Mr dtp has been
urging me to take an interest in the music of Ms Sinead O'Connor; it has
been difficult, because normally I can't abide people who look like
this.
or this
I
wouldn't want to be in the same room as people who have chosen to
look like concentration camp inmates, I find them shit-freezingly
offensive, there's enough people look this way, have looked this way,
really, as a result of Cruelty's brutal mannerisms; to make
wretchedness into an artsy fashion statement merits a swift rubdown
with a housebrick.
Tha
popular music is awash with conundra, enigma and home to the most
extraordinarily selfish and depraved monsters is not news. Nor is the
fact that its giants are often, in reality, pigmies.
I
long to write my rock'n'roll essays - How the Beatles' Sgt Pepper
Killed Rock'n'roll; Elvis Presley, Paedophile Momma'sBoy Made God and
The Grateful Dead, Fat Junkies in Short Trousers Playing Out of Tune, So
Fucking What? - I just never had the time, but they were always on my mind, they were always on my mind.....
O'Connor,
anyway, as much an activist as an artist. Rants about the Pope she
does, bless. Got herself booed by some gang of US showbiz filthsters;
pretty easy, I would have thought. But it made her the wee darlin' of
another segment of showbiz , we know how it is,
all these creative, super-personalities, but all motivated by a genuine
love of music and a basic wish just to, well, just to teach the world
to sing.
O'Connor rocketed to fame with a breathy, jerky, octave-jumping version of Prince's Nothing Compares 2 U or You, I dunno which, The octave-jumping, stepping-up an octave in one syllable Nothing compares, No- thing, comparezzzz, t'you, was the the
trademark
of poor, mad Joni Mitchell who, at least, wrote a couple of good songs -
but only a couple - and played some interesting, jazzy, open-tuned
guitar, before she fell victim to upherownarseness-ism and a Big Yellow
Taxi took away her pitifully few marbles.
I
looked at O'Connor's youtube sidebar and thought, Maybe just let mr
dtp's comments pass unremarked, this is shit, I don't have enough life
left to look at any of this but then I thought No, he's a nice man, mr
dtp, always polite, least I can do. And so I chose the unlikeliest
tune, which was the shaven one joining Roger Floyd and others onstage
doing the "Mother do you think, they'll drop the bomb...." song from
Roger's The Wall. I was an early devotee of The Wall but back then I
thought that I knew stuff.
Roger
Floyd of course didn't have the other Floyds in this performance of his
major opus of juvenilia but he did have three fifths of the Band and it
is Garth Hudson's moody accordion that sets the tone for the piece.
O'Connor, front and centre, sings as she always does, as though she
was hiding under the stairs, terrified, in an abusive Irish children's
home, that is to say any of them, I suppose. She has this device of,
at the end of a phrase, dropping from high volume to the last word being
almost silent, as though she'd been kicked, she wants you to think
she's been kicked, she does it over and over and I suppose it's what
people would call her unique phrasing. Her slaphead waifishness, her
faux vulnerability, her battered-child masquerade, her unoriginal,
endlessly retreaded vocal style, all of these are offensive. Of this
concert Roger Floyd said he found O'Connor the most difficult and
unpleasant person he had ever worked with - and when you consider the
posturing buffoon, Dave Floyd, the late nutter, Syd Floyd, the
misplaced classicist, Rick Floyd and that awful fucking Nick Little
DrummerBoy Floyd, not to mention himself, Roger Floyd must be a world
authority on nasty bastards.
When
I was a kid, eleven or something, I could never understand the
popularity of Twiggy, the sight of her made me flinch - skin and bones,
fear and vulnerability, FuckMeJesus. I thought then and I do now that
there is something darkly, horribly wrong with the world of fashion.
O'Connor is an overspill of that, a merging, a homogenising of all the bodily fluids of pop culture, a singing Twiggy.
Here it is anyway, see for yourself, nothing compares 2 O'Connor.
40 comments:
Again you are spot on the money, Kind sir.
" nothing compares 2 O'Connor." and it takes a lot of it.
Again, unintelligible mumbling. Do people actually pay to go and watch/listen to this sort of thing?
I was expecting to see her singing "Nothing compares to you" rather than "Mother", and then to compare it with a studio recorded version by her, which was given to me on a double-disc set entitled "Voices", a collection of different people singing all sorts of different stuff (and which, I admit, I rarely play these days!).
But as for this song.. vraiment, je n'ai rein a dire.
