SINEAD THE UNDYING A Repost in Honor of Her Living

So here we are. I am so very sad about the lost of the great and powerful Sinead O’Connor. There has been much said about her life, but mostly her sadness and her death. I wanted to repost this couple pieces I wrote a while back in celebration of her fierce life. Life.

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 meplay? (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. :)

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 an 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.