The Specificity/Universality of Sinead O’Connor
To the extent that casual music fans (which is to say, most people) know her, it’s as a “one-hit wonder” whose best known song was a cover. It happened to be written by the legendary artist Prince, whose own songwriter demo of “Nothing Compares 2 U” didn’t get released from his vaults until after his untimely death, largely because her performance of it made it hers.
Sinead O’Connor was a hell of a songwriter in her own right, and a screaming banshee and pure force of nature on record and stage (I never got to see her live, alas).
The songs she wrote, including her best one, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” were brilliant, but so idiosyncratically about her that they’ve been deathly-intimidating for another artist to cover. In that stream-of-consciousness diatribe, addressed to an un-named “you,” a poison pen letter without a standard verse-chorus-verse structure, but with a refrain that alternates between “If I treated you mean / I really didn’t mean to” and “Maybe I was mean / But I really don’t think so,” she pulls the listener in with (hardly universal!) stanzas like
But you know how it isAnd how a pregnancy can change youI see plenty of clothes that I likeBut I won’t go anywhere nice for a whileAll I want to do is just sit hereAnd write it all down and rest for a while
and just makes you feel it, like it was your life. It is, ironically, Dylan-esque. There was a period in the late 60’s when Dylan addressed a lot of his songs to an unnamed “you.” They were also poison-pen letters: “Positively 4th Street” and “She’s Your Lover Now.” She nearly stole one of his genres! Her reward, in case you’re too young to remember, was getting booed off the stage of Madison Square Garden at a Dylan tribute concert a few weeks after she tore up Pope JP2’s picture on SNL because he covered up the Church’s child sexual abuse scandal. (Dylan fans who can afford expensive concert tickets have always been more about vibes than lyrics or intellectual interpretation.)
If blogs existed in 1992, Sinead O’Connor would have been vindicated in a matter of weeks instead of the decades it still will take for people to realize that she was a truth teller and that the corporate media once again covered up for a bunch of pedophiles.
Besides “Nothing Compares 2 u,” O’Connor always had a great instinct for other people’s songs. Her cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies” was haunting, elegiac. It helped me process Kurt Cobain’s suicide, and that record, Universal Mother, seems to be at hand for many deejays who are trying to process her death.
O’Connor took a long break from putting out records in the 00’s. Her comeback record, 2012’s brilliant How About I Be Me and You Be You, made its centerpiece another cover song. John Grant’s “Queen of Denmark” is, like Sinead O’Connor’s best-written songs, so specific that it would seem to defy being covered. It’s clearly about a simmering break-up between two gay men. A stanza like
I wanted to change the worldBut I could not even change my underwearAnd when the shit got really, really out of handI had it all the way up to my hairlineWhich keeps receding like my self-confidence
is eventually followed by
I hope you know that all I want from you is sexTo be with someone who looks smashing in athletic wearAnd if your haircut isn’t right you’ll be dismissedYou get your walking papers and you can leave now
The specificity of the anger is what makes the song somehow so universal. After the record, Sinead O’Connor apparently made the song a hallmark of her concerts; sometimes performing it as the opener, sometimes as a set-ending climax and sometimes as an encore. But, always, letting out her banshee wail for the chorus:
Why don’t you take it out on somebody else?Why don’t you bore the shit out of somebody else?Why don’t you tell somebody else that they’re selfish?A weekling, coward, a pathetic fraud?
Teh Socials
The ignominy of remaining on Elon Musk’s Twitter is becoming too much. As luck would have it I got an invite for Bluesky on the day that the Chief Twit renamed his hopelessly broken, hilariously over-leveraged former public square, “X.”
John Scalzi wrote a pissed-off and slightly elegiac blog post about the community that many of us have lost through this one idiot billionaire’s “emperor has no clothes” debacle, and how and when to disentangle one’s writerly platform from that dumpster fire.
We could go on about how Musk will be an immediate business school case study for taking the value of a unique, universally-known and globally-appreciated brand and absolutely trashing it in exchange for a symbol best known for porn and/or the button you press on your computer whenever you want to leave something, but… well, actually, I kind of want to talk about the latter! With the switchover in name, I think this is a fine time to start disentangling myself from Musk’s Folly, whatever it is called, and manage my presence there differently than I have over these last 15 years when it was known as Twitter.
