The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Sinead O'Connor's telltale voice

September 1997

I think it must be the bottomless self-consciousness of so much current music that drew me to Sinead O'Connor's un-promising Gospel Oak (Chrysalis/EMI), which fea-tures a ✡ on the front and a dedication "to the people of Israel, Rwanda, and Northern Ireland" on the back. It may be that O'Connor had been consumed by self consciousness even before she tore up a pic­ture of the pope on Saturday Night Live, but she has a voice, and sometimes her voice tells its own tale. It isn't necessarily the tale she sets out to tell. There's often a difference between what an artist intends to say when she sits down to write a song and what comes out of her mouth when she sings it. Gospel Oak opens with O'Connor promising to mother a friend or a lover, if not the whole world, and moves on to her claiming to be the sun, the moon, and the earth. Her voice can make you hear all of that; it can also let you forget it and drift where the voice goes.

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With so much of the music that's around right now—or maybe anytime—there's no difference at all between what a performer intends and what he or she produces. The sameness, the literalness, is killing. My best example is that horribly embar­rassing imitation-late-Beatles commercial for Sprite that's been on the radio lately. Whoever the group is (could be a bunch of studio by-the-hour guys, could be Guided by Voices) has the rising and falling John Lennon vocal down so perfectly you can almost be fooled into thinking you're hearing an Abbey Road outtake from the Beatles' Anthology 3. That the group owns up at the end—"This song is just a jingle/You should have known it from the first"—suggests that whoever put this thing together thinks they can shame you into buying their product. And maybe they can. The strategy here isn't so different from the one on Size 14's de­but album, the offering of a band claiming to trade in "guilty pleasures" and "geekdom in all its splendor." Yeah, right. Their best-known tune, "Claire Danes Poster," was, lead singer Linus testifies via press release, actually inspired by a Claire Danes poster on his bedroom wall: "In­stead of trying to be cool, I might as well admit to being a geek." Brave of him, except the fact that Linus has it all figured out is all you can hear in the performance: his sneer on "Claire Danes" is so in­sistent, it's obvious his only purpose in writing or singing the song is to prove he's much cooler than the poor jerk-off it's supposedly about.

These songs begin as parodies, where the object (Beatles tune, Claire Danes poster) is presumed to hold no mysteries; others turn into parodies despite themselves, and turn the singers into objects, though the singers probably just think they're being really sincere. Aside from a charming Wild Honey-period Beach Boys homage on "Aver­age Joe," Ron Sexsmith's oh-so-modestly titled Other Songs could be a singer/songwriter send-up by the old National Lampoon Radio Hour gang. Joan of Arc's A Portable Model Of has some en­couraging song titles: Who knows what "Post Coitus Rock" and "Count to a Thousand" should sound like? But after two or three examples of four young men preening over their intelligence, you don't want to know. The Valentine Six's self-titled disc comes on in a wonderful jumble of indeci­pherable cultural references—the sax-driven com­bo knows how to ride smoky vocals in and out of any film noir of the past forty years. Inside the band's carefully constructed not-jazz rhythms you can glimpse Warren Beatty in Mickey One, or Gabriel Byrne and John Turturro in Miller's Cross­ing. The vulgarity of the music is liberating at first. But soon enough the perfection of the construct—the essential refusal of vulgarity—erases it. After three or four plays the record uses itself up.

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When Sinead O'Connor comes out of her first number like a wood spirit, or Joan Baez, to promise that she'll mother you, that she'll do for you what your own mother didn't do, the intent may be pi­ous, but the result is so sexual it can feel like a crime. That's the direction the voice goes in, promising to do what your own mother really didn't do, and wouldn't admit to doing if she did. The voice circles until soon enough the melody is a pair of arms and they're rocking you. What? Bad thoughts from this simpering little song-poem? She can't help it, perhaps: can't help sex­ualizing beneficence, or turning the self-sacrifice of her world-madonna into an admission of loneliness. "Oh my love, your love for Ireland will not be in vain"—it hurts to repeat something so sententious, but it doesn't hurt to listen to it. The music has room for floating signifiers, but not messages.

The record ends with a live performance of the traditional "He Moved Through the Fair"—a per­formance that feels as if O'Connor had been singing the song for a hundred years without get­ting to the bottom of it—and then with what seems to be a field recording of an Irish country chant, a man jigging to his own shout of "Ah, dee dah, la dee dah dee dah dee dah. . ." Every note O'Connor floats through "He Moved Through the Fair" is pristine, yet also distorted by the ex­tremes of yearning and wanting in her voice. That sound, contrasted with the raggedy whoop of the unnamed Irishman, makes a question none of the other music that's come up this month will lead you to ask: How did we get there from here?

This is a question no artist's self-consciousness can answer; self-consciousness can only disguise it. It's a question no singer can answer for a lis­tener; as a listener, you have to answer it for yourself.

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Originally published in Interview Magazine, September 1997