You're Wrong About - Sinéad O'Connor with Allyson McCabe

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

This week, we fight the real enemy with Allyson McCabe. Here's where to find Allyson online here.You can find Allyson's book Why Sinéad O'Connor Matters here. Support us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalYou're Wrong About Spring TourBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://www.allysonmccabe.com/https://www.allysonmccabe.com/my-bookhttp://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

We've come so far, but yeah, but women weren't allowed to be angry until probably what, 1991? Maybe not even today. I don't know. We can have that discussion. That's a great point. Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking about Shanaid O'Connor. We are learning about Shanaid O'Connor today from Allison McCabe, who is coming out with

a book next month called Why Shanaid O'Connor Matters. I'm excited to share it with you. I'm excited to get you in on the ground floor of Why Shanaid O'Connor Matters, because if there's anything you're wrong about, listeners care about, in my opinion, it is being the first among their friends to know about new Shanaid O'Connor books, and this is my gift to you today. Shanaid O'Connor is someone whose story people have been asking for from the beginning of this show's life, and it's a story that I've always wanted to do and been fascinated by.

It is always fascinating to me when an entire person's complex life and career are compressed into a single moment in time. Because we're talking about a 90s media story that was seen as a comedy at the time and parodied endlessly in late night jokes, we do, of course, have multiple trigger warnings for this show. Those things somehow always go together. And in this case, we're going to be talking about child abuse, parental abuse, we're going to be talking about the sex abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, and we're also

going to be talking about suicide. If that's going to be tough for you, then please listen with care if you want to proceed, and we are hopefully here to help you get through it. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here, here's the episode. Welcome to your wrong about the podcast where sometimes after almost five years, we finally give you the thing you've been asking for. And today, we are talking about Shanaid O'Connor with Alison McCabe.

Hello. Hello. Thanks for having me on. Thank you so much for being on. So Alison, you have a book out, what's it called, and when is it out? And can you tell people a little bit about that? Yeah, the book is Why Shanaid O'Connor Matters, and it is on University of Texas Press, and it will be coming out on May 23rd.

And now that we've done this episode, I get to go read my advanced readers copy that is in my living room because I no longer have to keep myself in the dark, and I'm so excited to read it. Thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much. This is a topic that I think people have been asking for since before the podcast even existed, like when the idea of doing a show about sort of correcting or expanding cultural myths kind of centered on the 80s and 90s, I think one of the first things you think about is

Shanaid O'Connor. And specifically, the cultural fossil she left behind, which was, to my memory, performing on Saturday Night Live and then tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II and saying, fight the real enemy, I think, and I believe this was in reference to Catholic Church sexual abuse scandals, although I don't know if the public knew that at the time. And I feel like Andrew Dice Clay had something to say about it. And I was born in 1988, and so what I was taught about this as a tween watching VH1 countdowns, which is something I talk about a lot on this show.

This is another topic that was in VH1's 100 Most Shocking Moments in Rock hosted by Mark McGrath. And I feel like it was treated as this notorious piece of video that could never be replayed and Lauren Michaels had forbidden it and it wasn't allowed to be seen by human eyes. And I'm looking at this and I'm like, what the fuck? That seems not to be a conspiracy theorist, but this makes me want to be a conspiracy theorist about it. And then also, I know that part of the tragedy of this is that whatever happened to her career

because of it, and it can't have been good, Sinead O'Connor is so much bigger than this moment. And I think that it's always harmful to a person when their life is right down to any moment. And that's what I bring to this, what Mark McGrath told me. Well, I will say that Mark McGrath is wrong about Sinead. I love it. I love it already.

Fightin' words with Mark McGrath. All right. Please take me on this ride. I should start from the outset by saying I was not a lifelong Sinead fan. My knowledge of Sinead was also pretty limited, like, shaped hair, had that big song Nothing compares to that was written by Prince, and of course the video where you see the tear. Great song. Great song.

And I wasn't really into pop music at the time when it came out, so I didn't really know much about her. Outside of that, that video was everywhere. And then of course, you know, what happened on Saturday Night Live with tearing the photo of the pope, which actually you're right in the sense that, like, you can kind of dig around and you can find on YouTube the whole video now. But for a long time you couldn't. And it just was like that still photograph of her, like looking angry, ripping a photograph.

And it's like you can probably find videos of people being beheaded on YouTube if you work around for long enough and catch it before it gets taken down. So like, this makes it feel like we were like, we can't let anyone see Sinead O'Connor, this very sincere young artist tearing up a picture of the pope because, like, it's harmful. And it's like, I kind of think that in a free society you should be able to tear up a picture of the pope on TV, like, am I, is this so out there? Well, I think to understand kind of what was happening, you have to kind of rewind

a few years and see how she got to 1992. Yeah. So, you know, I was working on a different story, having nothing to do with Sinead. And I happened to notice that there was this Fiona Apple video, which led me to multiple Fiona Apple videos. And the last one was her responding to a post that Sinead had made on Facebook in 2017 from a New Jersey travel lodge in which she was in deep emotional distress. And Sinead was, you know, talking about that in that video.

