Sleeping with a clear conscience: Sinéad O’Connor — RIP

(Note: I will not discuss her private life, nor the TV appearances in which she offended Reagan-Bush’s America, too often emphasized over her considerable artistry)

A whisper floats over a relentless electric rhythm guitar. That whisper tastes like cigarettes, her lover’s lips like wine. She whispers as if afraid of the rush of thoughts; we’re not sure if she’s addressing the lover or herself.

You’re not supposed to be here at all, it’s all been a gorgeous mistake.

How often she must have repeated this line and other mordant variants in the ensuing years.

Most eulogists will, rightly, turn to “Nothing Compares 2 U” as an example of the late Sinead O’Connor’s art. I don’t begrudge them. How many times can one say that Prince never got his own song right? Few songs released in my lifetime literally, as the kids say, stopped people in their tracks; my grandmother, whose last purchased 45 rpm purchase was Julio ‘n’ Willie’s “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” caught me watching the video on Friday Night Videos and remarked in Spanish, what a powerful voice.

But I want to write about “Jump in the River,” the track I enthused about above found on 1990’s American breakthrough I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got: the ur-text of how O’Connor could sing, write, produce, and play with the full engagement of her will. Taking over lead guitar duties from former Ant Marco Pirroni, she lays down a two/three chord strummed solo that wrenches 1977 into 1990, then lets the feedback peal as if it were a second Sinead at the mike. An organ line effloresces, wilts. But she leavens the acerbity with the sweetness of the chorus, perhaps too sweet for the line, “If you said jump in the river I would/Because it would probably be a good idea.”

Always O’Connor was aware of the thin line between compassion and self-destruction. To love as fiercely as she did represented an un-mooring; to hate was a species of disappointment, and, in the case of the Catholic Church as defendant, betrayal. The characters in her songs abase themselves: in the early triumph “Troy” she let her lover know, in a performance of controlled vocal savagery, that slaying a dragon for his sake was not a task she happily accepted. The too-little-known “I Am Enough For Myself,” she presented as a lullaby and a sticky note. She showed her capacity for love in her covers: end to end they represent not only display the capaciousness of her tastes but her ability to climb into them and pilot them. She sang Elton John and Burning Spear, Kurt Cobain and Cole Porter, each performance an astonishment of clarity. Her version of The B-52s “Ain’t It A Shame,” about a woman devastated by the boyfriend who prefers TV, might’ve been sung by The Raincoats in 1980 with less gloss. Where Cindy Wilson sounds wistful O’Connor treats the script as if it were “Just Like U Said It Would B” on the long ago and far away The Lion and the Cobra.

And she collaborated with ease: with Peter Gabriel, erstwhile lover, on harmony for “Blood of Eden”; on Bono and Gavin Friday’s “You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart,” on which she seems to be hurling gob at U2 for their paternalism and condescension; and clomping on the electronic soundscape of Massive Attack’s prophetic “A Prayer for England,” an imprecation rasped in the ear of every prime minister.

Broken as a force in pop music, even on college rock radio, O’Connor retreated into the shadows where her spirit nibbled on the fag-ends of curiosity, resentment, and malice. Universal Mother (1994) had collaborations with Bomb the Bass, a reminder that in 1988 she remixed “I Want Ur Hands On Me” to give MC Lyte some space: unusual for a teen unless you thought hip-hop an aberrant force, in which case she recognized a fellow traveler. Over David Stewart’s typically generic production “Daddy I’m Fine” offers a bildungsroman in song form: she lets her dad know — no pleading! — that she’s gonna look fine in leather boots and slicked back hair. I’m sure he giggled at hearing she wanted “to fuck every man in sight.” (I reviewed this album for my college paper, my last one filed, and I sneaked in the German word Obergruppenführe).

“My secret love is Sinead O’Connor,” Ann Powers wrote in 2007. “It’s an open secret; when asked about my favorite artists, I might mention her, but I won’t elaborate or offer a rationale.” So it is with me. There isn’t a month when I don’t play The Lion and the Cobra, an astonishing debut in which she fought (as a teen!) to produce her own album; or “The Emperor’s New Clothes” from I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, with its easeful groove and its beautiful fade-out, along with the desolate “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” the peak of its album’s second half, a rare #1 album whose silences deepen the more harrowing it gets. She took risks for which she was willing, unlike Madonna, to accept the consequences. I included 2012’s How About I Be Me (and You Be You)? in my top twenty that year.

Loath as I am to sentimentalize death and the symbolism it erects, often, as a Potemkin village, Sinead O’Connor regarded her art as a resistance against orthodoxies for which she was willing — she did — to pay a price. To separate what she did with John Paul II’s photo from her songs is to approach this art with a casualness she would’ve regarded as casuistry. “She is not daunted by the thought of walking through the desert – as long as she keeps near the sea,” Marcello Carlin observed in 2015, when she remained a laughing stock. Bad faith doth make cowards of us all.

P.S. Jon Caramanica interviewed me for The New York Times’s Popcast about O’Connor’s legacy.