Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      50 Rappers, 50 Stories: Hear the Remix

      by

      Ten bonus songs from our hip-hop anniversary project.Azealia Banks in 2012, the year her “212” became a breakout.Erin Baiano for The New York TimesDear listeners,Last week, the Times published a sprawling interactive package called 50 Rappers, 50 Stories, celebrating the upcoming 50th anniversary of hip-hop.* The day it ran, I set aside about 10 minutes to start browsing during lunch; the next thing I knew, more than an hour and a half had passed. It’s one of those kinds of projects.My colleagues spoke with — you guessed it — 50 different rappers about their careers and relationships with hip-hop, and the result is a mosaic of varied voices and narratives that run parallel and intersect in unexpected ways (like the Cash Money poet Lil Wayne and the New York provocateur Azealia Banks both identifying as theater kids). LL Cool J talks about meeting Paul Simon for the first time (“I’m gonna be honest with you, I didn’t even know who Paul Simon was, bro”); 50 Cent takes style inspiration from Juvenile (“Get me some baby oil!”); Cardi B cites the precise moment she traded in Barney the Dinosaur for Missy Elliott. Trust me, it’s all a delight.My fellow pop music critic Jon Caramanica and culture reporter Joe Coscarelli helmed the editorial end of this ambitious project and did many of the interviews themselves. They also created a comprehensive, roughly chronological 50-track playlist featuring all the artists they chatted with, and I can’t recommend that enough.But I thought it would be fun to have them put together a separate one for The Amplifier, featuring some deep cuts and personal favorites. The result is a playlist encompassing a variety of eras and regions, featuring plenty of marquee names (Cam’ron, Outkast) alongside entries from some of the more outré corners of hip-hop (Lil B, Trippie Redd). Consider this the remix.In his introductory essay for the project, Caramanica writes that hip-hop “is far too vast to be contained under one tent, or limited to one narrative. The genre is gargantuan, nonlinear and unruly.”“So,” he continues, “when trying to catalog hip-hop in full, it’s only reasonable to lean into the cacophony.” Which is how I’d instruct you to listen to this playlist.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Goodie Mob featuring Outkast: “Black Ice (Sky High)” (1998)Later alluded to in Kanye West’s “Touch the Sky,” this moody single about life’s hidden slippery spots from the second Goodie Mob album, “Still Standing,” is a showcase for Big Gipp’s hook writing and worn wisdom, with two acrobatic verses from his Dungeon Family kin — Big Boi and Andre 3000 of Outkast — that previewed the assured flamboyance of their third album, “Aquemini.” (Listen on YouTube) JOE COSCARELLI2. E-40: “Practice Lookin’ Hard” (1993)E-40 has been twisting words for well over three decades, with a dizzying approach to rhyme construction that plays with pitch and pace as much as language. This is a fairly linear storytelling rap, but his approach is frisky and surprising, with lyrics that creep up on you quickly or move at a deliberately slow pace. Also, this is likely the only hip-hop song in history to mention the card game whist. (Listen on YouTube) JON CARAMANICA3. dead prez: “Tallahassee Days” (2003)Recalling the fading of his adolescence in dead-end Florida, stic of the revolutionary-minded duo dead prez paints his artistic and outlaw provenance as one and the same — “kill or be killed” desperation, because “a job is a joke” — on this quick track from “Turn Off the Radio: The Mixtape, Vol. 2: Get Free or Die Tryin’.” “Whoever said life is beautiful lied,” he raps. (Listen on YouTube) COSCARELLI4. Cam’ron featuring UGK, Juelz Santana, Ludacris and Trina: “What Means the World to You (Remix)” (2000)This remix of a classic Cam’ron song has it all: one of the jauntiest beats in hip-hop history, Cam’ron’s dazzling interior rhyme schemes and naughty appearances from two other rappers in this package, Bun B and Trina. (Listen on YouTube) CARAMANICA5. Lil B and Soulja Boy Tell ’Em: “Cooking Dance” (2010)Pairing two early YouTube savants at the height of their anything-goes, post-CD but pre-streaming powers, this 2010 track from the “Pretty Boy Millionaires” mixtape immortalized the Based God’s signature kitchen movements via his free-associative Dada flow, in which Lil B is both “feeling like Fabio” and ad-libbing at will: “Cook! Steak! Chef! Pots! Chef! Pots! Chef! Cook!” (Listen on YouTube) COSCARELLI6. Paul Wall & Chamillionaire: “N Luv Wit My Money” (2002)One of the standout tracks from “Get Ya Mind Correct,” the 2002 collaborative album between the Houston rappers Paul Wall and Chamillionaire, “N Luv Wit My Money” is a lightly comic, utterly serious ode to flashy wealth. Wall was still rapping aggressively here, before he fully found his slow flow: “I love my car like it was my girlfriend: I like to caress the grain/Fondled the wheel and I got aroused/I swung in the ditch and I wrecked the frame.” (Listen on YouTube) CARAMANICA7. Azealia Banks: “Anna Wintour” (2018)As Banks told me, she is often derided for failing to deliver on her early hip-hop promise by pivoting to house music, “‘a.k.a white people music.’ I’m like, honey, no. House music is Black music. Everything I do is in the spirit of hip-hop.” On this 2018 one-off single, a vogue track named for the Vogue editor, Banks threads the two sounds seamlessly. (Listen on YouTube) COSCARELLI8. Trippie Redd featuring 6ix9ine: “Poles1469” (2017)Trippie Redd and 6ix9ine have been at odds for years now, but here’s an early collaboration from simpler times full of the elegiac melodies that have made Trippie Redd the stalwart veteran of the SoundCloud rap movement. This is a sweet, dreamy song about the stuff of nightmares, playful in a way that suggests no consequences lurk around the corner. (Listen on YouTube) CARAMANICA9. Roc Marciano: “Wheat 40’s” (2020)A cascade of sly punchlines, wordplay and unlikely juxtaposition (“I need therapy and a speedboat”), this song from the 2020 album “Mt. Marci” demonstrates Marciano’s economy of language and easy evocation, all while maintaining his character’s Mafioso frigidity: “Ma, I’m just a hooligan/I make this kind of rap cool again/She say I’m way cooler than Max Julian/You ain’t gotta ask who he is, we the loopiest/My character in the movie script is truly at the nucleus.” (Listen on YouTube) COSCARELLI10. Ice Spice: “No Clarity” (2021)It’s been less than two years since the Bronx rapper Ice Spice released this lite-drill revision of Zedd’s EDM anthem “Clarity.” All the elements for success were already there — the patient rapping, the raw emotional content, the as-if kiss-offs. Here, a tragedy in three acts: “You woulda thought that I missed you/But you was a thot, it’s a issue/Your bro was the one that I went to.” (Listen on YouTube) CARAMANICAWhat the world means to me,Lindsay*As Caramanica notes in his essay, “As for the 50th anniversary, well, it is a framing of convenience. The date refers to Aug. 11, 1973, when DJ Kool Herc — in the rec room of the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in the Bronx — reportedly first mixed two copies of the same album into one seamless breakbeat. That is, of course, one way to think about hip-hop’s big-bang moment, but by no means the only one.”The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“50 Rappers, 50 Stories (Remix)” track listTrack 1: Goodie Mob featuring Outkast, “Black Ice (Sky High)”Track 2: E-40, “Practice Lookin’ Hard”Track 3: dead prez, “Tallahassee Days”Track 4: Cam’ron featuring UGK, Juelz Santana, Ludacris and Trina, “What Means the World to You (Remix)”Track 5: Lil B and Soulja Boy Tell ’Em, “Cooking Dance”Track 6: Paul Wall & Chamillionaire, “N Luv Wit My Money”Track 7: Azealia Banks, “Anna Wintour”Track 8: Trippie Redd featuring 6ix9ine, “Poles1469”Track 9: Roc Marciano, “Wheat 40’s”Track 10: Ice Spice, “No Clarity”Bonus TracksSinead O’Connor forever. “O’Connor was never quiet about her pain,” Amanda Petrusich writes, bracingly, for The New Yorker, “even when it would have been easier to swallow or evade it — in fact, being unapologetic about the crippling weight of certain sorrows was the defining characteristic of her work.”In the aftermath of O’Connor’s death, a number of beautiful tributes have been published considering many different angles of her prismatic legacy. Our own Jon Caramanica wrote about her most infamous and misunderstood act of protest (she “was daring the cameras, and the viewers, to look away; no one did”), while Una Mullally explored O’Connor’s relationship to Ireland and Vanessa Friedman considered the resonant rebellion of O’Connor’s shaved head.If a playlist is what you’re looking for, Jon Pareles has you covered with his reflection on 10 of O’Connor’s most powerful songs. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Randy Meisner, Founding Member of the Eagles, Dies at 77

