The Last Day Of Our Acquaintance: A Wuddery-Eyed Salute To Restless Soul Greatness
You had to be there.
When I say “there” I mean Nineteen-Eighty-Nine. A number. An era filled with sounds hotter than East Coast Summer that kicked like “Funky Drummer”. One very memorable moment in time. At the assumed risk of dating myself or making a legend’s passing about me, be forewarned that in order to honor our subject we must travel back to a place in time that still appears clear in the eye of my mind.
I will never forget the first time I saw Sinead O’Connor, on live TV at the 1989 Grammys. It was a couple weeks past my 13th Birthday. Looking back, there really was no better time to meet such a unique force of passion and righteous indignation. I was home watching, because that’s the kind of thing those existing within an eighties monoculture did. Despite being an inherently ridiculous enterprise, the Grammys felt like required viewing for all absorbing culture like sponges as curious kids.
The things that catch you in those formative years, from childhood into and thru adolescence, will always hold a sacred space in our mind. Somewhere in a YouTube comment section, people born a little latter are busily thumbing out replies like “THIS WAS WHEN MUSIC WAS REAL!” underneath Fall Out Boy “Dance, Dance” or Ja-Rule & Ahsanti “Always On Time”. They may be a bit younger but I feel healthy enough to never value a few less years over all the good shit they missed during mine.
“Who Gives A Fuck About A Goddamn Grammy?!”
That’s an iconic line from a Public Enemy classic still in heavy auto-reverse-rotation inside my Sony Walkmen at the time. But I was watching that show. Had tuned in since single digit ages that first night Michael won everything with one glittery glove on. Remember Sting opening singing about “Russians” in the Red Dawn/Rocky IV Cold War era. Prince & The Revolution closing out with “Baby I’m A Star” introduced by Wendy Melvoin’s father. P opening with “Sign O’ The Times” in the peace-sign jean jacket without The Revolution for the first time three years later. MJ crushing “Man In The Mirror” on the same show only a year ago. Billy Crystal seemed to be hosting every year once John Denver stopped. Stevie Wonder always seemed to be heavily involved. Grace Jones. Tina Turner. David Bowie. Whitney. Cyndi. Can’t Slow Down Lionel Richie.
By this crucial age I was gorging myself on a steady diet of rap music, a genre/culture that hooked me in its early-album-era ascendency and remains my barometric setting to this day. My favorite show Yo! MTV Raps hosted by Fav 5 Freddy filmed a classic episode of prominent rap artists gathered in unity, from LL to Fresh Prince, boycotting the event since the sole rap award was not being broadcast. I didn’t miss the show, but I also didn’t miss the ceremony. The folks didn’t care, plus little sis was in bed already, leaving open use of the den TV.
Billy Crystal introduced a young woman from Ireland with an unfamiliar name to me. This was that same year everyone went nuts because Jethro Tull won best metal album over Metallica. And best new artist mighta even been Milli Vanilli. Who Gives A Fuck About A Goddamn Grammy?!? Who was this 20-year-old Irish girl standing alone on a nationally televised American stage in a black halter top, torn jeans, combat boots, and a shaved head?!? And is that the Public Enemy logo painted on the side of her dome?!?! No, that couldn’t be. Edging closer to the TV. Turn it up a bit. No one else is in the room but me. What was she saying? Then the hook busted thru like the Kool-Aid Man into my brain: “I DON’T KNOW NO SHAME, I FEEL NO PAIN, I CAAAAAAN’T SEE THE BLAAAAME!”, delivered in a pitch that sounded fully in key while still wailing like a banshee. GOD DAMN (pardon the pun). This moment was now imprinted in me. A new relationship had begun.
I’ve loved that girl ever since. With a passion that extends beyond her music. That aspect was great tho, as I quickly discovered. Sinead O’Connor was someone that I recognized, felt inspired by, wished to befriend and/or fight alongside. This only strengthened thru some very public wars she was brave plus reckless enough to take on, under the sun-thru-magnifying-glass flammable-gaze of global fame. Fame that came so quickly, while still clearly working thru a childhood marred by tragedy, abuse and mental illness with a sensitivity that makes you call out bullshit when you see it, yet feel weighed down by what seems like an increasingly dystopian nightmare that has increased exponentially in our digital age, long after her fleeting pop superstardom waned.
Success has made a failure of our home.
There was a time when Sinead O’Connor seemed poised to be one of the most prolific and powerful songwriters of her generation. Seen thru historical hindsight under a contemporary spotlight, it would be tough to make that case following the directional shift of her career after the early nineties.
