Sinead O’Connor doesn’t immediately spring to mind when you say “chicks with guitars.” She doesn’t live in the American Northwest or sing duets with Emmylou Harris, and—if memory serves me—never performed at Lilith Fair. She also tore up a picture of the Pope on TV, something that doesn’t appear in the “chicks with guitars” etiquette handbook.
Yet, the girl rocks on a six string, writes wickedly smart lyrics, and has, rather famously, a voice you could pick out from an Irish chorus line. She’s also irregularly more fascinating than your average singer-songwriter: a crippling depressive who found the strength to assault the Catholic church, a woman who became ordained as a Priest, an Irish traditionalist who found redemption through reggae. O’Connor’s life and work is oddly feminist and epic, as if Jane Austen smoked a doobie and penned The Odyssey. And on the bookshelf of life, her story would make the raging nothingness of Kurt Cobain his generation’s Jabberwocky—all noise, no reason, and plain silly.
I have loved much of O’Connor’s work and admired much of her life, but no song gets me yelling and screaming like “No Man’s Woman,” her polemic about love, gender, and the solidity of faith. I had planned on linking to an MP3, but finding none, discovered the video on YouTube. How odd it is: out of sync, melodramatic, a bit clumsy at times. But also occasionally stunning, if not for O’Connor herself then the image of her as bridesmaid, tattered and lumbering through Dublin, dying and then reborn through music.
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