      by

      The group’s original bass player, he was with the band from 1971 to 1977 but was uncomfortable with fame.Randy Meisner, a founding member of the Eagles whose broad vocal range on songs like “Take It to the Limit” helped catapult the rock band to international fame, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 77.The cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the band said on its website.“Randy was an integral part of the Eagles and instrumental in the early success of the band,” the group said.Mr. Meisner, the band’s original bass player, helped form the Eagles in 1971 along with Glenn Frey, Don Henley and Bernie Leadon. He was with the band when they recorded the albums “Eagles,” “Desperado,” “On the Border,” “One of These Nights” and “Hotel California.”“Hotel California,” with its mysterious, allegorical lyrics, became among the band’s best-known recordings. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977 and won a Grammy Award for record of the year in 1978.But Mr. Meisner was uncomfortable with fame.“I was always kind of shy,” he said in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, noting that his bandmates had wanted him to stand center stage to sing “Take It to the Limit,” but that he preferred to be “out of the spotlight.” Then, one night in Knoxville, he said, he caught the flu. “We did two or three encores, and Glenn wanted another one,” he said, referring to his bandmate, the singer-songwriter who died in 2016.“I told them I couldn’t do it, and we got into a spat,” Mr. Meisner told the magazine. “That was the end.”He left the band in September 1977 but was inducted with the Eagles into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. An essay by Parke Puterbaugh, published by the Hall of Fame for the event, described the band as “wide-eyed innocents with a country-rock pedigree” who later became “purveyors of grandiose, dark-themed albums chronicling a world of excess and seduction that had begun spinning seriously out of control.”The Eagles sold more records than any other band in the 1970s and had four consecutive No. 1 albums and five No. 1 singles, according to the Hall of Fame. Its “Greatest Hits 1971-1975” album alone sold upward of 26 million copies.Before joining the Eagles, Mr. Meisner was briefly the bassist for Poco, another Los Angeles country-rock band, formed in 1968. He left that band shortly afterward and joined Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band.A list of survivors was not immediately available. His wife, Lana Meisner, was killed in an accidental shooting in 2016.Randall Herman Meisner was born in Scottsbluff, Neb., on March 8, 1946, and started practicing music at a young age.He got his first acoustic guitar when he was around 12 or 13 and, shortly after, formed a high school band, according to a 2016 interview with Rock Cellar magazine. “We did pretty good, but we didn’t win anything,” he said.He was still a teenager when he joined another band and moved to Los Angeles in 1964 or 1965, he told Rock Cellar.“We couldn’t find any work because there were a million bands out here,” he said.Years later, Mr. Meisner would find plenty of work with the Eagles.“From Day One,” he told Rock Cellar, “I just had a feeling that the band was good and would make it.”A full obituary will appear shortly. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Sinead O’Connor Was Ireland’s Alternative Moral Compass

