Pre-Preamble
I’m reading a book titled “Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters” by Allyson McCabe. For anyone who knows me personally or reads my writing, you know that I would read any book about Sinéad O’Connor because she matters so deeply to me.
But first, I want to say that the book matters. It matters because it reminds me how I want to write about my musical heroes. (I first wrote about this goal in October 2022. Since then, I have taken a leave from teaching so I suppose I’m ahead of schedule.) The book serves as a model for the way I think about my icons. I want to weave stories of my heroes with my personal experiences. I also want to weave their stories and connections with each other. It’s those connections that make the stories powerful and unique. Otherwise, it’s the same reporting over and over.
Creating something that connects your own story to another’s story is certainly not a new idea. It’s a form of interpretation or perhaps even just art. But the connections have become more explicit. YouTube has inspired an entire genre of reaction videos, where people watch and listen to songs and share their thoughts. Those reactions happen on the fly and are over when the song is over. On the other hand, McCabe’s book is a react and reflect book. In fact, her reactions while exploring old videos of Sinéad and Sinéad’s admirers were the seed for her book. In the book itself she goes deeper into her own story and the social context of Sinéad’s rise and fall.
My stories may not matter to many people, but the connections between my experiences and my heroes are therapeutic in nature. I’m finding that McCabe’s book, while important for her own journey, is also inspirational for me. McCabe matters. (You all matter, but that’s a separate topic. And now I’m laughing that I wrote an eight word sentence about unity that uses the word “separate.”)
Back to the book. I’m only one-third of the way through it, because I’m savoring it. Reading the book reminded me that I had already made a list of my own reactions and reflections to write about. Why save them for my book? I’ve already written about Chrissie Hynde. Sinéad is next. So here we go.
Preamble
In the spring of 1987 I was a DJ at a student-run college radio station called “KANM.” The station didn’t have an FCC license, so you couldn't hear it on the public radio airwaves. It was a cable radio station and I honestly don’t remember how it was accessed. I think on TV? My memories are more about being a DJ than how I accessed it.
You had to apply to become a DJ and you had to work your way up from the bottom of the ladder. Being a DJ at KANM was something on my bucket list that I had put off for awhile, so I finally applied for a position for the winter and spring of my senior year. Being a newcomer, I was welcomed and assigned to the bottom of the barrel slot. I would be the DJ on Saturday mornings from 4am to 8am. That was fine with me! I just wanted to know how it would feel to be a DJ.
Many of those nights (mornings) were lonely, but I had a couple of friends who were willing to stay up late and call in. I opened every show with “Reelin’ in The Years” by Steely Dan. I wasn’t really a Steely Dan fan before that. It was a hasty and random choice. I assumed there would be an orientation as a new DJ, but the guy before me was ready to get home and go to sleep. He was completing his midnight to 4am shift, having worked his way up from my slot. He showed me the microphone, headphones, a few of the buttons, and how to mute and unmute myself. Then he said, “I’ll put a long song on for you so you have a little time. Have fun.”
Well, shit! Now what? There were shelves and shelves of albums. I grabbed a few and happened to select the Steely Dan song. I think it was a vinyl single or EP. Those were nice because you had a bigger target on which to place the needle and stop the song before it moved to the next one. I’m guessing it was the first song on that EP, but I’m not sure. I had heard the song before, but it wasn’t anything special to me, and it wasn’t exactly “college alternative” radio. But it was one of the first things I reached while quickly looking for a song to play next. I spent the next four hours combing through the collection and playing random songs, mostly focused on muting myself after I spoke and making sure there was no dead air.
Being already nostalgic at the age of 20, I decided the following week I would start with the same song. It grew on me. The guitar intro is pretty powerful, and I decided that could be my signature opening. After that, it was freeform exploration. Some drunken friends called occasionally requesting “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” by Frank Zappa, so that became a staple whenever they called. I think they used fake voices the first time to see if I’d know who they were.
Another staple on my show was “Slave to the Rhythm” by Grace Jones. The records were generally sorted by artist, and exploring the alphabet exposed me to artists I wouldn’t have known to seek out. Some of them were promo albums or singles, many of them imports. The artistic photo collage of Grace on that album grabbed my attention. (I didn’t realize at the time that the construction of the collage was in a video of the same name. I didn’t have cable TV in my apartment and only saw MTV when at friends’ houses.) Grace looked a bit menacing at first, but I loved the songs! The spoken intro by a man that reminded me of Vincent Price added mystery. And his introduction. “Ladies and Gentlemen. Miss Grace Jones. Jones. The Rhythm.”
The fact that the “Slave to the Rhythm” album was comprised entirely of different versions of the same song was useful when I needed some time to explore my next song choice. If it went to the next track, no one would notice. Of course, no one was listening either, as far as I knew. It was 5am! I was mostly playing these records for myself.
Reactions and Reflections: Sinead O’Connor
During one shift, probably while playing Grace Jones, I noticed a new vinyl single in the stack of new releases. A bald woman was screaming and clutching her hands against her chest. Who the hell was that? I decided to try it out. I announced that I was playing a new release from an Irish artist named Sinéad O’Connor. I wonder now if I pronounced her name correctly. The song was “Mandinka” and I absolutely loved it.
