Sinéad O'Connor Helped Me Find My Voice
This week, when O’Connor would have turned 57, Jocelyn Jane Cox traces the courage she first derived from the revolutionary pop star as a teen, and more recently as an adult.
It’s 1989. I’m a Senior in high school. Sinéad O’Connor’s voice fills every inch of our Chevy Lumina. Her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, has been stuck in the tape deck for about a year.
I sing along, sometimes holding back, other times closing my eyes and letting it rip. Sinéad’s delivery ranges from mellifluous, to screeching and tender, to scathing. I follow the turns of her voice, as if grasping onto the tail of her long flowing coat as she stomps through a foggy London park. I don’t know exactly who Sinéad is so mad at in tracks like “Troy” and “Jerusalem,” but her fury is infectious and therefore I’m furious too.
My mom doesn’t sing. I never hear her sing along to anything. She does bob her head, sometimes tapping her hand on the steering wheel. I am a timid kid. I’m afraid of many things, like: going to parties, alcohol, drugs, sex, speaking up in class, going away to college, and getting anything less than an A.
I’m also afraid of driving. Though I have my driver’s license, I’m too nervous to use it. While other kids are celebrating that new independence, I can only think about the fact that people die in car accidents. I can’t take it lightly. I’m embarrassed to be one of the only Seniors dropped off at school every day by my mom, but not so embarrassed that I want to merge onto a highway by myself. My mother has driving anxiety and it follows that I do, too. Plus, we have only one car and my mother needs to use it during the day.
I follow the turns of her voice, as if grasping onto the tail of her long flowing coat as she stomps through a foggy London park. I don’t know exactly who Sinéad is so mad at in tracks like “Troy” and “Jerusalem,” but her fury is infectious and therefore I’m furious too.
It’s a difficult time for me, and Sinéad, unbeknownst to her, helps me through it. My parents have been divorced for three years. My dad lives halfway across the country. My brother lives 15 minutes away, in a studio apartment near his campus. Though I have a few friends, it’s mostly just me and my mom. We comb through sale racks, read lots of books, and eat dinner together in our apartment while watching TV on the couch. I have an oversized poster of Sinéad’s shaved head on my bedroom wall and a collage of smaller photos of her from magazines taped to the side of my bureau. I own a Sinéad T-shirt. Actually, three. Sinéad is six years older than I am, but seems eons beyond me for lots of reasons, mostly because she has a kid, a concept that’s unfathomable to me.
My mother isn’t a big music fan, but whenever she notices Sinéad is going to be interviewed on TV while I’m at school, she records the segment for me on a VHS tape. Twice, she drives me and a friend to see Sinéad perform live in Philadelphia, 45 minutes away from where we live in Delaware. While we dance around, belting out every word of every song, she waits in the car, reading a magazine or John Grisham, with her book light trained on the pages, then she studies her AAA maps to get her route straight for the drive home.
I know the songs so well that Sinéad’s voice plays in my mind even when there’s no music on. She’s singing about her mother abusing her, black boys getting beat up by the cops, Margaret Thatcher, and the hypocrisy of the Catholic church. I work through these concepts in my head like math problems. I have no interest in becoming a singer or a songwriter or a performer of any sort. But I yearn to be as insightful and outspoken as Sinéad is. I want to be fierce. Of course, I even fantasize about shaving my long hair, but I know I never will.
When we’re not in the car, I play Sinéad on my walkman. I’m absorbing her irreverence while reading every chapter in my Chemistry book three times. It’s not that I like studying incessantly; I’ve convinced myself that becoming a perfect student will somehow make everything okay, or at least better. I know the answers when the teachers ask, but I’m quiet in class. I never raise my hand.
***
My mother and I have a running joke during our morning commute to school. In the fall, she always comments on the changing of the leaves. “Aren’t the leaves beautiful?” she says. “Just look at them! So red and orange and yellow now.” She can’t not say these words whenever we hit a particularly vibrant stretch on Route 896.
“Yes Mother,” I say, sarcastically. I think they’re pretty too, and she knows it. But it’s more fun to pretend to be exasperated.
In the dead of winter, when there isn’t a leaf in sight, I say, breathlessly, “Aren’t the leaves just gorgeous?”
“They’re wonderful!” she says without missing a beat.
At night, when I hear my mother crying in her bed I pretend I don’t. During the day, she “puts mind over matter” and wears “a brave face.” She has often encouraged me to “grin and bear it.” Mostly, she is funny and pleasant. Not that I’ve never seen her angry, but this is not how she moves through the world. She chooses to keep her frustrations and sadness hidden away and I can see this as its own kind of strength.
***
It’s 1990, my last month in high school. I’m watching Sinéad’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” video for probably the hundredth time. My parents have now been divorced for four years, but I still feel as shocked as the day my father told my brother and me that they’d “fallen out of love.”
It’s more than this though: the people who made me have become enemies. Whatever my mother’s exact role was in their split, I do not know, but she obviously hasn’t gotten over it, either.