      by

      In any society, she would have been radical for a pop star. But in Ireland, she was revolutionary.On March 9, Sinead O’Connor stood onstage at the Vicar Street concert venue in Dublin. Her presence was greeted by a prolonged standing ovation. O’Connor was at the RTE Choice Music Prize, an evening celebrating the best Irish albums of the past year. A new award had been invented for the occasion: classic Irish album, and O’Connor was there to accept it for her 1990 record, “I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got.”It was the day after my 40th birthday. Untethered by this life landmark, I felt strangely grounded by her presence: Sinéad is here, all is well in the world. Soaking in the noise of the audience cheering her on, she smiled, almost bashful, before dedicating the award to refugees in Ireland.O’Connor had a tendency to show up at necessary moments. This time, her reappearance was a relief, because everyone in the crowd was worried about her. Her son, Shane, took his own life in 2022. He was 17. She was no stranger to articulating her personal struggles: the abuse she suffered as a child, the impact of a news media that sometimes hounded her, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and PTSD.And now, here she was, onstage in Dublin, a strange sort of lighthouse, beaming again. “How is she?” I asked one of the stage crew. “Flying form,” came the answer.O’Connor receiving the Classic Irish Album award at the RTE Choice Music Prize, in Dublin, in March.Kieran Frost/Redferns, via Getty ImagesAt the time, there was something of an O’Connor renaissance occurring. Her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings,” was critically lauded, and she posted the positive reviews excitedly on social media. The 2022 documentary “Nothing Compares,” directed by Kathryn Ferguson, correctly positioned her as an alternative moral compass in Ireland, driven by integrity and authenticity, not shame.When I was a child, Ireland felt like a phony place, yet I had no way to conceptualize its inauthenticity. I was raised Catholic, and made to navigate the weirdness of First Holy Communion, novenas and trips to the shrine at Knock. The idea of defying this was incomprehensible. The dominance of the church was simply a given.I was 9 when television news bulletins framed O’Connor destroying a photograph of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live” as blasphemous, missing the serious statement behind the act. As far as Irish society was concerned, he was a living saint. The incident rattled the country, and it also rattled me. You could do that?There was no MTV in my house, but for some odd reason, my grandmother’s television set, on the other side of the country, in Galway, provided this magic portal. I would stay up late when visiting her, and O’Connor would drop in. “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Her open, searching gaze. The tear. You could do that, too? You could shave your head? Dye Public Enemy’s logo on the side of your head? Be an Irish woman wearing ripped denim on television? Go on an Irish chat show dressed as a priest? Come out as lesbian, and later declare you were “three-quarters heterosexual, a quarter gay”?In any society at the time, this stuff was radical. But in Ireland, it was revolutionary.O’Connor at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1990.DMI/The Life Picture Collection, via ShutterstockAnd Ireland was in her songs. “Dublin in a rainstorm” was the setting for one of her finest, “Troy.” Her voice was pure and strong, and Anita Baker described it as “cavernous.” She traversed alt-rock and pop, reggae and traditional Irish music. She covered Prince, Nirvana and John Grant. On “8 Good Reasons” (a title that referred to the eyes of her four children, she explained), she sang, “You know I love to make music, but my head got wrecked by the business.”When I first interviewed O’Connor, in 2007, backstage at the Oxegen music festival, in Kildare, she seemed a little shaky, but utterly cool, friendly and fun. In 2014, I sat listening to her talk about her latest album, “I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss,” as she chain-smoked in a Dublin recording studio, her face tattoos faded by laser removal treatment.Although I only knew her from afar, the sense of connection she created, both through the music and what she stood for, was profound. Her loss has instigated a deep collective grief across Ireland. She was a symbol of hope as much as defiance, an artist and thinker who always stood on the horizon, urging others to catch up.When I heard the news, I felt the gut-punch of loss. It was as though something elemental had departed the world, and some essential tributary had run dry within me.My wife stood up from the couch, walked to the fireplace, and lit a candle, the traditional gesture of Irish grief and remembrance. The national broadcaster’s main radio station played song after song. We remembered that night in March, when the roar and applause of the audience in Dublin seemed to say: thank you, we love you, you were right. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Sinead O’Connor’s Death Is Not Suspicious, Police Say