And Fiona was responding to that, reaching out saying, you're my friend and I support you, that kind of thing. I, you know, started to think, what happens to Sinead O'Connor after SNL? And I went back and I reexamined like her music. I didn't even know she kept making music. She made lots of great music after that. No one heard it. And as I went and did that, I realized the more I was looking at Sinead, the more I was

really seeing a reflection of the culture. And the more that I did that, the more I realized that I was also having to think about my relationships of that, both professionally as a journalist and also personally as a human. At what kind of stage in your life and journalism were you in when this topic appeared to you? And like, did you feel, did you like evaluate sort of your, your part in media on thinking about this? Yeah, I mean, definitely. I, I should say I did start out as a journalist, you know, well, way back in the beginning

of life, I thought I would be a musician, but then I went to college and it seemed like that was a safer thing to do and I was like studying gender theory and stuff like that. Cultural theory, got a PhD, taught at Yale for 14 years, but I was pretty unhappy actually doing that. People really try hard to get into Yale, like I tried really hard to get out of Yale. Just like Ron Reagan. I didn't, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, but I started doing these sort of local commentaries for the local NPR affiliate, just about like whatever was happening in

my life. And then they, you know, I was like, Oh, this sounds like kind of cool. I want to learn reporting. And then I started to do some sort of music stories for them. And then I ended up pitching to NPR and that was sort of how I made the path out of academia, you know, back to music through journalism. So yeah, I was pretty unhappy, but I was about to turn 40 at that time. And I was like, if I don't do it now, if I don't leave now, like I never will.

You'll sink deeper into the couch. Totally. I did have this, I found this exit ramp and that was, you know, radio and it really meant something to me. Now that said, when I first started working on this stuff, like most of the editors who you pitched stories to were like older white guys. And a lot of what they thought was important was stuff about older white guys. Yeah.

And like I, I have a similar experience where I was starting off as a freelance writer in like the early 20 teens, I guess, the teenies. And I had editors who I loved, who I worked with, who were mostly white women like myself, who were very junior and who had to, I think, report up to white men. And so they could go to bat for my ideas, but only to an extent. It never occurred to me that like this was why all of my ideas were deemed like who cares? Like what about Amy Fisher? Didn't we kind of fuck up the reporting on that one?

It was like, no, who cares? And like, who doesn't care about that? That's who doesn't care. Right. I, I started to kind of think about what can I do? And I started to arrive at the idea that journalism is really a lot about a kind of illusion of neutrality, you know, as opposed to just actual neutrality. Well, right.

Because like, don't you think that there is no actual neutrality? Like I think that you can get pretty close. I think you can get to like 93% neutrality, but you have to kind of be transparent about like, look, this is not neutral. And for me to present it is that is asking you to cultivate a higher degree of trust in me than is fair. And you know, and that's why I periodically should say like, look, I'm not claiming this is the truth.

This truth is this shows truth is the thoughts of some bimbo. So, you know, I think it's really important to be informed. I mean, I think that being informed like part of your role is you're going to hear stuff that maybe there's contradictions, there's omissions, there's, you know, there's all kinds of things happening and like partially your job is to judge and to try to make judgments about what is the best version of the story best, you know, accuracy is important. But at the same time, like, I feel a lot of times we were like, oh, curiosity, that's

the reporter's toolbox, you know, what about compassion? You know, I think compassion also has to be part of it too. And what's at stake, not just for the people in the story, but in you as the storyteller, I think recognizing that actually will probably get you closer to the thing that journalism calls neutrality than just this idea that anything that isn't universal is a problem. Right. And like, not to make everything about Tanya Harding, but like, what if everything is about Tanya Harding?

And like, I feel like the sort of mainstream media frenzies of the 90s were so interesting because it was like, respectable mainstream media could report on a big topic by being like, all these tabloids are reporting on this topic. Right. We're not reporting on the topic. We're reporting on the tabloids reporting on the topic. I think that still happens to some degree with social media, but, you know, Oh, of course.

Yeah. I think about Sinead. And I think this has covered well in Catherine Ferguson's documentary, Nothing Compares, which is now, you know, streaming on Showtime, you know, Sinead was coming out of Ireland at a certain time, you know, it was like a Catholic theocracy. And her mother was very, very devout and abusive, like horrifically abusive. And divorce wasn't legal, but her parents separated when she was about seven or eight. And her father spent years and eventually was awarded custody of the children, which

is also, you know, very, was very, very rare and still probably is. But you know, by that point, you know, she didn't do it a lot of hardship. And she was like, you know, pickpocketing people and shoplifting and acting out in all kinds of ways and, you know, eventually was sort of little Sinead O'Connor saying, you've got to pick a pocket or two like that, sent off to a Dickensian, you know, kind of Catholic girls school where an interesting thing happened, which was she had this nun called Sister Margaret who really saw on her like, wow, you know, she needs an emotional outlet. And she really loved her, not in spite of the fact that she was rebellious, but because

she was rebellious and she botchinated her first guitar and a book of Bob Dylan songs, which I'm going to get to in a second because that's going to be an important part of the story. And, you know, even like it's leather jacket, she won her from this sort of punk rock shop in Dublin. And what she was really doing is like giving her a chance to kind of have a self esteem, you know, an identity. Yeah.

And that makes me wonder, like as someone who identified, you know, from a young age as a musician yourself, like, I wonder about the sense of identity that music can give you as a teenager, kind of, because like, right, you're born and you grow up in a family and you grow up in a culture and it feels like music is one of the first things that you can turn to that's like, there are actually other, there are whole other worlds out there for you. Yeah. A hundred percent.

I talk about this in the book, but for me, it was like, I think the first thing was sort of like Blondie, you know, Debbie Harry was on the Muppet Show when I was 10. Oh, yeah. You know, I was just like mesmerized. Of course, I had Rockstar, fantasies that all came from that. And then later, of course, you know, MTV happens. But you know, here's the thing about Sinead, you know, her older brother, who's a well known novelist, you know, he brought home all these Bob Dylan records.