Sorry mr cool haircut, pressed the wrong button and lost your post. I hear what you say but it's showbiz activism, it's like royal "charities", little more than showing off. I have been campaigning publicly and privately for decades, about the noncing monsignors, and we all - or some of us - have tales of abuse at the hands of so-called clergypersons, nobody deserves a medal for speaking out. And I think, further, as we have seen, recently, that showbiz is Satan's engine room, actually part of the problem, never going to be a force for renewal and reform, is it??? I mean, really.
As for her talent, I maintain that she is a one-trick pony, crass and inept but these are matters of taste, if you like her and her style and her stances, that's fine, but I don't and I fear that if the young rely for information on people like O'Connor, then everything just becomes an arm of InfoTainment
In best politicos voice "so, i'll pop you down as a maybe, then?"
In no way to argue with any of that - she is batshit insane and a gobby bint to boot, the endless moralising, the shoehorning in of noncing clerics when the question was simply "1 or 2 sugars" - "Sugar! Sugar! you'd want me to have sugar wuddent ya, ya filthy noncing ejeet, you don't know God as I know God, ya slovenly disgrace to the Church", "err...so no sugar then pet?" etc ad nauseam.
However, leaving the mentalness aside, well, in fact, getting shut of it completely as preference, I would, as a matter of course, state that she's definately got an inverse Victorian characteristic that she's better heard than seen - not a fan of the shoulder and neck jerk away from the microphone at the break of every lyric, the breathless eagerness of it all - the life demeaning earnestness as if someone should be chisiling out her performance on granite for future generations to study and pore over. Much akin to that Scandanavian version made manifest in Bjork - another one who fell out of the bat cave and landed head first in a steaming pile of conceited insanity.
All that as taken - the girl can croon - that she chooses to do mainly commercial shite is perhaps a function of her madness - take a perfectly decent song and belt it out with 90% awesomeness but leave that 10% as fuck up is upsetting but that doesn’t diminish the sheer gravity of her voice, that sometimes she hits notes which render in me, anyway, a sort of ‘fuck me sideways and call me Marjorie’ reaction, a sort of recognition that as instrument her voice is damn near brilliant. I find Van Morrission a truculent twat but I once saw him at Glastonbury, dragged there by a pretty school friend and we turned the corner at the end of a song so heard nowt and then the guy started up again and I literally got thrown back, fell over with the power of the fat bastard’s rendition of the birdy song or some other such shite. But the voice, Bernard, there’s the rub, just the sheer weight of their voices does stand out as exceptional, a measure that whatever crap they churn out there exists a talent that can’t be completely traduced, that all the drugs, booze, insanity, moralising can’t completely wipe away their ability to do a decent turn. It’s a gift being born with a voice like that – most people have to learn to play an instrument – these fucks never had to work a single day in their mad lives to achieve what most never have the ability to achieve.
Could be wrong, though.
Your post is true, mostly.
An aside; a sure sign of ruin, of the erosion of standards and sheer lack of respect for persons and offices, whether believed in or not, is the casual use of abuse and blasphemy of the Almighty with phrases such as 'F***MeJesus'. Crude and unnecessary.
Be careful you do not become that which you hate.
No time for Sinaed meself, except to be slightly jealous that she could wear such a low maintenance hairdo and still look pretty. You have to bear in mind that our host is a harsh critic who thinks Neil Young is a whiny Canadian cunt best avoided.
Christ, not half, Neil Young, he was on a loop in a Dundee shopping mall, last week, when I was there; I thought of you, ms lilith. Neil Young AND Dundee, you West Countrians, don't know how lucky you are.
It is never casual, mr wtr, and I am sure that Himself, reading over these few years of commentaries would find that the pursuit of Godliness and the exposure of sin cancel out any perceived disrespect by such as yourself; I am sure, in fact, that He wouldn't give a fuck and nor should you.
That's a good mouthful, mr dtp, but neither O'Connor nor Morrison have that effect on me. I love a few of his earlier, anthemic pieces, The Healing has Begun, These Are The Days, Take it Where you Find It but there is an awful lot of derivative and repetitive filler and when it comes to his voice I am tone deaf. I understand those magical musical moments of which you speak - Captain Beefheart gave me my first and there's been, I dunno, half-a-dozen since.
I like the chiselled in granite idea, it is that awesome pretentiousness of her which I was strugg-a-ling to describe and which you nailed perfectly.
I didn't just view that track, I saw her recently on the TeeVee doing something else, between announcing her new status as a priest, and all that other stuf you mention. Funny thing is that - for reasons posted by mr cool haircut and unfortunately deleted - on the face of it, one would want to like Sinead but Honey, it's so hard.