      by

      The London police force said that the Irish singer was found dead at a home in the city.Sinead O’Connor was found dead in a private home in London, the city’s police said on Thursday, a day after the provocative Irish singer’s death was announced. While few details have been released about the death, the police said that it was not being treated as suspicious.Ms. O’Connor, best known for her rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” was 56.Her family confirmed Ms. O’Connor’s death in a short statement. “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinead,” the statement said. “Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.”Ms. O’Connor recently moved to London, according to local news media outlets. On Thursday afternoon, the city’s police force said in a statement that officers pronounced Ms. O’Connor dead at the scene at a residential address in southeast London. “A file will be prepared for the coroner,” the statement added.The local coroner’s court said in a news release that an autopsy would be undertaken, the results of which “may not available for several weeks.” Then a coroner would decide whether to hold an inquest into the cause of death, the news release added.Ms. O’Connor released 10 studio albums, including her 1990 breakthrough, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.” Although her music cut through on both sides of the Atlantic, she was also known for stirring public controversy. In 1992, she ended an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” by ripping a photo of Paul John Paul II into pieces to protest sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      A Trumpeter Stretches Past the Bounds of Jazz

      by

      Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah’s new album, “Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning,” is his first on which he doesn’t touch the trumpet. Instead, he extends the legacy of Black masking Indians in New Orleans.Growing up in New Orleans, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah was raised at the corner of two traditions. He learned to play the trumpet at the elbow of his uncle and mentor, the saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr., whose career took off after a stint in Art Blakey’s band. Harrison was a true-blue jazz musician, and Adjuah — who was born, and first introduced to the listening public as, Christian Scott — seemed destined to become one, too.But their family was also prominent in New Orleans’s tradition of Black masking Indians, rooted in the city’s history of Black and Indigenous resistance in the 18th and 19th centuries, when Africans fleeing slavery often joined with Native Americans in maroon communities. While professional musicians laid down the roots of American jazz in the late 1800s — mixing African styles with European repertoire at parades and society functions — groups of so-called Mardi Gras Indians dressed in bright regalia performed songs with a more unbroken connection to West and Central Africa, and little relationship to a commercial audience. To this day, Black masking Indians sing those old songs on Mardi Gras Day.Adjuah now carries that history. He has become a big chief of a Black Indian group, the Xodokan Nation, just as his uncle and grandfather were before him. On July 1, in a ceremony at historic Congo Square, the Ashé Cultural Arts Center named Adjuah the Grand Griot of New Orleans.Adjuah has worked for years to convince the world that he’s not a “jazz” musician at all: The word’s racist history is now widely acknowledged; he says “stretch music” is a more appropriate catchall for the alloy of African