And for her, like, like the thing that saved her was like music and God, you know, and specifically Dylan during his Christian era, you know, he had all these albums that she would listen to like on repeat. And she really felt that she could be like Bob Dylan, like a protest singer that got it allowed her to survive. And that she was going to like use her voice to kind of be a voice for other people, right? You know, when her first album came out, it's 1987. There's no lane for a female protest singer.

There's no lane for female anger. Right. That comes a little later. That comes with like whole, that comes with Alanis Maris that does you ought to know. But you know, in 1987, that's not happening. Right. You can be horny as a woman. And I feel like every we were like, wow, women are allowed to be horny now.

It's legal for women to be horny. Incredible. We've come so far. But yeah, but women weren't allowed to be angry until probably what, 1991? Maybe not even today. I don't know if we can have that discussion. It's a great point. Certainly not in 87.

But in fact, when the album came out, which by the way, she had two different versions of the album cover, one of which she was singing and so her mouth was open, her hair shaved and her record label was like, we can't put that out in America. You look too angry. So instead they did a new one where she's like hands are crossed and her eyes are closed and she looks very different. So anger was a real problem at that time, but she had a lot of it. So righteous anger, say Augustine says, what, anger is the first step towards courage or

something like that. So that applied in her case. But like me, because I mean, she's a few years older than I am, but basically the same generation, you read Rolling Stone and you got these ideas like, oh, you didn't really see gender because women weren't really in there that much. She were like, I could be like John Lennon. I could be like Bob Dylan. You weren't sitting there going, aside from the fact that I'm a woman, it wasn't a conscious

thing. Right. Yeah, I think that there's a special experience in growing up and kind of forgetting all the reasons why you can't do all the things you want to do because of your gender. And like, you know, the time before, you know, if it happens, you're like, rudely brought down to earth about it, but like, because it's one thing to not be able to express anger kind of as a woman making music in a way that's widely distributed. But there's so much else that that also makes true.

And one of them is that like, you can't really have any political consciousness because how can you do anything in protest without anger being available to you? Definitely. So like in her case, she has this, she's getting these lessons from at the girl's school, she's getting these lessons. They brought in a teacher for her, teacher's brother's getting married, she invited Jeanade, who's like 13, 14, somewhere like that, you know, an adolescent to perform at the wedding. Just so happens that the guy who's getting married, that's the groom is the brother

of the music teacher. He's in a band that has these deep connections to you too, and everything that's happening in Ireland around that time. And you know, it's the start of her, it's the start of her career, but it's also the start of her idea that she could be somebody. Like that's her identity is wrapped up in that. So I think like, you know, she gets a record deal when she's still really, really young. You know, her first album comes out in 1987.

She fired the producer who was working on it, somebody, the record label appointed, but he wanted to give it kind of like a Van Morrison sort of sound and like soft and ethereal kind of mystical kind of that era of a Van Morrison. Right. How old is she in 1987? Well, let's see, she's born 66. So I'm going to say she's like 20, 21, something like that, I'll have to do the math not to be wrong, but you know, young.

I still really struggle with being like, Hey, this isn't working out creatively. We shouldn't do this project together or like, it is in a sense, sometimes easier to stand up for your work than for yourself and you can trick yourself because your work is yourself and look at that. You stood up for yourself, but that I'm very impressed by that. She called him like a fucking old hippie or something and she told her they wanted her to be sexy because that was the way you got your thing going. So that was where she had a mohawk at first and then she had it shaved completely and

you know, got rid of the whatever, you know, she was wearing and started wearing sort of the whole like thing. You picture her in like the Doc Martens boots and the ripped up jeans and the black halter top. What happens is she's starting to kind of put together her own identity outside of being just this abused child, you know, she wants to be somebody powerful and represent that and you know, she gets pregnant as she's making the record. She has a relationship with the drummer and the record label wants her to end the pregnancy

because they tell her how you're going to tour and you're going to throw everything in the trash and we spent all this money on the record. She's like, fuck you. So that was huge and all those songs on that first album, which was called The Lion and the Cobra. It's a musical memoir. They're so powerful, but they're going to try to figure out how do we, how do we put her out there into a world where she doesn't really conform to like what we think of as

a sort of pop princess and she's terrible at interviews. She's very shy at this time. The interviews are awkward. And I'm sure they're asking her like wonderfully asinine questions like they always do. Like so. Sinead. Totally. And so what happens is it's on college radio and she gets broken really on MTV because

even though she's really bad at interviews, she teams up with this guy, John Mayberry, who's a director who can really represent like what makes her so powerful and so different and her voice is incredible. Yes. She gets some traction. 89 Grammys is the first time she's on US prime time television. She had once been on like David Letterman before that, but this is her first appearance on, on like the whole world is watching.

This is when people watch the Grammys. So. Yeah. And she used to be like, you would be like, Oh, it's maybe Metallica or something. Is this, is this for the nothing compares to you? No. This is before that. This is she's going to, she's up for like best female rock vocal performance.

She's nominated. She doesn't get that. She doesn't get the award, but she's there to perform that night. She's doing Mandinka. That's the video that Fiona Apple is reacting to. And here's the thing. From the very start of her career, even before she broke and became famous, she was very, very interested in rap music and had on her first US tour had local rap artist opening

all the dates and enlisted MC Light, who was just 16 at the time and had like one song to do a collaboration with her on, I want your hands on me, which was a big video on MTV. And in the 89 Grammys was the first time the Academy was going to present an award for rap, but, but they weren't going to televised the award. The idea was that, you know, at first they wanted to dismiss rap as sort of like either a fad or dangerous, okay, but it got to the point where they couldn't ignore it. So they were going to do the award, but they weren't going to televised it.

