Sinéad O’Connor, Oneworld 2003

ONE OF THE MOST captivating mouth-that-roared rock stars of the late 1980s/early ’90s, 35-year-old singer/songwriter Sinéad O’Connor leaves as many contradictions trailing in her wake as ever.

Though once admonished for requesting ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ not be played before a performance in New Jersey, O’Connor now views with sympathy the American response to 9/11. Like a sage, she praised hiphop culture as a prophetic voice-of-the-voiceless (performing at the ’88 Grammy Awards with the Public Enemy symbol shaved into her close-cropped hair) only to later pronounce hiphop’s death. And (most infamously) she protested organized religion in 1992 on Saturday Night Live by tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II on air, but has since become an ordained priest for the Latin Tridentine Church, an offshoot of the Roman Catholic Church.

O’Connor has long since become more of a record industry cautionary tale than artistic voice — commercial success was an early career casualty to her blunt, Sagittarian outspokenness. The Lion and the Cobra — the singer’s acclaimed 1987 riot grrrl debut released when she was 20 — established O’Connor as a deft musical alchemist, all lapsed-Catholic confession and heart-on-sleeve emotion. With I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, the cathartic 1990 followup destined to become her commercial pinnacle, O’Connor seemed perched on a pedestal preaching truth through the most contentious ways imaginable. And though records like Universal Mother, Gospel Oak and Faith and Courage easily measured up to her earlier output creatively, her near blacklisting by “powers that be” insured her failure to reach the masses.

In a mid Manhattan hotel penthouse, Sinéad O’Connor breaks bread with Oneworld to untangle her contentious viewpoints on nationality (Sean-Nos Nua, her seventh studio album, is a collection of traditional Irish folksongs), spirituality, hiphop and record-industry tricknology.

*

With its pronounced materialism and lack of reverence for its foundation, some are beginning to pronounce the death of hiphop culture. This is something you declared ten years ago, saying: “I think hiphop’s age is over because it’s done everything it can do.” What do you think caused the death of hiphop?

What I think happened is, the industry took over the rap movement in some way by promoting people like Vanilla Ice. They saw that the hiphop movement was quite revolutionary in some ways, and that it educated people. KRS-One was talking about “edutainment.” So I think “they” — in the virtual quotes, whoever “they” are — found that threatening and then pushed forward people like Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer to dilute the message. I think that’s kind of what’s happened, pretty much.

And I don’t know really — apart from Dr. Dre, whom I love, and I love Eminem as well — but I don’t see anybody in the last six or seven years who’s really tackling edutainment or the stuff that it was about. That doesn’t mean they’re not there, because I live in Ireland. [laugh]

Have you heard the music of dead prez, Mos Def, Common…?

No. I’ve heard my son talking about them, although I haven’t heard their stuff. I love OutKast. I love Dre.

You once seemed to heavily identify with hiphop. You collaborated with MC Lyte on a remix for ‘I Want Your Hands on Me’ back in ’88, and Wyclef Jean produced ‘Dancing Lessons’ on your last album, Faith and Courage. You even rhymed about the Irish potato famine on Universal Mother‘s ‘Famine’.

I identified with hiphop quite a lot because — say if you take [rebel] bands like N.W.A — I felt that myself and them were talking about the same things, but just coming at it from different avenues. You could take N.W.A as an example because I figure that album Straight Outta Compton is like the best album ever made, hiphop wise. You could kinda put it in a time capsule and say, “this was hiphop.” So I identified quite strongly with the whole hiphop movement because of that, because of its directness.

I think Ice Cube was only about 17 when they started out and it was amazing, the poetry he was writing and the stuff he was talking about. So it seems we were coming at the same things from different avenues. They were talking a lot about their childhoods and their experiences as children of America. So that’s why I kind of identified with them.

These are people with no voice before that, and you had all these young people just joyous that somebody was voicing their stuff. So I guess in a way that’s why I identified with it, because I was trying to do the same thing but coming from Ireland and talking about the experiences of young people in Ireland, growing up in Ireland.

In astrology, the year 2001 symbolized the changing of ages. With the new Aquarian age comes a rise in logic, truth, creativity and femininity. Spirituality is predicted to trump religion, and you’ve championed such a shift yourself. Can you reconcile your past critique of religion with being ordained as Mother Bernadette Mary by the Latin Tridentine Church three years ago?

I don’t think it’s right to talk about the priesthood in the context of my career as a singer. I didn’t do it to stick two fingers up at anyone, and it would appear that way if I used it in [interviews].

As far as spirituality is concerned, that’s fine. What you’re talking about I think is true, about the Aquarian age and all that kind of stuff, and people almost rejecting religion. The way I see it is that God needed a certain amount of rescuing from religion and that’s what’s happening, if you like. The fact that they’re striking religion doesn’t mean that they’re striking God. What “God” — in inverted commas — actually is, is all of us. So I guess that’s where my spirituality comes from. I’m lucky enough to have grown up in Ireland, which was basically a dictatorship run by the church. And I wanted to grow up and only take in the good things by not taking in the negative things. But I think a lot of religion has made God a bad word almost, or people don’t think it’s cool or whatever to believe in God.

Many things are done in God’s name.

