Over and over, all born into great pain

RIP to a giant

I’m completely gutted to learn of Sinead O’Conner’s death. This is a slightly edited version of something I wrote more than a decade ago which holds up pretty well, I think.

Sinead came at just the right time for me. I was an intense person trying to hide; she was an intense person who made one of the best videos of all time by being totally exposed. I remember talking to a friend about the bald head and the closeup, how brave they were, how beautiful she had to be pull it off, only vaguely sensing how astonishing it all was for a twenty-three year old who was already a single mother, already getting heat for her politics, for talking about her abusive childhood.

Her debut was full of all the mythic poetry we could want at sixteen but also a song whose sublime horniness I appreciate more every day. Her second album, the one that really catapulted her to fame contains the best break up song of all time. What can compare to the devastation of “I’ll meet you later in somebody’s office”? And then she ended it with the bare a cappella incantation “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.” And put one of the best anti-Thatcher songs in the middle of it.

I also adore her cover of Nirvana’s All Apologies, one of the best cover-as-alchemy songs ever recorded, and so many of her songs about motherhood, so tender and strong all together, her album of show tunes and standards, and so much more.

Then of course there was the Pope thing. I may have been watching it live when she tore up his picture because I remember seeing her do it, and I know it was cut from the episode, although maybe it was on the news or something. I remember my fellow students at the women’s college I went to – certainly an audience inclined to be sympathetic to how her translation of Marley’s anti-racist message into a cry against abuse and its enablers – being mostly embarrassed by it. I remember the discussion being about how she must be crazy, cracking under the fame. I remember my high school boyfriend, a nice Catholic boy, going off on her and me stammering a half-hearted defense. I remember enjoying her next few albums but wishing she wouldn’t have little audio clips of Germaine Greer or speeches about how the potato famine wasn’t really a famine and about “the one true enemy – the Holy Roman Empire” and how Jesus said “I bring not love I bring a sword.”

I remember being embarrassed for her when I read some music magazine interview where she said that all the problems in the world were caused by child abuse, because I was in college and I knew the answer to any statement like that was always ButIt’sOfCourseIt’sMoreComplicatedThanThat and then you get to leave it there. Oddly, I don’t remember people steamrolling her CDs, Joe Pesci on the next SNL talking about smacking her, or her getting booed off the stage. When people are actually being cancelled, there aren’t articles calling it that. Even before the pope thing, Sinatra threatened to smack her for not wanting the national anthem played before a concert. Once again his followers did the Prince of Peace proud.

Of course it turned out that she was right, that there was a lot that I didn’t know – not just about the church, but about her. At least, I didn’t know until years later that she’d spent time in a Magdalene laundry after being encouraged to shoplift by her troubled and abusive mother. I didn’t know they’d operated that recently. Frank McCourt-style memories of mothers talking about priests don’t get at what she describes in the opening of her response to Pope Benedict’s “apology”:

When I was a child, Ireland was a Catholic theocracy. If a bishop came walking down the street, people would move to make a path for him. If a bishop attended a national sporting event, the team would kneel to kiss his ring. If someone made a mistake, instead of saying, “Nobody’s perfect,” we said, “Ah sure, it could happen to a bishop.”

This made me think about the opening of one of Chris Marker’s films, when he talks about the Old Russia and how the czar’s people would smack someone who didn’t take their hat off and bow, and how whenever you talk about Revolution and the good and bad of it, you have to remember that that’s where it started. And this part made me cry:

We worked in the basement, washing priests’ clothes in sinks with cold water and bars of soap. We studied math and typing. We had limited contact with our families. We earned no wages. One of the nuns, at least, was kind to me and gave me my first guitar.

She doesn’t give the exact dates but it was probably no more than a dozen years from then, from that first guitar from the kind nun, to being discovered and the Lion and the Cobra and the breakthrough with “Nothing Compares” and then to that night on SNL. People think artists take on unpopular views because they want attention, that it’s an affectation, that they’re just not serious people like the rest of us and they should shut up and play. And I think about what it must have been like, being so public so young, without the ideological training that is the passage through prestigious institutions that other types of public figures go through, you get something real and raw and beautiful, and more often than not, people just don’t know what to do with that. We bitch about the superficiality of popular artists, and then when one isn’t, we freak out at their sincerity. She must be crazy, or else she doesn’t really mean it.

But of course, she wasn’t, and she did mean it, and she was one of the realest of real ones. In her response to Benedict’s apology, she also wrote this:

"Irish Catholics are in a dysfunctional relationship with an abusive organization. The pope must take responsibility for the actions of his subordinates. If Catholic priests are abusing children, it is Rome, not Dublin, that must answer for it with a full confession and a criminal investigation. Until it does, all good Catholics — even little old ladies who go to church every Sunday, not just protest singers like me whom the Vatican can easily ignore — should avoid Mass. In Ireland, it is time we separated our God from our religion, and our faith from its alleged leaders."

How stunned my 18 year old self watching her would be to know that now abortion is legal in Ireland and largely illegal in much of the U.S. So many brave people do that sacred work of separating God or faith or spirit or what have you from the powerful who abuse it, and few suffer as much for it as she did.

May her memory be for a revolution.