And that was not okay with her. So when she appeared, she wore in her hair, which was shaved, like almost totally bald, but it was the logo for public enemy, which is, you know, the guy in the crosshairs, which Chuck D said represents the black man in America in her hair, like the big yellow, there it is, anybody can see it. And that was her expression of solidarity with the artists who had been, you know, erased from the program, not just the ones who were nominated, but by extension, all the artists whose videos were not played on MTV, they were not on the radio with other pop music,

even though the genre of rap was popular. And she's like forcing them to be televised in a way because like the camera can't show her without showing the public enemy logo. And that was, you know, that was her first thing. She could have just gone that night and like lip-synced, you know, just like bowed politely and, you know, yes, I'm here to be a pop star, but she didn't. This is what made her great, but this is also what made her dangerous. This is what I feel like in a past life, she would have been like a labor organizer, you

know? Something, but not a pop star. Yeah. And you know what? People are watching this and there's like not just girls and women, but a lot of girls and women like all around the country going like, whoa, it was really powerful because she just didn't give a shit. I feel like the way that people are kept in line normally is like, well, like this sea

is very choppy and it's very cold and this lifeboat is very tippy and you'd better just like go with the flow and not realize that you've been sexually assaulted because you just have to keep letting it happen to do your job or whatever it is. And that Shanaida O'Connor in response to this is almost like, because the situation is so precarious, I will give less of a shit. Right. Now you're talking about something having to do with the psychology of abuse, right? Which is the idea that like if it happens to you, just shut up.

Don't tell anybody, nobody's going to believe you and even if they believe you, everything's just going to be worse once it's out in the open and it's all going to come back onto you. So just carry on. Right. And it's based on a philosophy of like no one can ever be in power but the abuser and like you can't imagine such a world which is like reasonable, like it makes total sense to like end up with that belief system and that's how we protect ourselves.

But then it's like you end up here an adult and there's a record label and you got to and somehow, yeah, it's, and I feel like it can also be a direct response to abuse to be like, you know, just to come with full force at everything that resembles that in your life as an adult. 100%. Let's let her talk about it. Please welcome Shanade O'Connor. I believe very much that the music industry as a whole operates mainly, it's concerned

mainly with material success and a lot of artists do, I think, are responsible for encouraging the belief among people that material success will make them happy and I think one of the ways that the industry encourages commercial success and materiality is by having award ceremonies which very much honor those who have achieved material success rather than people who have told the truth or who have done anything to pass information to people or to inspire people or to, you know, just be truthful about anything. So 90 comes around, now she's got the huge album I do not want what I haven't got. This is the one that's going to launch her into the stratosphere of superstardom.

And the tier she sheds in the music video for the single Nothing compares to you was like remembering her mother who has now died, she died in 1985 on a car crash on the way to mass. And that's right before Sinead signs this contract and puts out the first album. So it's the memory of the mother that provokes the tier, no one knew that. Also everybody made a huge deal out of the idea that it was a Prince song. Even though, you know, it wasn't a major hit for Prince and unlike some other artists, she just had nothing to do with Prince except for just it was a business transaction to

cover the song. She was not a protege of Prince, he had nothing to do with her recording of the song, nothing except for just like cashing the check that was his role. But yeah, she becomes this massive, massive superstar on that video. And she's not going to let up on being political. So like she's invited on to SNL for the first time in 90. But Andrew Dice Clay, who's known for his misogynistic and homophobic and, you know, generally not nice guy humor, she's like, oh, hell no, if he's the host, I'm not coming

on. Huh, it is like, I think one of the really like time capsules of 90 things is like, yes, Andrew Dice Clay was like this incredibly divisive figure. Like I remember, I remember like Nora Dunne refused to be on the episode of Saturday Night Live that he hosted. I am a set of Law and Order, which I would love to see Andrew Dice play on Law and Order. And Nora Dunne is the prosecutor. Yes.

And that's the same episode. So they accused Shanae of censoring Andrew Dice Clay. Same year, she has a show coming up at the Garden State Art Center in New Jersey. Now, with this show, there's a couple of different versions of the story. I think the details matter less than the emotional truth of the story. And that is, it was like a kind of thing that they did before the show is playing the national anthem. So these two people showed up posing as reporters.

They were not reporters. And they asked her, how do you feel about the national anthem? And Shanae being Shanae, depending on which version of the story you believe, either said, I prefer not to have it or hell no, it has nothing to do with my music. Well, yeah. And it was this whole like, oh my God, she refuses to have the national anthem played. She's not going to do the show. She actually did the show and there was no actual thing that happened.

But it got blown out of this whole, here she is now censoring the national anthem. She's ungrateful for her success in America. You know, she's this. She's that. She's other thing. She hates America. Frank Sinatra, who was playing the same venue the following week, you know, threatened to kick her ass.

Frank, as if. As if you could. Well, yes, as if he could. And you start to get the whole narrative about Shanae being this sort of angry, you know, ungrateful sort of, we gave her all this pop star and I'm in like, this is how she acts. And what it feels like is that she's being deemed angry, like I'm sure she has plenty of anger, as you've said, but also in this case and in so many others, they're like,

wow, all these men are so spitting mad at her. She must be threatening them. And it's like, no, she's just sitting there having an opinion, you idiots. Right. So by the time 92 rolls around, we've taken a while to get there, but by the time 92 rolls around, it's like, it's got, you know what I mean? Like the cancellation is inevitable. Not that night.