She rode into a new decade from the Reagan/Thatcher eighties on a tidal wave of raw emotion, writing epic tunes imbued with big ideas, informed by the war-torn horrors of human history. “Troy”. “Mandinka”. “Jerusalem”. Even the title of her debut The Lion and the Cobra was literally some biblically proportionate shit. She wrote most of the music and every lyric on it. That voice along with the accompanying bald-is-beautiful look was already iconic. Even before mainstream success, she was already wrestling with her portrayal in the UK rock press and the effects it had on the people and place she arose from. But as she famously sang shortly thereafter, “how could I possibly know what I wanted, when I was only 21?”. It’s a fair question. One posed by a woman forward-thinking enough to put another legend-in-the-making, teenaged Brooklyn Rap Queen MC Lyte, on a record before either of their debut albums went to pressing.
Two years later a Prince-penned discarded gem, originally released by one of his side-projects known as The Family (shout-out to Susannah Melvoin + Paul St. Paul), became the biggest hit of its era. “Nothing Compares 2 U” launched a young Irish mother, singer/songwriting high-priestess of the alt-rock scene, directly into the pop music stratosphere. It was an unfathomable set of circumstances nobody involved could have foreseen in their worst nightmare or wildest dream.
Prince had no idea that song was a hit when he wrote it. Because the truth is it wasn’t. Not in The Fam or even his virtuosic hands. Mind you this dude cranked out “1999”, “Purple Rain” and “Kiss” with a laundry list of other smash hits within an incredibly short time span. But no one in P’s orbit, or anywhere else on the planet, could have taken it where Sinead took it. She inhabited that song so deeply that it was hers the moment you heard it on the radio, even more so once you saw the video. It’s tough to even remember what that initially felt like at the time. It was one of those rare wudder-shed moments when MTV Buzz Bin flowed directly into heavy-rotation, then came a level of cultural omnipresence which made you forget this song didn’t always exist. That single tear streaking down her cheek, slow-mopped by the “Teen Spirit” janitor, while that weak-2023-country-karoke-cover of “Fast Car” plays inside a Walmart. A three-plus-decade-long-marathon that in this week’s wake will surely shoot “2 U” back up the chart.
But sometimes when you unintentionally spin the world off its axis, you want to put things to a stop almost as quickly as it started. It’s been theorized that whatever age you first become a superstar is the age of maturity you remain for life. As if global fame becomes a freeze-frame. Like many dime store psychology theories based upon generalities, any example can be proof positive or pure horseshit. Whether that was the case for Sinead is impossible for anyone, even those close to her personally, to say definitively. What is undeniable is that song’s success absolutely changed her artistic trajectory, for better or worse, and irrevocably, by age 23.
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
What a title to follow a Grammy-winning-debut made before reaching legal U.S. drinking age. What a flex that the title cut embodied its sentiment, right down to Sinead’s voice being the only instrument heard on that track. Let’s get down to brass tacks. Over three decades later, her second album remains a lava-flowing heat rock, front to back. Ten Bangers. All Killer. No Filler. From the Serenity Prayer opening strings of “Feels So Different” thru the final echoing vocal crack. If you haven’t heard it in awhile, do yourself a favor and go back. Once you’ve finished those 51 finely-crafted minutes? You’re welcome. More importantly…Thank You, Sinead Marie O’Connor…or Magda Davitt…or more recently, Shuhuda Sadaqat…for this timeless work of badassedness.
“I’ll talk but you won’t listen to me. I know your answer…already.”
For anyone interested in keeping an accurate score…Sinead O’Connor was proven historically correct for most of the stuff she was publicly excoriated for. The Pope-aided Catholic Church cover-up of child molestation. State-sanctioned racism. The music businesses’ artistic exploitation. The politicized outrage over the national anthem. The false pretenses and motivations behind the first, let alone subsequent second, Gulf War.
Sinead was right. Most folks she used her platform to speak on behalf of knew so back then. For those still unable to admit that, or wishing to remain willfully ignorant of these facts, let’s bury bad-faith debates with Sinead. We hold these truths to be self-evident to a point not worth discussing anymore.
Am I Not Your Girl?
The temperature in the room always gets turned up when the artist onstage asks their audience a powerfully direct question.
Think Snoop live at the Paramount Theater in New York City, on nationally syndicated television, during the infamous 1995 Source Awards aggressively asking “The East Coast ain’t got no love for Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg?!? Y’all don’t love us?!?”.
D’Angelo from a piano at Brooklyn Bowl after a 12-year-absence, his first cooing words coming in the form of The S.O.S. Band question, “Teeeeeellllllelll meee…do you still careeyeare…about me?”.
Johnny Rotten in 1978 at Winterland in San Francisco for what became the last concert by the Sex Pistols, stopping mid-show while musing out loud to the crowd with the baiting inquiry, “do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheat-ed?”.
Sinead’s big-brass-with-string arrangement of a 1962 Johnny Mathis-helmed Loretta Lynn song, ending with those words bellowed, repeatedly, before a hard stop-and-cut on “AM I NOT?” on Top Of The Pops in ‘92 felt like one of them.
