Rip it Up

The Fire in Sinead O'Connor's Head

In the Spring of 1990, I was 17, driving a ‘74 Lincoln Continental that belonged to my grandfather.  It had leather seats and an 8-Track Player, which I converted to cassettes with a $20 adapter from Radio Shack.  The copay for this was that I could hear a high-pitched noise as that would sing with the car—speeding up or slowing down—whatever it was doing.  You want fancy convenience with your hi-tech cassette tapes?  Ain’t nothing for free.

So sometimes I would just tune in the radio—the classic rock stations, Chris Douridas’s eclectic programing for KERA, Dallas Public Radio—I would call him sometimes and tell him what I liked and what I didn’t like--even Top 40 radio.  Young M.C.’s “Bust a Move” was something I always enjoyed encountering.  But the song that you could not get away from on Planet Earth was Sinead O’Connor’s cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and every time I heard it, it would stop me in my tracks.  I managed to keep steady on the road, but the rest of me was swept away.  I was 17, so it felt like autobiography every time.  All the flowers that you planted, mama, in the backyard.  They all died when you went away.

If I could sing that way, I would.

Of course, I couldn’t.  My voice was stubbornly where I was.  It was deep, it was in and out of sinusitis, and it was not meant to belt and shine.  And yet I felt it.  That girl was holding nothing back. 

I went out to the hazel wood Because a fire was in my head

It's been seven hours and 15 days
Since you took your love away

Mark your calendar.  It’s exactly where you left it. Time stopped.  Life has been put on hold. In the video, she is holding steady and staying stunning while a single tear runs across her cheek. It was real.

How do I know? To see him, perhaps." She looked away from him along the shaft of light towards the window in silence. "He is dead," she said at length. "He died when he was only seventeen. Isn't it a terrible thing to die so young as that?"

Yeats, Joyce—new names then.  Poetry was new, like early morning.  When I discovered it, I knew I could never go back.  I was learning what a poem was, but the feelings behind them were played with maximum volume.   When a song was played on Top 40 radio, they were sped up a little to make room for commercials and maybe one more song that sounded like one.  And “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a number one hit for a hot month and was the Number 3 single for the year.  When I heard the rest of I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, I felt chills.  If I listened closely, I would cry.  There was something going on that was so dark and true, and how could the masses be lining up for it?

Of course, now we know it wouldn’t last.  When someone is singing truth and determined not to let the slightest taste of guile or calculation get in the way, trouble is not far away.  Kathryn Ferguson’s new documentary Nothing Compares tells the streaming world what I witnessed in real time. I saw her rip up the Pope live on SNL.  I saw her get booed at BobFest—a concert at Madison Square Garden celebrating Bob Dylan’s 30 years in the music business--soon after.  Someone said she was the first person to get canceled. 

It's not on YouTube, but I was lucky to see the rehearsal footage at BobFest.  SNL had already happened, but her mind was on Bob.  When her brother gave her a copy of Slow Train Coming at age 11, she said it saved her life.  It helped her feel that she wasn’t crazy, that she could make it through.  She said, “He’s as beautiful as if God blew a breath from Lebanon and it became a man.” She called him “Lebanon Man.”  Her version of Dylan’s “I Believe in You” is just as devastating, in its way, as “Nothing Compares 2 U.”  All the hairs on my body stand up, not just when I hear her sing these songs, but even when I’m thinking about them.  She sang the song in a whisper.  There was no way she could get it across to the angry pit at Madison Square.  I had always wondered what Dylan must have made of all this.  He got booed at Newport, he pissed people off, he was a truth teller, too.

We now know that Pope John Paul II—an impressive man in many ways—was also complicit in the cover up of the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church.  This is no longer a controversial statement, but in 1992, it needed some explaining and Sinead wasn’t going to wait for that.  Someone who is that close to beauty and that allergic to compromise is not likely to last long, but every time you hear her, it’s unmistakable. I’m sure she made many people uncomfortable, and that’s when you know you’re doing it right. She’s really been through it.  She has been suicidal on the internet, and her son recently committed suicide.  After trying the priesthood—a very unorthodox kind--she converted to Islam a few years ago.  She did not get into this to make friends.

She probably doesn’t mind if young people call her a badass.  In her case, the shoe fits.  But whenever I see or hear her, I feel that intensity, and it’s actually stronger now than it was back in 1990.  My receptors are more sensitive, and so much white noise goes in and out, that when the real thing breaks through, it makes you cry or give blessings to this amazing creature.  There was nothing between her and us.  It was direct, and if we weren’t prepared, and she went for it anyway.

 

"Gretta, dear, what are you thinking about?"

She did not answer nor yield wholly to his arm. He said again, softly:

"Tell me what it is, Gretta. I think I know what is the matter. Do I know?" She did not answer at once. Then she said in an outburst of tears:

"O, I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim."

She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the bed-rail, hid her face. Gabriel stood stock-still for a moment in astonishment and then followed her. As he passed in the way of the chevalglass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, well-filled shirt-front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror, and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eyeglasses. He halted a few paces from her and said:

"What about the song? Why does that make you cry?" She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of her hand like a child. A kinder note than he had intended went into his voice.

"Why, Gretta?" he asked. "I am thinking about a person long ago who used to sing that song."

Michael Furey died of singing, of love, of passion.  He was seventeen, but the further I get from seventeen, the more tender it feels.  Sinead and James Joyce’s characters in “The Dead,” Dubliners all.  And seeing Sinead self-destruct in real time hits me more the further I get from 1992. I didn’t just live it then, I’m living it now. 

So I'm walking through the desert
And I am not frightened although it's hot
I have all that I requested
And I do not want what I haven't got

I’m still trying to get there.  Journalists are sounding off about this documentary, speculating if now we have caught up to Sinead.  How many of them can make the hairs on my body stand up just by opening their mouths and making a sound?  What about producing that reaction from memory alone?  She is Wallace Stevens’s siren, singing beyond the genius of the sea. She was The Lass of Aughrim. She sang it, she was it. She poured everything she had into it, into all of it, and she still stands. 

Oh if you be the lass of Aughrim,
As I suppose you not to be,
Come tell me the last token
Between you and me.

That voice will continue to resound, and its power from 1990 will just get stronger. It could terrify, it could transcend. It is eternal. It is your youth and what it means to you as you age.  It could know all about you without ever meeting you. It could make you feel alive every time you hear it, even on Top 40 radio. It is about losing everything, but sacrificing nothing. It is the wound and the salve. She is singing “The Lass of Aughrim” in the rain, but does not sink. “I love Yeats’s poems, they’re like music but they open up a different sky, the one that’s inside me.” She knows what it feels like for us. Nothing compares to that.