It would have happened because of everything you're saying. So she had, it was kind of more well known in Ireland than it was here at that time about the child abuse crisis in the Catholic church. And you know, she was all fired up about it. Now the picture of the Pope actually belonged to her mother. It was from the Pope's 1979 visit to Ireland. And it was like her mother's sort of prized possession that she kept, you know, kind of above her like dresser.

Oh wow. Wow. Wow. When the mom died, Sinead took the photo, which to her represented, you know, lies and abuse. And she knew at some point that she would destroy it to make a statement. Now she has this giant platform on SNL. Just like we said, people used to watch the Grammys. People used to watch, people used to watch SNL by the many millions.

Yeah. I don't watch SNL. I watch like the clip compilations that fans put together on YouTube because I, it's a long show and life is short. And I just can't watch a whole episode of Saturday Night Live, you guys. I'm going to, we don't even know how long our natural life spans are. But this was monoculture. This was when, you know.

Yeah. These were the days, my friends. You know, everybody was tuned in to see this and she knew it. Now, when she was also a kid, she'd seen Bob Geldof and the Boomtown rats go on top of the pops and they were celebrating, knocking off, we've talked about Grisa a little earlier, you know, that song, like, I think it was Summer Loving. You know, it was like the, it had been at the top of the charts, but Bob Geldof and the Boomtown rats knocked it off with their song.

And to celebrate, they, they tore up these photos of John Travolta. And you know, when you're a kid watching these things, it's, you know, you're like, very impressionable. You're like, oh man, that's so kickass, you know. Yes. And I also was imagining for a second that the Boomtown rats covered Summer Loving. That would be all right. That would be cool.

But I think like her idea was, yeah, the Boomtown rats are like a band that's about something. You know, it's not just the sort of pop entertainment thing. That's awesome. And it's stuck with her. It's also a classic, like, person from not America in America. Yeah. And like, it's, it's a, it's a top of the pops reference, you guys. And we're like, what?

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Anything not made within our borders. Like literally nothing. Yeah. And then she's also got added onto that. She's got all this Rasta imagery, you know, on the stage that night when she's performing

because she's also making a statement that most people miss, you know, about the church's role also in perpetuating slavery and racism more broadly. But the issue is that she's singing Bob Marley's song War from 1976. It's not a song that's on her album. But it is a song about oppression. And she tells the producers ahead of time, she's going to change some of the lyrics. So it's about the oppression of children, which is child abuse, but she doesn't tell them everything.

She doesn't tell them everything she has planned. So she goes on for her first set. She does a song from her record that's out. Nope. It's another album that's come out in 92. It's like show tunes, literally. It's show tunes and standards that were meaningful, meaningful to her as a child. And she, but then when she comes back for the second song, she's, yeah, almost all the

way through. And then she has to make the statement she thinks she thinks that's what she's there to do. Right. She pulls out the photo of the Pope. She says the word evil, fight the real enemy, she says, and she tears up the photo, blows out some candles on stage and like leaves in the whole world gasps. Yeah.

Now, it has to be said, she didn't tell anybody what she was doing. So it was kind of hard for anybody really to decipher it, right? Right. Like it didn't occur to me until I was told that this was the message that she was communicating. I was at the reception at the time. There's a couple of things. I wonder what would happen if like a male artist at the same time did it. Of course, it would be a scandal, but what would it have been the same?

Like what if Bono did it specifically? Yeah. I mean, this is what happens I think in 1992 when women talk and they tell you something that people don't want to hear is like kill the messenger. You know, something I never realized or appreciated before is that Sinead O'Connor and this is like it feels like she sees herself as an activist working through music. Yeah, absolutely. She says that moment on SNL re-railed rather than derailed her career.

One week after SNL, Joe Pesci is hosting the show. What a weird cast for this whole thing. It's like, I love how the people who comment on this politically come down to like whoever SNL has booked these weeks. Well, he comes on for his monologue and he wants to talk about what happened. He says, if I had been hosting, he starts to brag to the audience while I would have given her such a smack. I would have grabbed her by the, and the word he says next is actually eyebrows because

it's cut on her hair, you know, being shaved. But if you heard it, you would of course think about Trump and think that he was going to say another word. And I wanted that actually to be what I led with and cut the tape right there. Because my point wasn't that Pesci was a misogynist because we even know that he wrote those lines. It was that the culture was misogynist and that's why when he said that, they erupt in applause and laughter and Sinead gets turned into a punchline.

Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Pesci. Thank you very much. It's great to be here hosting Saturday Night Live. There was an incident on the show last week. Sinead O'Connor tore up a picture of the Pope and I thought that was wrong. So I asked somebody to paste it back together. Joe, you have that picture? There.

I mean, why should I let it bother me, right? It wasn't my show, it was Tim Robbins' show. But I'll tell you one thing, she was very lucky it wasn't my show. Because if it was my show, I would of gave it such a smack. I would of grabbed it by her eyebrows. I would of, okay, I'm done, I'm not talking about it anymore. We have a great show. It's Columbus Day, spin doctors are here, don't go away, we'll be right back.

And that this is what we did in 1992, you know, we were just like, abusing women, ha-ha-ha-ha. Yeah. I love it. And also, you know, and that like you just think about like Saturday Night Live is like, I know they have, they're working, you know, quickly, but like this is not a small show. Like it's not easy to get a dodgy joke like through to performance, you know. They cut the Stuart sketch for God's sake. I hope non-controversially, we can all agree, even the church has agreed now at this point

that the abuse crisis was real. It did happen. Yeah. It was a global atrocity. It's not like she was talking about nonsense that wasn't actually like something that was going on that we all now know to be true. And in fact, you know, a decade later, the Boston Globe does all these investigative articles and they get posters and then people make a movie called Spotlight, I believe,

and that gets a bunch of awards. A movie my mother took me to see during the brief period when I was going to be a lawyer and was like, would you defend one of those priests over lunch? And to which I responded, mom, on Christmas. Yeah, right. It's worth pointing out because like people, many adults are walking around today who have no living memory of the moment when the story broke. This was, you know, about the same time as 9-11 and like people didn't know, right?

