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?
The Pre-Posthumous Recordings of The Artist
I’ll be the millionth writer to note that 2016 has been absolute murder on legendary musicians so far. And now Prince is gone.
I don’t have a full obit, a critical reappraisal or anything terribly profound to add; just a few musings on record shopping that are too long for a Facebook status update.
Many artists of Prince’s stature and longevity usually leave behind a trove of posthumous recordings, so that they remain platinum-selling artists years after their death. And, of course, now their holograms can go on tour in support of those new records (the future is a strange place). But Prince was a legendarily prodigious recording artist. It’s not an unusual year that sees Prince out out two or three new records! (or, rather, saw; the past tense doesn’t feel right yet). And, so, Prince is the rare artist who has dozens of pre-posthumous recordings ready for purchase. So, before you bemoan the fact that you will never hear a new Prince song ever again, there are hundreds – perhaps thousands – of hours of Prince music that is new to you, waiting to be picked up and taken for a spin.
When I got married, I heard my record collection through new ear’s: my wife’s. Kate sort of played DJ with my records when we first moved in together, and put in heavy rotation some discs that I might have only spun once every other year previously. Prince was one of those. Embarrassingly, I only had The Very Best of Prince, when everyone knows that greatest hits are for housewives and little girls. So, out of a renewed appreciation, and a desire for a little more variety, I started picking up more Prince CD’s every time I visited a used record store.
I never really bought new Prince records. His stuff was much more of a used record store hunt for me. And there’s a ton of them in every used record store. Music going digital caused a lot of fans to tell their copies of Purple Rain and 1999 (of which there are millions!) to make some room and a buck. But I was also able to score the one-and-done discards of fans who actually bought the new records to sort through whether it was a good one, a great one or a mediocre one. Emancipation, Musicology, 3121 – that whole blur of records that he put out after regaining his name and artistic freedom just in time to watch the music industry basically collapse.
And so, the only profundity that I will leave you with is this: go out and buy 3121. It’s the best recent Prince record that I’ve heard and you probably have not. It feels classic and new and like listening to an old friend all at once. Plus, he interrupts one slow jam with a falsetto command to “Turn off your cellphone,” which, if nothing else, would make a great ringtone.
The Reds in the Bleachers
Bill Mardo, sportswriter for the Daily Worker newspaper, died last week. His NY Times obituary notes his column’s crusading role in pressing for the racial integration of Major League Baseball in the 1940’s.
“In the years before the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson as the first black player in modern organized baseball, Mr. Mardo was a leading voice in a campaign by The Daily Worker against racism in the game, a battle it had begun in 1936 when Lester Rodney became its first sports editor.
…
The Daily Worker asked fans to write to the New York City baseball teams urging them to sign Negro league players at a time when the major leagues had lost much of their talent to military service. A milestone in baseball history and the civil rights movement arrived in October 1945 when Robinson signed a contract with the Dodgers’ organization, having reached an agreement with Branch Rickey, the Dodger general manager, two months earlier.”
There’s a book – maybe a movie – in this story. It wasn’t just the constant agitation in the Daily Worker. There were also regular protests by Yickels and Yipsels in the bleachers and the checkmate: a groundbreaking NYS anti-discrimination law that invited lawsuits that would have dragged Branch Rickey into the 20th century if he hadn’t decided to preempt it all and jump out ahead of history as the Hero we all now agree to pretend he was.
(Personal note: my old comrade Si Gerson was an editor at the Daily Worker, if not the Editor-in-Chief, during some of the campaign for racial integration in professional baseball; it is he who first admonished me to dig deeper and learn the real history of what it took to help Jackie Robinson break the color barrier.)
“…If He Died In Memphis, That’d Be Cool”
Alex Chilton died of a heart attack today, at a too-young 59 years of age. While it’s sad, it’s not too surprising. I’d already written an obit about him five years ago, when he went missing in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
I still never travel far without a little Big Star.