We West Cuntrarians do know how bloody lucky we are actually :-)...we just moved to the prettiest village in Somerset and walking to the post office (yes it still has a post office) is like someone put something in your tea.
If Mr Prick wants to hear a girly voice at the peak of human capability he could do worse than check out this German bint here. That Mozart was a bit of a piss taker wasn't he?
I saw an interview where she said she was bipolar - fairy snuff - but then said that she been to some back street quack who'd been giving her dodgy tablets which made her more loopy and after 6 years she bumped into a Doc who'd been to college and he immediately got her on some beneficial drugs which she intimated was the cause of much of her battishness. Which, again, seems perfectly reasonable (other than bipolar being a cover all for the real diagnosis of 'a bit of a twat' but I guess that's for another time, like ADHD in kids - 'bit of a twat' again).
I think she's best enjoyed when shitfaced and beyond the point of caring unlike Mr Gil Scott Heron who's my everyday go to guy for funky awesomeness (even though Curtis Mayfield was more talented). I went to see him 5 times and the gimp never turned up and now the cheeky cunt has gone and died, workshy fop that he is.
Thanks Lils - unfortunately at work at the mo so Youtube restricted but shall turn it up to excruiciating volume next time hammered.
Well, lilith, I admire your spirit and bavery in even admitting that you have looked for and found that German bint.
I wonder why such stuff exists?
Arthur, I have a theory about that but when I express it I lose friends.
She looks less bipolar than borderline, like so many more interesting women in her world.
"tdg said...
She looks less bipolar than borderline, like so many more interesting women in her world. "
I think if she stripped off total she would look like a bipolar bare.
Ms Lilith: Lucia Popp is the definitive Queen of The Night, I think. Try this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEzVNEqRlqw
i think that you're all being rather hard on ms o'connor, maybe it's some kinda clever-trevor suppressed romantic bloke thing...
as for the queen of the night, lucia popp is pap - i am the queen of the night.
I don't care what she is, says or looks like, O'Connor's voice is wonderful. But if you want to hear the female voice on another order of magnitude - Sophie Hunger, singing Le vent nous portera. Try it and see.
Not as if she has real problems, like poor Steven Fry, so-o-o-o clever and still can't manage to top himself, bless.
I could be wrong but I get the impression that she's just your standard alcoholic Oirish pikey with a God complex and a beautiful voice. Knock out the voice and they're a dime a dozen.
This is what grates: drama divorced from a cause. Where the gears between the feeling and its contex slip, even in one place, everything is thrown into doubt. If Fry really wanted to kill himself he would have done it -- how hard can it be? -- this is just bad acting.
Bad acting is what he does, mr tdg, he fled, in tears, from his last stage venture, didn't he? And that secured him loads of attention. It is annoying but also puzzling; what IS the matter with him? He is smart enough to know that anyone about whose opinion he might care will know the merit of your second sentence. Is he really performing merely for the ghouls of Nutscape and WECanTalkYouDown.com?
Mind you, despite his pretensions he does associate with some dreadful, trashy people - Jo Brand, Phil Jupitus, Clive Anderson, Prince Charles. Not from the top drawer, are they, brainswise?
May be an urban myth but I read that the Rev Chad Varrah, founder of the Samaritans, devised and manufactured a masturbarion aid for a young soldier who'd lost his arms. If that's true, it's probably the first and last good thing they did.
His is an ordinary man's idea of intelligence, which is why he is successful. Real intelligence rarely has broad appeal.
I suspect he has a personality disorder, somewhere in cluster B. People prefer to talk of being bipolar because it does not have the stigma of pd, indeed seems charmingly unfortunate, and another excuse to emote, emptily.
@dtp
where would we be without daley's dozen words of wisdom?
tales of the unelected
considering the skyful of stars who, given an ounce of fame and fortune, cash in their political positions and principles to garner themselves even more popularity, i honestly feel that ms o'connor constitutes a refreshing, if rather super-heated, blast of radio-activity over the air-waves. she will likely carry on in the same vein right into her dotage, it's just how she is - and all power to her elbow, say i.
i'm sure that it must simply be some wholly insignificant and incidental factor in the woman's personal make-up which triggers you off so, mr ishmael - as dtp so sagely hints, when embraced in the company of those she trusts, ms o'connor is no doubt the life and soul of the party and a bundle of laughs all rolled into one, and it is only when on hostile territory that, as an instinctive means of warding off political predators and detractors, she blows herself up to her fullest scale. this feisty female's only fault perhaps, is an inclination to make frequent brazen forays behind enemy lines, thus over-exposing herself to dangerous positions under threat of opposition fire - and in this regard, i sincerely hope that she slays her psychological demons and finds a better battle-life balance.