It's the same thing as so much else where like the knowledge exists. Like people are aware, but it's just like news outlets are not pursuing it. It's not, it's like the information is like available, but it has not yet sort of caught fire and made the rounds and created public awareness and sort of people doing the digging to produce like substantiated accounts that prove to doubters what's going on. Well, that's the thing, look, the reporters were courageous and their meticulous reporting and documentation, you know, they earned the Pulitzer, they definitely, it was important what they did, the work, I don't mean in any way to disparage, but it was also the courage

of survivors to come forward and tell their stories. You know, without that, there's no, there's nothing happens. You know, it had a, and those people also risked incredible backlash, you know. Some people are very angry and upset that they talked about this was like, oh my God, you know, because that's, you know, it's a 10-year period between Sinead and SNL and when the Boston Club article starts to come out. But now, like from the our point of view in 2023, she was trying to sound the alarm about something that was happening and in fact, was evil.

You know, the other part of this is Pesci comes on the week after and then after that, she's supposed to go be part of this show at Madison Square Garden, which is a tribute to Bob Dylan. She's planning to sing this song from his Christian era called like, I believe in you and it's, I hope I have the title right, but it's really a song about not just Dylan's faith in God, but like her faith in Dylan. And when she comes out that night to perform, she's introduced by Chris Christopherson as like an artist who's synonymous with integrity or something like that.

But then this is Madison Square Garden. It's full of thousands and thousands of people. Half the crowd is booing and half the crowd is trying to drown out the booze and the song is meant to be performed as a whisper and she can't, she can't do it. So you see her like on stage, it's heartbreaking to watch. And then instead she goes and starts reciting war again, breaks down in tears and like is escorted by Christopherson off the stage. And that is the moment when really she's canceled.

In between there were groups, they're going to steamroller her albums outside of Chrysalis's office in your Rockefeller center and celebrities are weighing in. We loved doing this. We love steamrollering albums. Like who has access to a steamroller? Who is doing, is there a guy who's like just waiting for the next musician to get canceled in the 90s? But you know, so many celebrities mocked her during that period.

So many celebrities. You know, Madonna was asked what she thought and uncharacteristically said, well, she has a problem with the Catholic Church was probably a better way to, you know, talk about, and she did. She published an open letter and when she talked about her history of abuse in detail and said all the things that were kind of in the background and that did not, as you might imagine, make people go, oh, okay, then. Well, right.

Yeah. Cause people never, oh God. Yeah. And do you think that like, that the Madison Square Garden appearance was like, I feel like the way these narratives would unfold at the time, I don't know if it's still true today. I think that everything is so much faster that it's harder to quantify, but like, again, she's tiny hearting as an example, that case as a media circus fascinates me because it

had a very like hot and fast burnout, right? It was exactly six weeks long because it began with Nancy Kerrigan being assaulted in Detroit and it ended with the end of the Olympics. And then, you know, there was kind of like a half life dribble, but really it was like the American public was allowed to be hyper fixated on something for six weeks and then move on and it felt like the verdict was delivered when Nancy Kerrigan won a silver medal, came very close to winning gold, complicated judging decision there. Tanya Harding could be read as like bowing under the pressure and skating badly because

she was a bad person and bad people don't skate to their potential. I feel like that's something we believe is America. And it feels like that's similar where it's like, we are like, we've successfully broken her spirit. Great work. Let's move on, Chaps. You know, I think a lot of people get fixated on the moment of the tearing of the photograph, but that's really one tiny moment in a much like more expensive timeline.

And when I tried to tell that story, after she published her memoir, when I tried to tell that story, like I realized, well, I'm having a hard time pushing up against some of the same kind of resistance that I might have been like, how much has really changed in the cultural scaffolding from 1992 to the time, you know, in 2021 when I'm trying to reframe this, because now we know all the stuff. So I wanted to bring that in. So I did go back and look at the music press at that time and after, because what happens is she keeps putting out music, great music, I mean, really interesting music, and you

never hear about it because from that moment on, really, all you see is the tabloid headlines, different controversial things she said and done, blah, blah, blah, but I would say this. My argument isn't that Sinead O'Connor is perfect. It's that she has a right to be imperfect as do we all because that's what it means to be a human. Yes. Although to be fair, male musicians never fuck up in public and recover from it. I don't know about that.

Yes. Well, right. I feel like that's kind of the whole thing and that we love our male music. Like Mick Jagger is like, has he ever made a good decision? I don't know. But that's not our business and we love him. We love to see him bouncing around like a little demon out there. And the way that he and Marianne Faithful were treated after they were rated is a great

example of that because they were literally in the same room. Yes, just with this, without alleging a conspiracy theory, I feel like the easy kind of explanation for so many of these things, especially in media, which is the part of it I understand to some extent is that you don't have to conspire to all have the same motive and the motive is money and the way to get money. One of them is to be like that big Sinead O'Connor, who you all hate already is up to something else. Let's talk about that.

She also happens to make music sometimes, but that is not our business. At that point, she's had this one hit album. It's a massive hit, but it's one hit album. So I think maybe some other stars, then again, I would say male and maybe female to some extent. If you're making a lot of money over a long period of time for a lot of people, they'll put up with a lot of worse behavior from that person. Right.

