"Sinead O'Connor will never be accused of simpleness, yet watching her co-headline the Fleadh [Festival]...I understood her dilemma as I never had before: she's a pop star, a standout, drawn to the Irish collective ethos even as her every natural gesture betrays her weirdness...O'Connor came off as a complicated person holding herself back."--Eric Weisbard, SPIN, 9/97
Just about everyone who knows me knows that I am in love (more like a mixture of awe and lust) with Sinead O'Connor. If the fact that I actually own and have listened to the Am I Not Your Girl CD wouldn't clue you in, my seeing her in concert twice this summer and the quazillion pictures of her I've posted on my favorite bulletin boards would. I've had it bad since I was 13 and saw her in that "I Want Your (Hands on Me)" video. Here she was, naturally gorgeous without hair or makeup, pleading/cajoling/screaming about female longing so intense it was palpable. "Put 'em on, put 'em on, put 'em on me," she demanded in that sexy Irish brogue, without mentioning any gender, and damn if my teenage self didn't want to obey. Months before, I had tried to drown myself in the bathtub. I thought the world would be better off without my fat, awkward, sexually-confused, math-dyslexic self. A voice that sounded like a more confident version of my own told me to get up, and I'm grateful every day that I listened.
For a while there, the voice that ensured I wouldn't go back belonged to Sinead. I saw the "Troy" video, too, and cried. I hadn't even kissed anyone, and I knew exactly what she was talking about. (I'd know better when I was older.) So I bought the album. All through seventh grade, I screamed the chorus of "Mandinka", "I don't know no shame, I feel no pain, I can't" in my room until I could believe it. She sounded like nobody understood her in middle school, either. My mom said "she looks like a dyke, and her voice is undisciplined." What did she know? I'd had enough of discipline, and I knew what a dyke looked like--I saw half of one in the mirror every day. It wasn't discipline that made me spend my babysitting money on "The Lion and the Cobra."
I'd found other artists, developed a simultaneous crush on Michael Hutchence from INXS, gotten friends and two boyfriends between "The Lion and the Cobra" and her breakthrough album, "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got." But I was still a troubled--thank the God/dess, not suicidal--girl. None of my true friends went to my preppy high school, and I floated among the cliques. I lived for graffiti and using my fake ID and books (I was the nerd who found Cliff's Notes "dishonest") and hardcore hip-hop. But I picked up her second album anyway.
"The Last Day of Our Acquaintance" comforted me when I decided to become my second boyfriend's friend again. It just wasn't working that way. Sinead was no longer my secret--her career had exploded after "Nothing Compares 2 U" hit. But it was okay, because nobody thought I was weird to like her music.
That video was the catalyst of mine and my friend Maureen's coming-out to each other. We were seventeen. A group of us girls were in her living room watching videos when that one came on. It could as easily have been a Winona Ryder movie or an Eve Salvail pictorial or a cute waitress at Steak and Shake, but it was Sinead who prompted the successfully-heterosexual Maureen to blurt a heartfelt, "I'd do her, man." Before our friends' jaws could drop, I responded with an equally emotional "hell yeah, hell yeah!" and high-fived her. We talked more after that, met women who we'd have a chance in hell with, etcetera, but to some extent I credit Sinead's beautiful face and voice with burning off years of isolation and fear in seconds. We shrieked happily when we saw an essay in Ms. where she admitted to physically experimenting with another woman.
So I understood when she tore the picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live--I was contemplating leaving the Assemblies of God church and would have torn Benny Hinn's picture if I could. And I actually liked some songs on "Am I Not Your Girl?" And I felt bad for her when she was booed off the stage at the Bob Dylan tribute concert. I felt that I could probably do better if I had been given that face, that skin, that phenomenal voice. But I wasn't. And in my first 'zine, I wrote an essay defending her. She told her truth and she took risks. That, to me, just made her more irresistable than ever.
Who among us doesn't want to drop off the face of the Earth when we make a stupid-ass mistake in public, or several of them? She did. She declared she'd sing opera, stop singing altogether, stop giving interviews, stop writing songs. For a while, she succeeded in being nobody. People slept on the phenomenal-but-quiet "Universal Mother" LP, but I didn't. I was happy that none of the songs were from the 40's, and many of them were great. She had "the Charge of the Goddess," the classic Wiccan praise of Her, printed in the album cover. Though she had overdosed on pills (sorry, but not a suicide attempt my ass) and gone through rehab, she sounded happier and more content on "Universal Mother." Her calmness was as interesting as her anger.
Today I am a 23-year-old Bisexual Witch, who's done more than experiment with another woman. (Sinead is only the second-most-beautiful woman on Earth!) I sound like someone's torturing a cat when I sing and I yell at the hairdresser when s/he cuts more than an inch off my waist-length hair. But I can safely say that Sinead is one of the biggest influences on my life. Watching her take on conventional religion gave me the strength to do so, reading her bold opinions gave me the strength to keep thinking mine, listening to her words gave me the strength to express my own. I honestly believe I would have stopped writing--I hated my writing as well as myself--had I not heard "The Lion and the Cobra," and been inspired again.
She's 30 now, and has passed from angry Maiden to relatively calm Mother. She's still controversial and still capable of screaming. But her hair has grown, and so has she. The mother of two children, she knows how to measure her risks now. She decided to take the death threats against her before she played in Jerusalem seriously, citing her concern for her band, her children, and herself. She also told those who had threatened her, "You have succeeded in nothing but your own souls' failure," proving that her predilection for hyperbole remains intact. Her new "Gospel Oak" EP is slow and soft, the perfect thing to play when you need to sleep or calm down, but never boring. I play it after I expend energy in ritual. I must also admit that I was all-too-happy to claim her as a sister in Paganism after she gave an interview talking quite a lot about it. However, she claims Rastafari as her religion.
This is dedicated not only to Sinead, but to anyone who can create beauty out of ugliness and to anyone who'd rather be truthful than admired. Some of us were given the gifts of stability and comfort; others the gifts of restlessness and confusion. Thank God/dess, Sinead is definitely one of the latter, tempered with sweet tough wisdom.
Blessed be, angel.
Other, better Sineadian sites...
Photos come from Jeff's Cool Music Page, Mars-L's page, and Yoav Gonen's page. Thanks, y'all--um, you don't mind, right?