For some of us the answer was, of course, absolutely. But the big crowds, especially stateside where in a matter of months she went from superstar trajectory to career suicide, were already filing out quickly. In some sense, it had to be. She said fairly recently that a number one record was what actually derailed her career. The tipping point of the vitriolic backlash gave that career back. Still the manner it all transpired was a truly amazing spectacle in real-time to see. Sinead was like your old friend and coworker going out in a blaze of glory, telling your boss or the judge everything you ever wanted, but were afraid say, along the way.
Once the smoke cleared, she seemed less interested in playing nice with the industry than the general public seemed inclined to hear her opinion. I will not waste this space revisiting or re-platforming plebeian toxicity. From a musical standpoint, returning with a follow-up to a multi-platinum breakthrough with a set of jazz standards made some sense. Particularly when there had been no time, while touring and promoting tirelessly, plus fighting public wars on multiple fronts, to process what had happened, let alone write new songs with the level of articulation worthy of her artistry. Instead, she utilized her best weapon to reimagine the music that made her sing in the first place.
Thank You For Hearing Me
By the time we get to Universal Mother, it’s late ‘94 going on ‘95. An artist who sold seven times platinum globally on I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got would never get halfway to Gold in the US again. A movement as massive as Nirvana had come and gone in the time between “Nothing Compares 2 U” and “Fire On Babylon”. The alt-rock/grunge crowd her success had helped usher in had already gestated into something bigger, then split and mutated again. The black artists she’d collaborated or closely aligned herself in solidarity with during ascent (Lyte, 2 Live Crew, PE, Soul II Soul) were also being put out to pasture by the second (or third) wave of rap ‘Golden Age’.
For years I had trouble fully appreciating Dolores O’Riordian (RIP) of The Cranberries because that band’s massive success so clearly felt like a market-correction to me, in the form of a more traditional Irish rock/pop act, with a female Irish lead singer that reminded some untrained ears of Sinead, without causing waves.
I’m not saying that’s fully the case, this is just my interpretation of the music industry climate back then. Fair or unfair. You really had to be there.
Rememberings
July 26th, 2023. The last day of our acquaintance. Or is it? I never met Sinead O’Connor. Had two tentatively scheduled plans to do so under music journalistic pretenses. The first via Skype, another in person backstage at a City Winery show scheduled in Philly for different outlets. Both fizzled out in 2016 and 2020, first for personal then pandemic reasons. There was no popular musician interview in life that I felt better suited. I’d been training for it my entire life since that first night.
I could fill many more pages with petty music geek grievances, like explaining why Madonna’s opportunistic public flogging of Sinead during the early nineties made Madge look like a total punk-ass. Or how even as a fan of Frank Sinatra, one of his worst public moments was providing grist for the mill by joining the Greek chorus of publicly boorish prominent men proudly declaring their desire to kick her ass. Or how fans paying big bucks to see Dylan 30th Anniversary at MSG went out on some proto-“Okay, Boomer” bullshit, unironically protesting a protest singer at an event honoring an aging protest singer they woulda booed in ‘66.
But in her time of passing, long after some feared, but still far too early at 56 years, it’s likely better to mention more attributes about Sinead that I always have and forever will appreciate. As a vocal performer she is otherworldly. Whether performing her own material or interpreting others. Across whatever genre she took on, because she did do the damn thing among a litany: punk, rock, folk, pop, hip-hop, reggae, blues, jazz, gospel, and so many cross-streams in between. When she wanted to be she was funny as hell as well. I copped the Audible version of her recent memoir Rememberings during COVID-19 the first day it dropped just because I wanted to listen to Sinead O’Connor’s voice reading it, laughingly recounting old war stories, while in true Irish fashion habitually cussing melodiously.
The world needs more shit-stirrers. More soldiers of love leading with open hearts even if that means they may be susceptible to break. We definitely need more white folks with a platform to stop being polite, cease entertaining nonsensical arguments in bad faith, or behaving like spoiled school children when it comes to matters of race. Allow me to use this space to remind anyone reading that no one actually cares if you are “not a racist”. You don’t win a trophy for not being something no human being was ever supposed to be. The pertinent question is do you have the conviction to call out racism when it is staring you in the face? Are you able to admit America was literally built upon it in the first place? Not every problem that’s faced will be solved, but no problem can be solved until it’s faced. Hopefully you can find some baseline of facts, plus listen to others of different hues, religious views, genders, or sexual practices than you, just to make some effort to facilitate every individual enjoying their best opportunity to co-exist in this place.
This talented Irish import despite any childhood dysfunction, physical/mental/sexual trauma, mental illness, slings and arrows endured while growing up in public, failed relationships, general flawed but human messiness, plus the tragic recent death of her youngest son, usually tried her best to do that.
It does no good to speculate how it ended. Deep down as one of the many admirers and friends she never met, I have an aching feeling that I know.
But as a theological pragmatist who hopes others utilize any spiritual guide they find for good, who neither rules out nor holds strong convictions about what happens beyond Earthly existence, I can only hope that a lifelong searcher dedicated to spiritual exploration has found a peaceful place to go.
With Love and Gratitude…XOXOXO…Bambino