It’s just Sinéad’s head on the screen with her black turtleneck, mournful eyes, and that single tear. It’s the ultimate break-up ballad. I know these are Prince’s words, but I believe her myriad emotions: she’s sad, she’s livid, she’s hurt, she’s lamenting lost love.
It’s 1990, my last month in high school. I’m watching Sinéad’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” video for probably the hundredth time. My parents have now been divorced for four years, but I still feel as shocked as the day my father told my brother and me that they’d “fallen out of love.”…It’s more than this though: the people who made me have become enemies.
When I sing along, I’m not imagining a crush or an ex. I haven’t yet been spurned. And I don’t imagine my mother singing to my father or vice versa. I’m singing to them both. Nothing compares to how things were when we were all together and I thought (mistakenly) everything was fine. Ultimately, their being apart is very good for them. I can’t bring myself to accept it, though, and I’m certain I never will.
I want to rail against everything. Instead: I wear all black and red lipstick and a single curl over my left eye. I’m afraid to be as bold as Sinéad. I am still scared to drive and terrified to get a B. Mostly, I fear that anything I think I can count on could suddenly change. I rage-study in my room, silently controlling what I can control. I am living vicariously. I am singing along.
***
It’s 1992. I’m a sophomore in college. Sinéad is ripping a photo of the Pope in half on Saturday Night Live. People are making fun of her and even protesting. Frank Sinatra has an opinion. People are booing her at a Bob Dylan tribute.
I don’t see the SNL moment live because I’m stomping through Philadelphia in the middle of the night in my Doc Martens fueled by a drink called Skylab, served by the pitcher-full at Smoke’s, a dive bar near my college campus. I catch some snippets of this moment on TV then watch the whole performance with admiration on the VCR when I go home for Thanksgiving. My mom has of course recorded it.
***
It’s 2005. I’m driving through the streets of New York City toward my 5th-floor walk-up. I’m swerving around cabs and laying on the horn when they cut me off. I’m listening to reggae and WBGO jazz and sometimes NPR, which I started listening to after 9/11. My mom and I are talking about our respective workdays on our cell phones, 300 miles away from each other.
***
It’s 2017. I’m yelling as loudly as I can from the top of the cement staircase of our local post office. A hundred people are chanting along with me. I have my own kid at home now. I’m furious. In the footage I watch later, I see the bulging veins in my neck and my temples. I’m holding a bullhorn, not a microphone, but I’m reminded of my obsession, my exemplar of courage, Sinéad.
***
It’s 2022. I’m watching “Nothing Compares,” a documentary about Sinéad on Showtime. She and I are both thirty years older. I haven’t listened to her music in a while, maybe because I over-listened as a kid, with that tape stuck in the car, and maybe because her voice is too reminiscent of that particular epoch, my specific timidity combined with pain. She and I have lived some life since then, though of course different versions.
It’s crystal clear to me as I sit in my living room, mesmerized in my pajamas, that she helped me find my own voice, albeit in increments, over the course of decades. I am someone who can speak up now. I can draw a straight line directly back, not to my mother, but to Sinéad, all my hours of listening and watching.
I clench my jaw. I shouldn’t be astonished by the grit I see on the screen, but I am. Kathryn Ferguson’s film shares footage of Sinéad speaking out against specific injustices in Ireland, the United States, England, and Rome. It delineates how she has been misunderstood and treated savagely by the media and numerous institutions and industries, run mostly by men. It’s clear she is every bit the badass I always thought she was. For a certain swath of women in my generation, Sinéad was fascinating. She embodied a version of womanhood I personally hadn’t seen yet: she was demure and vicious, feminine and butch, whispering and yelling. I found these contradictions thrilling.
It’s crystal clear to me as I sit in my living room, mesmerized in my pajamas, that she helped me find my own voice, albeit in increments, over the course of decades. I am someone who can speak up now. I can draw a straight line directly back, not to my mother, but to Sinéad, all my hours of listening and watching. I was gradually emboldened.
After the credits roll, I put on The Lion and Cobra and crank it. I find one of the T-shirts I still have in my closet. I think of my mother, now gone, and how she encouraged my Sinéad fixation even though this Irish singer’s way of expressing herself was so antithetical to her own. I’m almost certain she did so because she saw Sinéad’s music as an outlet for my frustration, an outlet she knew she couldn’t or wouldn’t provide. Maybe she was living vicariously, too.
I wonder if my mother ever turned up the volume on that album after she dropped me off at school. I imagine her driving back home by herself through that canopy of colorful leaves. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I imagine her letting her own fury rip as well.
Sinéad O’Connor, who died July 26th of this year, would have been 57 this Friday, December 8th.
 | A guest post by
|
I love the way this tribute to Sinead becomes, at the same time, a tribute to the writer’s mother. It flies on wings of love.
She's a great example of --maybe everyone will constantly shit all over you, and tell you everything you do and say and ARE is wrong. You could even be reviled by many 'cool' people, whom everyone admires. You could be universally reviled and even be the butt of jokes.
And you could still be a magnitude more honest and talented and more correct in your assessment of situations than those people.
We don't usually get vindicated in any way. But it doesn't matter.