influences, Black American improvisation, hip-hop, indie rock and more that he has been polishing for the past two decades. But it has always been tough to hear the music he makes with his bands, and not think immediately about where it fits in the cosmology of (what most of us know as) contemporary jazz.Until now.Adjuah’s new LP, “Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning,” is his 14th studio album, and the first on which he doesn’t touch the trumpet. Instead, he sings and plays a handful of self-made instruments: Chief Adjuah’s Bow, which blends the West African n’goni and kora with the European harp; a custom n’goni; and a Pan-African drum kit. Adjuah mixes in the odd SPD-SX drum machine or other synthesized percussion, but the album features almost nothing but acoustic percussion, vocals and the occasional sound of trees rustling or birds cawing.Instrument-building, he said in a recent conversation with the Africana studies scholar Joshua Myers, is part of his effort to “find instruments that could work as 21st-century bridges to the older styles, so that we could go back and grab those things.”“Bark Out Thunder” connects to a lineage of Black Indian recordings made over the past 50 years: by Bo Dollis’s Wild Magnolias; the Wild Tchoupitoulas; and Donald Harrison Jr., whose 1992 album “Indian Blues” (featuring Dr. John) did its best to marry straight-ahead jazz aesthetics with the Black Indian repertoire.Adjuah’s LP amounts to a paean to this legacy, and an announcement of how he plans to carry the torch forward. Joined by about a dozen longtime collaborators and close family members, he leads the ensemble in a few traditional songs and a handful of originals built on gnostic, historically grounded lyrics and drifting, driving rhythms. He doesn’t condescend to the folklore. It is his source of strength: a book of oral histories and battle rhythms, to be used in a contemporary way.This is Adjuah’s first album that simply cannot be construed as contemporary jazz — and it’s the most compelling, undiluted LP he has made yet.From the Black Indian canon, he covers the rousing call-and-response of “Shallow Water,” offered here in tribute to his uncle; an up-tempo version of the traditional song “Iko,” here titled “Xodokan Iko — Hu Na Ney,” with a refrain in Black Indian Creole set against Adjuah’s original verses full of references to the Orishas and American Indian iconography; and “Golden Crown,” on which the chorus’s voices salute the chief: “Adjuah got the golden crown.”As “Golden Crown” nears its end, Adjuah’s voice fades down to sing a hopeful verse:Meet the hunter that mornin’ gold shining brightSay a riot this mornin’ I might incite, nowA riot of love, a riot of lightOn the digital LP, an up-tempo bonus track reprises the hazy title tune. Adjuah plucks his bow in a slightly distorted pattern while the percussionist Elé Salif Howell joins him in a charging, six-beat rhythm redolent of Wassoulou music: an ancient-but-alive West African style, played mostly by women, not far from what’s known as “desert blues.” True to form, as Adjuah sings he name-checks his sources — shouting out the Wassoulous’ history of resistance to French colonization while placing them alongside a dozen other groups (“Haitian, Cheyenne and Mande, too”) that fought the same fight. “There was a man who took a stand,” he sings, “did what he can to build the world anew.”Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah“Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning”(Ropeadope) More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Has Scott Joplin’s ‘Thoroughly American’ Opera ‘Treemonisha’ Found Its Moment?