you see, mr ishmael, this is the value of having friends with whom, in the midst of a vicious world, one can be at ease, and indeed i have often heard you speak of your own. sadly, of course, in the roughed-up ruin of modern reality, i find that friendship is an outdated concept which in a bygone age became suddenly extinct, friends having chosen to eschew love and companionship in favour of diving headfirst down respective rabbit and fox-holes in pursuit of deeper causes, which afforded them greater spiritual and emotional fulfilment, and it was at that point, mr ishmael, left estranged from inner worthiness, that i decided to investigate this other warmer wiser world, with a view to checking out the holy chalice which attracted people there - so i dived down too, in the hope of discovering what it was all about, so-to-speak.
through the looking-glass, i glimpsed the ideologically-driven, single-mindedly steeped in their endeavours to improve our societal behaviour, all living in an snap-strung realm where the sole permissible emotions were those either of extreme concealed mirth or outright eye-ball-popping anger, the subtler mood-shades in the spectrum, such as simple sadness, sympathy, nostalgia, melancholy, common contentment, gladness, and plain conviviality, being banished into obscene obscurity to a degree where cynicism remained king - a place where, mr ishmael, at the time of his execution, poor mr rigby would have been legally obliged to have laughed his head off and his guts out, and where the, albeit gauchely, expressed love of one human being for another was regimentally and raucously ridiculed. i truly believe that what i beheld in my vision was the land of the happy-fascists - the be-happy-or-else brigade.
fuck that, mr ishmael. fuck that to hell.
@tales of the unelected
notwithstanding your personal experience, mr tales, by painting everyone alike, you are painting yourself into a corner of cold-comfort conceit - it's not such a mad mad world we live in, but admittedly our super-compulsive state, which employs the terror-tactics of pressure-cooker policing from cradle-to-grave, micro-molesting us in each and every aspect of our lives, and notching-up the heat the more we lack in compliance, does in fact conspire to flip us out of the frying-pan into the fire, should of course we chose to allow this to happen. i am sure that you have misread the mood and motivation of some in your society, they struggling to stay on-side with sanity as much as you.
Well, mr totu, I read and slept upon your comments on identity and I do not believe that I do or have much departed from them, in this quadrant of cyberspace, at least.
The post was merely a response to another's recommendation; Idid not call for O'Connor's jailing or anything, I just always and ever found her artistry to be miniscule, her presentation a bit dodgy and her public
concerns about as sincere as those of the dwarf humanitarian, Mr O'Bono
If people choose to attend her concerts and listen to her recordings, well, I am sure there are worse things they could be doing, and better.
I wonder, too, finally, how O'Connor came to be deemed a Caltic artist, is it because she hails from Ireland? Nothing Compares 2 u, hails from black Philadelphia, or is everythibg Paddy does just part of the Celtic craic? Am I a Celtic blogger?
It is clear from her support, here, that in her artistic journey Sinead has "gathered flowers, but they do not smell for me."
And anyone looking for the eye of the Celtic storm would find the authors of that line and work outwards, through riffs and reels and ragas, through the layers of the onion and Be glad, for the song has no ending.
Subtle or brutal, her emotion is fake. That is the major fault of our age, not that emotions are crudely posterized, though they are that too. And they are fake because the majority are insulated from real suffering. They have little to feel *about*, so they just feel, intransitively.
i applaud sinéad's pacifist, anti-war position. me un her gonna go over the states and give our sis madge an all-over, deep-tissue anma-massage, with our tongues - we feel concerned that the queen of pop's face needs especial attention.
hear what you're saying tdg, but as katie points out, at least sinéad o'connor takes a non-violent approach - the way it's going these days, you have to go-out and chop-up a copper to prove you're a serious political activist.
@tdg, @them rockers against racism
regardless of their creed, colour, or country of origin, so many of these 'serious' political activists against injustice and imperialism come from well-to-do families in the world of the well-connected - beware of their primary education, for they have tasted power, and seek more power, and they don't mind how they get it.
@katie kwik-fit
they're probably expert in stipple technique then.
Dear Mr Smith
I have been convinced she is, in fact. a bit shite.
Debate and evidence.