Of course. And then there is the third element of it, which is she is a survivor of horrific abuse. She's been totally upfront and transparent about how it's impacted her emotionally and mentally. And sometimes what you're seeing in the comments that she's made over the years and the actions that she's done over the years that have drawn the most controversy is that she's often trying to sort of, Joe Pesci said he would have gave her such a smack. She's trying to smack back against the shaming and the silencing.

And most of all hurting herself often when she does that. But I think in a way, we need to talk about that. We need to talk about mental illness. We need to talk about how the public expression of trauma is itself sometimes manifested in like acting in ways that people are like, Whoa, what is she doing? What if we like listened and tried to understand what was coming from and supported her? And yeah, it wouldn't just have had a different impact on her career, but it would have had a different impact on us as a society.

You know, she's trying to call it racism. She was trying to call it sexism. She was trying to talk about child abuse. She was trying to talk about mental health and a lot of people are interviewing her like, What about that haircut? Let's talk about the haircut, you know, like, can we go to that? You know, like they didn't really want to have that conversation. Yeah.

And I feel like when there's a real phenomenon where if someone is in the media and what they're exposing is like both their own trauma and or trauma that is, you know, befalling others maybe in a systemic way, it's almost a ritual for us to like witness those figures and then bat them away. And like, I kind of knew that this episode would be like a past year wrong about all-stars because like I'm also reminded of Lorena Bobbitt, right, where like she cut her husband's penis off and checked it out the window of her car. And then the police found it and reattached it to John Wayne Bobbitt.

What a tramp. Yeah. And I don't begrudge him getting his penis back, but it's always fascinating when there's like an incredible effort for something that kind of shows what we find valuable or like. I was having a Wikipedia night the other night, you know, as you do. And I was reading about how there's like this light bulb that's been burning continuously for like over a hundred years that's in a fire station and somewhere in California. It's like tons of people have written about it.

There's like a preservation society for it. It's like been moved at like everyone on some level agrees like this light bulb. We got to keep this. We got to see how long this light bulb can burn for and we're undertaking extraordinary efforts to protect this light bulb or to reattach John Wayne Bobbitt's penis. And they're both important. I want him to have a penis, but also like think about, I don't know, like how many human beings are treated with less respect than that light bulb or that penis.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. You know. And that Lorena Bobbitt basically that that story was about like, wow, like what manner and extremeness and incredible and enduring length of abuse can get someone to a place where they are so desperate that like the most reasonable thing they can think of to do is cut off their husband's dick and chuck it into a field. And what we fixated on as a culture was like, we just made like one billion jokes about

it. And I can't quite begracuss that because it is, it is funny. Ever found it took it to the hospital in a big bite container filled with ice and like, that's very funny. It could never not be funny, but like the most of the story was very sad and we found ways to just not witness that at all. And I think that's like a ritual that we do with these with stories like these. So yeah, now we're circling back to anger and then the question of like who gets validated

right, who gets believed structurally. This is a reflection of where journalism is right now, right, which is like, what can be told, who can do the telling, you know, what risks are there for the journalist in being transparent or even openly acknowledging how they relate to a story. I mean, something I've definitely have been grappling with and thinking about this because I guess, you know, as I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, I didn't just report it. I, you know, I also talked about how it affected me personally, how I related to it.

It's risky. I mean, to me, those felt really risky choices to make, but I also felt like if I don't, nothing will ever change. It's not a guarantee. It will change if I do do it, but is a guarantee that it won't change if I don't. Yeah. Well, that's so beautifully put. I love that.

And I, I feel like I should write that down and put it where I can see it every day. And that really speaks to like the coverage that you're talking about where it's like if people were to step outside of this alleged objectivity, you know, they could be like, Shanaida O'Connor tore up a picture of the Pope today. We found this very unnerving because we're all supposed to kind of believe in the Pope. Like, cause it, and it's considered like, even if you're not Catholic, you're like, well, he's like, he's a Christian religious leader. We have to be kind of nice to him.

And if people alleged horrible things against the Catholic church, then like, you know, I think there is a basic sense in the world where like powerful institutions of whatever kind fundamentally kind of want to protect each other unless they're at war or want the same thing because it's like power is sympathetic to power. And I feel like if people were admitting where they were coming from, we would hear that. Well, besides being asked about her hair constantly, of course, after SNL, she was asked about SNL constantly.

And she said many, many, many times she did not mean to attack the man or the faith, but the corruption of the institution. That was what she was doing in that moment. Right. They keep asking, oh, is you want to apologize to anybody for what you did? Besides that being completely the question of whether anyone owes her an apology. Yeah. Including Mark McGrath.

Yes. I don't know. I'm sure. Yeah. Who knows? I don't remember that segment particularly well, but like the idea that what she had done was like unshowable was just like, come on, you guys. And yet we can't get past it.

You don't even mean like unshowable from now on, forevermore, you will not be able to separate Sinead O'Connor and that moment, right? So the only thing that you can do is provide a different perspective on that moment. So like when people say, for example, like in the recording industry, like if we just had more women, not unless we actually make systemic change to the industry itself in the way that it values or devalues people, because otherwise you're going to select for the people who are willing to uphold. Right.

Sinead O'Connor seems so remarkable again because she is running so counter to that survival approach of, you know what, you just got to keep your head down and eat shit. And this is how we, yeah, go so long without talking about what everybody knows but can't talk about or won't. Yes. Are things changing? That's the question that comes up. I would throw it to you.