      by

      “Treemonisha” — brilliant, flawed and unfinished — is ripe for creative reimagining at a time when opera houses are looking to diversify the canon.“He has created an entirely new phase of musical art and has produced a thoroughly American opera.”The anonymous critic who wrote these bold words didn’t have a performance of Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” to evaluate, or a recording. In June 1911, all the reviewer had to go on was Joplin’s 230-page piano-vocal score.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      10 Essential Songs by Sinead O’Connor

      by

      Her catalog is full of raw passion and raw nerve.Sinead O’Connor did not hold back. Not her voice, not her ideas, not her troubles, not her rage, not her sorrows, not her faith. From the moment her debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” appeared in 1987, O’Connor — whose death was announced on Wednesday — flaunted raw passion and raw nerve.She seemed equally startling, at first, for her keening voice and her shaven head. Her singing encompassed cathartic extremes: lullabies and imprecations, sighs and howls. She made bold, intemperate public statements, like famously tearing up a photograph of the pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992. Yet her songs also offered comfort, nurturing and righteousness; she was an idealist, not a provocateur. And she struggled openly: with the music business, with unforgiving journalists, with career pressures and with mental illness.O’Connor was emphatically Irish. The inflections of old Celtic music sharpened her voice, and she was shaped by her Catholic upbringing, if only to later reject it. Yet she was anything but provincial. She produced her own debut album when she was only 20, drawing already on punk, dance music, electronics and seething orchestral arrangements. She would go on to work with reggae, big-band music and more; her voice, even at its gentlest, could leap out.O’Connor’s first two albums were her most inspired ones. They were charged with youthful turbulence and unbridled ambition, as O’Connor sang about love, death, power and making her own place in the world. She went through some fallow patches afterward, but she never stopped striving to sing her own truth.‘Mandinka’ (1987)With a distorted, three-chord rock stomp, O’Connor brashly announces, “I don’t know no shame/I feel no pain,” landing hard on dissonant notes. The song seesaws between refusal and acceptance, with a final tease of “Soon I can give you my heart.” But O’Connor also flexes her high notes in nonsense syllables that are as defiant as any word she sings.‘Troy’ (1987)One side of a lover’s quarrel unfurls across an operatic six and a half minutes, backed by a string ensemble that underlines every churning emotion: memories, accusations, confessions, vows, pleas, warnings and the sheer desperation when O’Connor sings, “Does she hold you like I do?” followed by a howl of pain.‘I Want Your (Hands on Me)’ (1987)Chattering, percussive funk carries this call for physical pleasure, and as she bounces her voice against the syncopated beat, O’Connor summons unabashed rasps and moans.‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ (1990)O’Connor’s commercial peak — a No. 1 pop single — thoroughly commandeered a song Prince wrote for a 1985 album by the Family. She makes her voice small and bereft, then lashes out at consolations; she places Celtic turns at the ends of phrases. And she brings crucial changes to Prince’s melody, making upward leaps when the chorus gets to the line “Nothing compares to you.” Its video clip — almost entirely a close-up of O’Connor’s face against a black background — forged an indelible image of loneliness.‘I Am Stretched on Your Grave’ (1990)A hip-hop beat backs an old Irish poem that was translated into English and turned into a song. Its narrator mourns the death of his lover, wishing to join her. O’Connor’s voice, completely exposed over the stark rhythm track, is otherworldly. A fiddle arrives near the end, completing the mesh of traditional and contemporary.‘The Last Day of Our Acquaintance’ (1990)The formal mechanics of a divorce — “I will meet you later in somebody’s office” — can’t contain the bitterness of the situation. For most of the song, O’Connor sings over two calmly strummed acoustic guitar chords, but agitation rises in her voice, and when a band eventually kicks in behind her there’s no mistaking her fury.‘You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart’ (1994)This incantatory rocker was written by Bono, Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer for the film “In the Name of the Father.” If it sounds like O’Connor fronting 1990s U2 — with a pealing piano and an implacable beat — it draws the best from both, with U2’s echoey depths, O’Connor’s primal peaks and the high-stakes dynamics they both thrived on.‘This Is to Mother You’ (1997)O’Connor promises to “do what your own mother didn’t do” in a song that radiates kindliness and womanly strength. It’s a folky, Celtic-tinged lullaby that promises to end a dark back story, to release someone — perhaps a lover, as the video suggests — from “All the pain that you have known/All the violence in your soul.” It’s pure unselfish comfort.‘Jealous’ (2000)“I don’t deserve to be lonely just ’cause you say I do,” O’Connor insists in “Jealous,” a not-quite-breakup ballad she wrote with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. The beat is measured. But the singer’s partner is keeping her dangling, and she’s not sure what she wants either; she makes her harshest judgments in her most fragile voice.‘Dense Water Deeper Down’ (2014)The folk-rock jubilation of “Dense Water Deeper Down” — with muscular guitar strumming, layered harmonies, even some happy horns — celebrates a lover who “makes me forget everything my mother warned.” There’s just one catch: He’s only a memory. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      The Night Sinead O’Connor Took on the Pope on ‘SNL’

