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Even the first time I interviewed her, in a hotel room in New York the day before her appearance on Saturday Night Live last September, I was aware of Sinéad’s unusual willingness to share her self-image. That is, whatever her self-image may be at any particular moment, since it seems to shift and shimmy with extraordinary flexibility, according to her mood. It’s more than the still-evolving spectrum of identities of a twenty-four-year-old in unusually fluid circumstances; it’s also the continual, psychic locomotion of the performer seeking authentic expression.
When she’s on, in a conversation or onstage, Sinéad’s openness is eerie. It took me a while, actually, to gather myself for a visual scan of her notorious head; her eyes are so huge, blue, and mesmerizing that even when they were obscured by blue-tinted glasses, it was difficult to look away. Her physical presence, though she’s small, is intense. Her hands sometimes abruptly fly about her body. Sinéad speaks very, very softly, and she slips easily into a kind of monotonous incantation. I got semi-hypnotized. It’s not exactly a trance state; it’s more like lucid dreaming, like her performances, which are gripping without the necessity of suspending disbelief. You never forget that it’s Sinéad O’Connor singing, howling, contorting her face and her body, dancing, touching herself. Not for a second do you forget the audience, the proscenium, the heat, the lights, and the troubling hyperreality of the pain, anger, and yearning the singer expresses.
But all of this rage and pain, Sturm und Drang, all of this tempestuousness is tempered by a sweetness that is not conveyed by her public statements or her performances. In print she can come off as brutal and defiant. In performance, her intensity is overwhelming. In person, just before and after she does her musical numbers, you see Sinéad number three: smiling like a kid, a little shy, a little gauche. On the Saturday Night Live show, the cameraman catches the moment: After her performance of one of her most scathing compositions, “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” Sinéad stands stock-still while she is applauded, holding her guitar a little awkwardly, looking really pleased that the audience likes her. The bashful body language, combined with the black lace blouse over aBlack Girl Yoga Let That Shit Go Poster black bra, is irresistibly charming. In the dressing room, several of her friends, blond, rowdy, and punk-gorgeous in waistcoats, leggings, diaphanous skirts, jackboots, and leather jackets, have been watching intently on the monitor and cheering her on. At the end of the song, they all smile when she does.
“Look at that face!” says her best pal, Ciara. “And they say she’s aggressive!”
Sinéad retreats, smiling but timid, backward toward the drummer’s stand, like someone at a party who thinks maybe no one will ask her to dance. The audience keeps applauding.Black Girl Yoga Let That Shit Go Poster
When she gets back to the dressing room, two of her pals are stationed at either side of the door with electronic ray guns. “You were really kickin’, girl!” “Brilliant!” They whoop and cheer. Sinéad submits to being zapped. “How was I?” she asks, wide-eyed and superexcited. “Really? Really? It went by so fast!”
She is friendly but doesn’t pretend that you are her friend. Yet she sometimes goes off on these jags of talk, and you know that despite how much she needs to protect herself, she is truly speaking her mind.
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O’Connor is sneered at by some of rock’s old guard, who don’t understand her paramusical appeal. But her transgression of current stylistic boundaries is precisely what has galvanized her audience and turned on the often-jaded rock press. Articles and reviews of O’Connor’s work rarely compare her with other rock musicians. Occasionally, John Lennon is mentioned, and now and then Prince, Jimi Hendrix, Tracy Chapman. But these convey emotional immediacy or sociopolitical context rather than musical tradition.
Sinéad acknowledges an artistic debt to an almost awesomely odd pair: Bob Dylan and Barbra Streisand. What these two peculiar Jewish-American performers would have to offer the little rebel from Dublin is that kind of magical, cultural synthesis that is better left unanalyzed. Suffice it to say that Dylan was the hero of her youth: “I would have slashed my body to shreds if he had asked me to, you know what I mean? The songs he sang applied to me. I knew what he was talking about. So he was a big inspiration, in that he wrote really personal songs, really exposed songs. I wasn’t ever really into the political stuff. I was into the love songs that he wrote, and the religious songs that he wrote.” Her favorite was “I Want You.”
And it was a Barbra Streisand tune she sang, at age fourteen, at her guitar teacher’s wedding. The guitar teacher’s cousin, a member of In Tua Nua, must have enjoyed the performance, for he promptly asked her to attend the recording session that inaugurated her career, but Sinéad recalls it with embarrassment. “I had to sing ‘Evergreen,’ which was great because I became Barbra Streisand for the afternoon. It was a big white wedding and I remember the dress I had — it was purple and had purple and black stripes and had this big collar-like thing, this big turtleneck and I thought I looked great. And I had these boots, you know — and I remember being really embarrassed because my legs are really horrible and they were sticking out.”
Her unusual stylistic tics, even the strange stylized vaulting from one register to another that critics often describe with the word banshee — “flinging my voice about,” as she calls it — are too diverse to trace. It was her older brother’s guitar playing that set her on a musical path, combined with the nearly unrelieved misery of the Rehabilitation Center for Girls with Behavioral Problems. But, as one of her Irish friends points out, many people go through that, and they don’t have it. Undoubtedly, Sinéad’s got it, whatever it is, and audiences respond with an intensity unseen in a number of years. Sinéad O’Connor is an original, for sure, and comparisons are therefore more fun than necessary, but, frankly, the only artist to share any of O’Connor’s musical attributes is the infinitely disturbing lyric soprano Maria Callas, who was, as Sinéad is, willing — or perhaps compelled — to vocalize an almost unbearable vulnerability. This quality also characterizes her lyrics, which are pure emotional autobiography, the basis of Sinéad’s approach to songwriting. “Usually I’m going through something in my life, something personal, and I just write down whatever comes into my head about it. That’s how I communicate with myself. That’s how I explain things to myself when I’m freaking out.”
O’Connor, 1992
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