Aside from laughing at the Melon Husk for using a domain name he’s had parked on GoDaddy that probably can’t even be trademarked because Microsoft and Unicode beat him to it, there’s the fact that one of the best American punk bands named themselves “X” sometime around 1977. I’ve been a fan since before Napster and Kazaa. In a previous life I actually created the USENET group alt.music.x. Let me tell ya: “X” is surprisingly hard to find on the internet. People eventually settled on making wikis about “X (American Band.)”
It’s been pointed out that many of us have the Twitter bird logo and link to our accounts on our professional homepages. I know I have to redesign this website, but I’m not excited about it. Whatever widget I’m using has corporate-friendly social links on the sidebar for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I hate all of these websites. They suck in numerous, and yet specific-to-them ways, but they’ve been sort-of professionally necessary until Phony Stark and Mark Fuckerberg broke their products (by not understanding what was socially valuable about them) and made so many of us question what we’ve been wasting our time on.
I’m trying the alternatives.
I will not join Threads. I enjoyed Facebook when it was like a year-round Christmas card; a way to engage with far-flung friends and extended family and I even played around with the “Followers” feature when people who read my stuff on In These Times or Jacobin tried to “friend” me (I only really accept friend requests with, well, friends; we’ve met! Maybe shared a meal! Or worked together?). After trashing our democracy, Facebook has rigged its algorithms so badly that when I share links to articles I’ve written it hides them from my mother-in-law and Aunt Regina (both of whom would probably like to know that I got published). It hides my friends who have become conspiracy theorists, which is okay, I guess, but I think I’d prefer to know that’s what happened and unfollow them on my own. More often, the barrenness of my feed is that friends–real friends–have quit, stopped posting, forgotten their passwords. I log in these days and get ads for women’s underwear and Star Trek memes. I’m not even a Star Trek fan, although the women’s underwear is at least worth an occasional peek. In any event, I’m not investing my time in a new product by an out-of-touch, stunted manchild whose track record is breaking his own products and society along with them.
I joined Mastodon. The interface is unnecessarily un-friendly to non-geeks (and I’m saying this as someone who used to propagate USENET forums!). The power users are sort of brittle and defensive about the intentionally un-fun “fediverse” that they’ve designed. I certainly like the concept of the platform becoming a protocol so that politically incompatible instances can put out moats around themselves when another gets a little too fascist-friendly. But having to choose an “instance” on the front-end feels like high-stakes speed-dating. I initially joined the default social account. Then somebody started a “Union Place,” which appealed to me for obvious reasons before I found out there was a DSA-oriented “instance.” Why do I have to choose? And why do I lose all my old toots (or skeets or exes whatever the hell we’re calling our used-to-be tweets)? And why does this website feel like a never-ending continental breakfast at a really boring academic conference? Anyway, I’m @Ess_Dog@union.place.
Bluesky seems to have won more of “Weird Twitter.” It’s funny; many of its users are sweaty for followers and posting unhinged skeets about engaging in oral sex with the Animaniacs and gaining tens of thousands of followers like in the good old days of the bird site. Except, one doesn’t find many journalists or public figures there. Aside from the community of weirdos with similar interests that we found on Twitter, the best feature of the site was the feeling of swimming with the sharks. To hell with the “blue checks,” one could respond to a minor celebrity like Dan Savage or Kathy Lee Gifford and maybe get a response. More importantly, we could instantly roast self-importantly economists, former cabinet members, dipshit op-ed columnists, Senators and even the Presidents of the United States and take them down a peg. And that’s what we’ve probably lost forever, Most of the elites will never lower themselves to share a platform with dirtbags ever again. Anyway, I’m @essdog.bsky.social (until I figure out how to make myself @shaunrichman.org. Come say “hi.”
Back On My Bullshit
Hello, Internet. I’m blogging again. Or possibly not.
I’m starting to re-work my website, in anticipation of my next book. My first website, hosted on a comrade’s server, probably began around 1998. I called it “Why Did Shaun Richman Create This Homepage?” and mostly used it to store pictures, audio files, an occasional written piece for a couple of years. Continue reading “Back On My Bullshit”