      by

      Tearing up a photo was the moment nobody forgot. The performance that preceded it was just as powerful.What people remember about Sinead O’Connor’s Oct. 3, 1992, appearance on “Saturday Night Live” is this: At the end of her second performance of the show, a cover of Bob Marley’s “War,” O’Connor intoned gravely, “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil.” As she held tight to the word, stretching it like a castigation, she grabbed a photo of Pope John Paul II and held it up to camera. When she let the word go, she punctuated her exhale by tearing the photo three times, followed by an exhortation to “fight the real enemy.” She tossed the fragments to the ground, removed her in-ears, and stepped off the stage into culture-war infamy.Throughout her career, O’Connor — whose death, at 56, was announced on Wednesday — was a fervent moralist, an uncompromised voice of social progress and someone who found stardom, and its sandpapered and glossed boundaries, to be a kind of sickness. She was also a singer of ferocious gifts, able to channel anxious passion with vivacious power and move through a lyric with nimble acuity. She was something grander than a simple pop star — she became a stand-in for a sociopolitical discomfort that was beginning to take hold in the early 1990s, a rejection of the enthusiastic sheen and power-at-all-costs culture of the 1980s.And so, in an era where late-night television performances could still prompt monocultural mood shifts, her gesture was a volcanic eruption. She became a target instantly — of the religious right, of other celebrities, and, as she reported many years later in her memoir, of a couple of egg-tossing young men, as she exited the studio that same night.But none of that extinguished the power of her protest. And she was a savvy radical — reportedly she had done something slightly different in rehearsal, and saved the pope photo for the actual show. (The photo itself had hung on the bedroom wall of O’Connor’s mother, who O’Connor later said had physically and sexually abused her as a child.) Also, she was on live television, holding court for three minutes on the miseries of discrimination and abuses of power, under the guise of being a pop star performing a song. She was daring the cameras, and the viewers, to look away; no one did.The recriminations O’Connor faced recall the bankrupt culture wars of a different era — she was “banned” from appearing on “Saturday Night Live” again, and the show mocked her on subsequent episodes. The following week’s host, Joe Pesci, took direct aim at her. “I’ll tell you one thing: She’s very lucky it wasn’t my show. ’Cause if it was my show, I woulda gave her such a smack.” Cue laughing and clapping from the audience. He continued, “I woulda grabbed her by her … eyebrows.” More laughter. At one point, he triumphantly held up the taped-together pope photo, like a feckless politician stirring up his base. (Tellingly, footage of Pesci’s monologue is available on the official YouTube channel of “Saturday Night Live”; footage of O’Connor’s performance is not, though it can be found in various unofficial locations online.)Joe Pesci on “Saturday Night Live” the week after Sinead O’Connor’s performance, holding up the taped-together photo of Pope John Paul II that O’Connor had ripped.NBCOf course, she was correct — the scale of sexual abuse perpetrated within the Roman Catholic Church that came to light in later years was staggering. By then, O’Connor’s protest felt distant, but the damage it did to her career was permanent.At the time, O’Connor was only a couple of years past her American breakthrough — her piercing cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” written by Prince (and originally performed by his side project the Family). Subsequent to “S.N.L.,” she had a handful of hits, but mostly retreated from the pop spotlight. Or maybe the way to think about it is that she right-sized her career, away from the silly and grim expectations of complaisance that come with universal acclaim and toward a more earnest plane.Whichever the case, the pope brouhaha obscured something perhaps just as extraordinarily powerful — the song that O’Connor had been performing. Her “War” cover had lyrics slightly modified to allude to the abuses in the Catholic Church that she was protesting. (She also performed “Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home” that night.)She’s performing “War” a cappella, staring hard at a camera off to her left.Less singing than declaiming, she renders the song with a forceful clarity, landing every line with nervy syllables held just a microsecond past comfort, as if reminding the viewer of the need to gulp them down whole. Marley’s original — the lyrics are drawn from a speech given by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia before the United Nations General Assembly in 1963 — moves with a sly breeze. O’Connor’s, with its silence, turns the original plaint into a jolt.Her performance is anthemic, invigorating, a call to arms for the dispossessed and an elegant dissection of the authoritarian powers who hold them down. Her vocal is level and determined, but her howl is spiritual and undeniable:Until the ignoble and unhappy regimeWhich holds all of us throughChild abuse, yeah, child abuse, yeah,Subhuman bondage has been toppledUtterly destroyedEverywhere is warIf there is a moment of true singing here, it’s right before the grand gesture at the end. “Childrennnn! Childrennnn!” O’Connor sweetly chants, calling everyone to attention. Then, with everyone’s ears perked, she nods her head forcefully and jabs out a quick, urgent instruction: “Fight.” More