Cheers dude
DtP
Dear Mr Ish, May I be so bold as to suggest that those who have not spent at least 2,500 hours honing any talent they might be blessed with, as has my daughter, could be a little more reticent about holding themselves out as singers. And she is only just starting out. Forgive me for being forward.
.....................................................
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=usLaKOpV6Ns
Uncommercial songs - ejeet.
Sorry, just for clarity, j'accused O'Connor of doing commercial songs in my first rant and she clearly hasn't. Anywho, just wanted to correct that.
Cheers dude
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Feel free to visit my web page ... meladerm
ok, on the balance of evidence provided, it does seem that ms o'connor is something of a wacked-out one-trick wassock, but surely it's her mate bono about whom we should be more deeply concerned...
...according to this delightfully discordant critique by george monbiot, the godfather of irish rock's greed-for-gratefulness, underscored by his grossly grandiose presence at the high-table of white-condescension-to-aid-blacks, has been blocking-out the grassroots protests of ordinary african farmers, who, as a result of g8 'initiatives' promoted by the new alliance for food security and nutrition, are not only being subjected to rapacious land-grabs by western multi-national companies, but are also being forced to buy these new-wave colonialists' cripplingly-expensive genetically-modified seeds...
basically, bono's brutally-biased sonic-boom has been drowning out the unamplified voices of smallholder farmers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, and environmentalists right across africa - obviously afro-fugal obama would far rather listen to the commercially manipulated meanderings of a dozy white twat like paul david hewson kbe than real african agriculturalists, who, given equal access to their maladministrative american uncle, would more likely love to tear a thousand strips off the neo-colonial protectionist prick, one-by-one, before feeding the end-product to their local band of honey-badgers as a form of pertinent yet somehow politically-correct fertility sacrifice.
instead of campaigning for a free-market where individual africans have the right first to feed one-another and then export their surplus goods to america and europe for potential personal profit, mr pro bono appears to be lobbying for the god-given right of rich multi-national western corporations to exploit the very people for whom he claims to care - and so today, at last, we see the long impoverishing curtain of protectionism pulled-down but at a price which will surely enslave africans forever-and-a-day; after the long sentence of slavery and colonialism, africans are finally permitted to export their produce to the rich nations, but only if the fat white controllers harvest all the plump profits.
bono cynically patronizes africans with complex offers of aid and charity, when in fact what the common african man and woman really wants is very much more simple: justice, and the freedom to trade on equal terms with their western counterparts. the guy seems infinitely more interested in schmoozing upto, and jumping into bed with, big-brother-in-business than genuinely helping his black brother in dire straits - does this jazzy-jerkoff realize that the mau mau uprising and subsequent commission of retaliatory genocide by churchill's officers was originally precipitated by oppressive colonial control of prime kenyan farmland which left the kikuyu tribespeople living in utter destitution?
(continued)
as an irishman, shouldn't bono understand the devastating effects that this manner of obsessive suppressive micromanagement, and de facto enslavement, can have on a population? as the grandson of a kenyan torture victim, shouldn't president obama also appreciate the insidious significance of the new alliance policies which he supports? it's well worth remembering that the genocide in 1950s kenya was deceitfully dressed-up as a 'civilizing mission', as indeed was the iron-fist of colonialism the-world-over, gloved as it invariably was in the pure velvet of christianity...
rather than assisting in the continued corruption of the african continent, would not mr bono's time perhaps better be spent ensuring that ireland itself does not once again become a subjected colony of a larger (european) empire? maybe when he admires his image in the mirror, bono sees himself as a brother and spokesman for the african continent, maybe he should take off those dark glasses?
when pop-saints like bono are invited to dine with the devil, they become part of the problem, not part of the solution...
of course, i know for a fact that mr ishmael has been invited to dine at the big white house on the hill too...but declined in the traditional vernacular manner - bunged wealth being no temptation for someone as tight as a sheeps-arse-with-acute-anal-cramps, who can stretch a penny to feed himself and his entire family for an entire year, and who further possesses the electrolytic capabilities to gild a turd and pass it off to the financial times as a gold ingot.
now, to be fair, i could forgive ms o'connor for her exorbitant celebrity self-centredness, if only she could redeem herself...make the world a better place somehow...perhaps repair the altogether unattractive unrepentant condition in which her good friend bono finds himself...relinquish her self-imposed religious repression for just one moment...do something right...and knock the cunt out.
not that i condone violence or anything like that...
...but in this one case...
...maybe the exception would prove the rule...
hey, oh well...another g8 conference goes down the drain of decadent democracy.
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