Exactly. This idea of God that’s being presented to a lot of people, it either makes them not believe in God at all or makes them actually not believe in communication [with God] at all, ‘cause they think it’s over there, when actually it’s somewhere else. So I guess I kinda see it as in a way trying to rescue God from religion, and rescue one’s soul as well from all this bullshit.

Let’s discuss Sean-Nos Nua, your new album of traditional Irish tunes with modern production. You’ve done this before: Am I Not Your Girl? was all composed of covers of American tunes like ‘Black Coffee’. Why this, and why now?

I guess the songs themselves. I knew a lot of the songs since I was a kid, the Irish language ones and stuff — ‘Molly Malone’ I’ve known since I was a kid. And then I learned some of them when I was in my twenties, traveling around the world working. But growing up in Ireland, traditional Irish music was a huge part of life and why I wanted to be a singer. And so I just fell in love with the songs.

I’ve been trying to make the record for about 12 years but when I was with mainstream labels, they never really got the idea of the record because they had a lot of prejudice about it in a way; people have made these really gacky Irish records. People thought it was gonna be ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ and all that. So there’s a lot of prejudice, even within Ireland, toward this kind of music. People have certain ideas about it. And even what you call “true heads” in Ireland, who are strictly strict about the tradition, they wouldn’t dare mix up a tune with a Jamaican sound. That would just be criminal. So they make it very uncool for younger people to get into the music, and I just think there’s a caliber of songwriting that had been in Ireland as exampled by these songs, which maybe some of the younger people could [be inspired by]. There’s a caliber of songs that we’re capable of that’s soul music, that’s true soul.

And so what I like about a lot of songs on the record is there’s a lot of subtext; it’s not always what the words are about. It’s about the songs. The subtext in a lot of these songs is very much about the enduringness of the soul, getting into a relationship with your soul. Very powerful songs.

So you’d never sign with a mainstream label like EMI or Atlantic Records again?

I don’t think I ever would go back to that. Not just financially, but because one’s creative output is dictated by the record company. You can’t do necessarily the kind of records that you really want to do if you’re signed to a major label. For example, this record, like I wouldn’t have been able to do it because they would have a prejudice about it. So for creative reasons, I don’t think I would get back into it.

But also, I think artists have been fucked, obviously, over the years. I do think they will collapse at some point completely. People will phase them out, and there won’t really be a need for them. Every dog has its day.

In songs like ‘Fire on Babylon’ and ‘Kyrié Eléison’, you’ve advocated the fall of a certain system, and you’ve been highly critical of politics in the past, saying: “Politics is there to take you away from truth. People should just not vote, they should stop going to work, they should screech this whole fucking sham to a halt.” Given that, what is your opinion on America and the Middle East of late?

Well, obviously I think it’s very sad. I come from a country [that] has been at war for most of my life until about ten years ago. I certainly remember as a kid one of the things that really bored in my personality is watching certain things on the news. It’s kind of disillusioning for little kids when you grow up listening to this stuff. That’s what I think people don’t really pay much attention to as well — grownups running around reacting like kids. But actually all the little kids of the world are gonna have to deal with this stuff, when they’re afraid there’s war and afraid this, that and the other’s gonna happen.

Obviously, it’s falling. What happened can’t really be justified at all, but I guess I can understand why people get to feel that that’s their only choice and if there is violence — people tend to get angry when they’re not heard and they’re getting really badly fucked over. Which doesn’t excuse what’s happened, but I guess if you want to stop these things happening, you have to get some understanding of what led to it so as to prevent it happening again, you know?

As an Irish person, I’ve been sitting around talking with my friends over the last while since September 11 and talking about the retaliation thing: whether or not you should retaliate. And I guess it’s quite human to retaliate. If someone hurt my son, I guess my human reaction at first would be to retaliate, but ultimately violence just begets violence.

But there’s a whole other thing that came up for us when we were talking. As Irish people, we’ve watched America teach us peace. So it’s slightly disillusioning even for us, and it’s worrying for us such as [if] America sets the example of not using peace and goes to war, then will our country fall apart too? They beg us to stay humble and peace[ful] and they’re not doing it themselves.

And obviously the healer has to have been healed and the teacher has to have learned a lesson it’s teaching — so if anyone is going to go around saying they can help our country, they have to have helped themselves first. I guess America has been quite a force for peace outside of America, but within itself, it’s having a crisis of peace when children are shooting each other. It’s weird.

After this high school shooting, [former president Bill Clinton] says, “We should teach our children to use words and not weapons.”

But on the other hand…

But then, what’s on CNN for the whole week and what are all the kids hearing on the news? It’s really, really dangerous.

They say we are made in God’s image, and the thing is, that must mean that God isn’t perfect. And if you say that we’re a part of God, etc., then we’re just evolving. And how do kids learn to walk? By falling over and making mistakes. So I’m not really into being judgmental on anybody for any of this stuff, and I wouldn’t be in a position to criticize. I’ve got a temper as well. I guess I’d like to see America be able to achieve peace within itself first and the effects that would have around the world. It’s a bit hypocritical trying to fix Israel and trying to fix Arabs if your own kids are shooting each other.

Return to Writing