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?