When I saw her release on CD shortly after, I snapped it up. I read what I could in magazines. Somehow I learned to pronounce her name. Perhaps I saw her on MTV. I don’t remember. But I remember this.
Sometime that spring, I decided to drive home to Austin for a short weekend. It would have been relatively close to graduation, so I’m not sure why I would have taken the trip home. I was alone, so it wasn’t one of my Austin road trips with friends for a concert. Perhaps there was a family celebration, emergency, or other need to go home. Since I had the radio commitment, I couldn’t leave until 8am on Saturday morning, which meant it would be challenging to stay awake while driving the 100 miles or so home.
I put “The Lion and the Cobra” into the CD player. I had listened to it a bit, but now I had the chance to listen in my preferred setting: the car. I had a 1967 pea green Mustang that I had upgraded with a high end stereo system, CD player, and strong subwoofers in the rear. I started the album and rocked to “Mandinka.” I let the album continue, but I was not patient in my listening. I needed to stay awake!
So I repeated “Mandinka” for that entire drive. Within a few repetitions, I was howling along with Sinead. “I don’t knoooooooow no shame, I think I’m playin’ a gaaaame! See the flaaaaaaaaame!’ (Song lyric reprints dispute my hearing of the words. I still don’t see how “I feel no pain” fits into the syllables I interpret as “I think I’m playin’ a game.”) Anyway, I screamed and howled that song for 100 miles and almost two hours. There was no dozing off and when I arrived in Austin I was honestly a different person. I had no idea at the time that I had transformed, but somehow Sinéad had liberated me into feeling more feminine. More primal. Just more…me.
Sinéad and I are only six months apart in age. While she was having a child and releasing her album, I was graduating from Texas A&M and heading for a corporate job in Dallas at IBM. Perhaps she represented the part of me that didn’t want to conform. I howled and howled and howled.
During my first year at IBM, I befriended a group of recent university graduates. We were tight knit and partied a lot. “Mandinka,” and the rest of the album, were important features of any music I chose. I remember my friend Michael saying, “Is that the bald howler again?” I didn’t appreciate his shallow view of my new hero. If you didn’t get Sinéad, it was your problem.
That album is etched in my heart and connected to that time in my life when I was establishing my conforming, dependable, corporate adult identity while trying to stoke my inner flame of resistance. I think that Sinéad represented a part of me that I couldn’t experience in my own choices.
A few years later, she released her second album. I anticipated that album with joy, buying the CD as soon as it was released. Frankly, I was (and still am) underwhelmed by “Nothing Compares 2U.” Don’t get me wrong. It’s sung beautifully. I get that. But there is just so much more on that album. At the time, I must have read that it was a Prince song. I was more interested in what Sinéad had to say herself, not Prince. I wasn’t mature enough to realize that she says a lot when she reinterprets the songs of others. So I focused on the songs she had written.
To this day, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” is my favorite Sinéad album, although “Universal Mother” is an extremely close second. My love is not for “Nothing Compares.” But for “Three Babies” and “Black Boys on Mopeds.” And all the anticipation she builds in “You Cause as Much Sorrow” and delivers all and more in the chorus. And the tension of “Jump in the River.” I can still get lost in that album. It makes me cry with compassion and sometimes I need a hug when I listen to it. Sometimes I want to hug the world. These days I want to hug Sinéad.
Why does Sinéad matter so much to me? I didn’t experience abuse. However I did experience the trauma of mental illness in my family. I can connect this now, and while it’s a part of my connection to her, I don’t believe this is the most important part of why she matters to me.
I think I identify with her sensitivity. When I was a young child, my mom would often say to me, “You are so sensitive.” She did not say this in a critical way. She would say it when I worried about other people or animals. I think she wanted to spare me any feelings I had when I was concerned about another person’s situation.
I remember once sitting in the back of my parent’s car as a child. On the road in front of us was an old pick-up truck. A group of children was riding in the back bed of the truck. I think at least one child was sitting in a small lawn chair. It was hot outside and the sunshine was intense. I felt bad that I was riding in a nice car with air conditioning while those kids were stuck in the back of a sweltering pickup truck. I told my mom, “That’s not fair.”
“What’s not fair?”
“Why are those kids having to ride in an old truck in the hot sun?”
She said, “They probably don’t have much money. But don’t worry. They don’t know any differently. They look happy. Don’t worry about them.”
I can’t decide if her comments were wise or indifferent. Perhaps both. But that memory was burned into my brain. And when I heard “Three Babies” and “Black Boys on Mopeds” it released years of empathy that I had been told to contain or dismiss. It did matter that I was in the air conditioned comfort while other kids traveled unsafely in the back of the pickup.
That is why Sinéad O’Connor matters to me. Since that album, her music continues to support the parts of me that are sensitive. Gentle. Concerned. Sometimes fierce. She invokes my advocacy for others. And my understanding of my own lived experience. She matters.
If she doesn’t matter to you, I hope you have an artist who matters to you in a similar way. A way that inspires and inflames the best parts of yourself. The parts that may be hidden in your external way of being.
i get what you're saying about Nothing Compares, a beautifully interpreted song but that album (my fave also!) in its entirety is a masterpiece. her gift and perhaps her downfall was she empathized so deeply with other people's suffering..she could bear theirs and her own but the loss of her son was just too much. so heartbreaking