can’t do that to you. You can remain at a distance from reviews and awards – “The Feeling” you cannot.
Sinead was a bonafide superstar by the time I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got came out. She could have phoned it in and still sold millions of records; instead she’s singing (again) about her own life, her own personal violence, and she does not apologize (quite literally) while singing about the rage hormones can put you through, pregnant and otherwise. I’d never heard a woman sing about this let alone TALK about it before! I was raised watching biology-free Lawrence Welk with my grandmother for Christ’s sake! To my young congealing misogynist mind, pregnancy was not cool – it was “evil”, terrifying, the end of your life if you were female and only for religious people. Please keep in mind, I was feral and had no parents. Having a baby in my subconscious mind was abject fucking cruelty; in my concious mind, it was nothing short of conformity and “giving up”. (Yes, I was fucked up.)
She stopped me in my tracks. She ruled the world with “Three Babies”, a song about how abortion actually makes her a better mother. It’s not a challenge, a threat, or a justification – it just “is”. I already felt this way, I understood abortion and my own fierce protective nature. I had just never heard anyone say it before, let alone so Grand Canyon-ly beautifully. I had permission to start thinking about not having to hate my own biology, slowly, in little bits… She started that for me.
Her lyrics are so personal and often don’t rhyme. They hit harder for it – she speaks of the mundane and it breaks you. Out of the gate in “Emperor’s New Clothes” she’s brutally plain spoken about the realities of a relationship:
I treated you mean
I really didn’t mean to
But you know how it is
And how a pregnancy can change you
She doesn’t apologize, nor does she absolve herself of responsibility, and that’s where the crushing tenderness lays so softly right behind that tired truth over an unrelenting dance beat. It’s fucking perfect, and it’s devastating. There is so much respect for the person she is speaking to (and herself) even though they may be in an impossible place. What a love song. It could have ended there and it would still be perfect, but then we wouldn’t make it to the line “I will live by my own policies”, so…
Sinead O’Connor’s music is a gift I received from my persistent, loving friends. What a beautiful state of affairs. Most of us have “given” music to another person at one time or another and likely changed them away from some darker place, or just gave them some spazzy joy? It just never stops amazing me what that transaction can manifest. I think that’s why sometimes we don’t listen to a favorite life-changing record for years after wearing it out and committing it to muscle memory. It acts as a poultice – a medicine, some feel-good drugs and a ziploc bag to keep it in for later, when you need it. When you open it again you may not be ready and maybe that’s when you need it most. It feels like the reason we stay alive.
P.S. A huge FUCK YOU to every person who felt so righteously indignant making fun of Sinead O’Connor when she ripped up a photo of the Pope on SNL. You are cowards. And you know you are cowards.
Absolutely those people were and are fucking cowards. Sinead was RIGHT years before people would admit what was going on in the Catholic Church and a lot of churches in general. It was nothing but pure misogyny that almost destroyed her and her career, but she’s still here fuckers.
As I recall, she appeared at the Dylan anniversary concert about a week later, and after Kris Kristofferson introduced her, the boos and catcalls stopped her -- who would expect an anti-free speech demonstration at a Bob Dylan Anniversary Concert? She wasn't able to sing, and just stood there sobbing. Kristofferson returned to the stage, stared out at the crowd for a couple of seconds, shook his head, put his arm around her and muttered, "Sinead, people will be talking about you music and your courage for a long. Fuck them!" and walked her off the stage.
Pope John Paul II was viewed as a hero then, and it wasn't really until after his death that some of the problems with his papacy came out -- his blindness where the Vatican bank was concerned and his failure to stomp on the sexual molestation cases that began surfacing during his Papacy. However, the conduct of clergy in Ireland was none for decades before the scandals came out, in part because the Church in Ireland was really a co-equal offender with the government. As I recall, the Constitution of Ireland carves out some space for that establishment, and while it should have been gone by now, they are still prying the cold, dead and sinful hands off the document.
It would have been nice for more than Kristofferson to come out on the stage and support Sinead. That no one did is sad but not hard to understand. Those shows are largely chaotic, and Kristofferson was probably the only one of the headliners watching this. But, what he did was show moral courage. And, Sinead O'Connor may be a broken vessel, as are we all, but a lot of her career could seen as carrying a lamp for moral courage, for the stranger, and for the poor and the abused.
Sharappa earlier mentioned this song. I was a Kristofferson follower in college, and still play a lot of his music, but I was doing other things for a long time. He'd written similar songs about Johnny Cash, by the way...here's what he wrote about Sinead. https://youtu.be/3HwWDOQoCBM