Are things changing? Oh my God. Are things changing? I do, I think so. Even if you can't believe things are getting better and I think that might be a Pollyanna-ish thing to say, things at least move around laterally, you know, cultural knowledge of things changes and people change and grow. I mean, I do feel like people today in a kind of remarkable way, given what we know about

human history are like expressing a lot of interest in emotional well-being and in like learning how to be healthy and in raising their children to feel loved and happy and not necessarily to like, I don't know, I was at the, I went to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry recently, which was very exciting. And they have a thing called moldorama, I believe, where you watch like plastic being injected into a mold and they make a little model for you. So I got like five of them. That's how we have historically made our children, right?

You like have a child, if you're a boomer, then it's like your parents probably brought you up with the expectation that like they were going to decide who you were going to be and you would then be that, like that was the culturally dominant idea. And I'm not saying it isn't now, but like no one I know who has kids is fixated on at least outwardly the idea of raising them to be a certain kind of person. They worry about keeping them safe. What's going to happen with the climate? Other kinds of people, right?

They worry, they worry about like these huge apocalypse problems, but like when it comes to actually raising their children, what they care about is like loving them and like helping them to be, have happiness and mental health and to help others. And like, I think we're really trying. I think that maybe in the face of how bad things are in so many ways were, I think there's that can really inspire us and force us to, to truly love each other. Boy, I did not think I was going to get this optimistic, I thought, but here we are. This is what I really think, honestly.

I agree with you in the sense that, you know, we have other mechanisms for, you know, social media has obviously positives and negatives, but it didn't exist then. There was no mechanism. You were in the tabloids, like it just got repeated, like you couldn't really do anything necessarily. Yeah, there could be no countervailing force. Right. Also, again, you know, things like podcasting, you know, you're, the gatekeeping is changing.

Even in the industry, you know, people are like, I don't want to be on a major label. What's that going to do for me? You know, like, they don't have to, they're like, I'm on SoundCloud, I have everything I need. Yeah, I mean, you know, the economic model still has to be worked out, but I think that we have more and also, you know, people are talking more about experiences they've had and that's the whole basis of something like me too, right, or other social movements that are concurrent.

But Sinead had no instinct for self-preservation, you know, career-wise, and she paid a terrible price for it. But it's not to say that what she did didn't count, like I think it did, and it did make possible the idea that other people could kind of see, oh, somebody's done that, and yes, they had a lot of pushback. But the point is that they did it, not just that they had the pushback. And I do think that now younger people will be like, it's kind of hard to explain. I have kids, like when I was working on this story in this book, I tried to talk to them

about Sinead and they were like, why are people what, and that's good, like that makes me feel hopeful. Yeah, which I love, I agree, I think it's like when we hear something about the Victorians, you know, we're like, oh my God, people literally did that. Amazing. Yeah, that's the reason to keep telling the story, right, so that people understand that that did happen. Yeah.

We need to acknowledge it, and that's the only way we can move forward and heal from it, right, as a culture. Totally. So I do feel like, you know, I think that's what made her dangerous. People are like, I don't mind daughter to see that and think she can do whatever. You know, like, same with, you know, the idea of power is it's not just top down, right? It's more like an electrical current and sometimes little surge and sometimes there'll be an interruption in the flow.

And sometimes the system that's designed for something not to happen actually enables that thing to happen. Yeah. Yeah. And then if someone has made an example of in this way, another one of the effects is like to show people that this was clearly something that was very powerful because people were so afraid of it. Right.

So this goes to the idea of like, what is the artist's role in society? It's like a giant question, but it's actually not as big as it may appear. I mean, artists are not entertainers. You know, entertainers entertain. Artists are there, I think, to get you to think something about something, not think a certain way necessarily, but just to have the ability to think, what do I think? You know, like just to have the question of yourself or to feel, what am I feeling right now?

And then I wonder what's provoking that feeling. That's really what I think a true artist does, and that is what I think Shanae did in the 90s. That's what she's continuing to do. She has a new song part of Outlander. She's doing the theme music. It's coming out the summer. Oh, I love that.

She's, you know, I think a great artist, I would encourage people to seek out some of that music. It's really good, but also that she is a human and not a punchline and not a punching bag. And the more we can recognize that about her, I think the kinder we can be to ourselves Yes. Wow. Can you, what has her life been like since? Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. So like, as I said, through the 90s, you know, she would kind of bounce back and forth between sort of trying to come back and then having some setbacks in her personal life for a lot of that time. And then, you know, it's kind of heartbreaking because around end of 2019, beginning of 2020, somewhere around there, she'd converted or reverted is the word I guess that I should use to Islam and has a new name, but still performs under Sinead O'Connor. The name translates to Truth or Witness, which I think says a lot.

And she was doing these quiet, you know, sort of not, I wouldn't really say it was like a big comeback tour. It was more like she really wants to perform. She is like happiest, I think, in some ways when she's doing that, when she's just her in the audience and not all the bullshit around it. Because they're mostly on the US West Coast, these tours, this tour dates, sold out mostly with fans, not industry insiders, you know, people who came out to see her, she's performing in a hijab, she's got a small backing band, and her voice now, you know, is weathered

and earned. You know, to me, it's kind of, it's beautiful. It's kind of like when you listen to like early Joni Mitchell and then you come back and you see you're doing like doing both sides now later on, you're like, damn, she had it, but now she owns it, you know? Yeah. I don't know how I feel about Joni doing these songs, but then, you know, COVID happened. They're planning to expand the tour to coincide with the 30th anniversary, but I do not want

what I haven't got, but that was scrapped by the pandemic. And then she went into treatment, mental health treatment, also substance abuse stuff in a longer term program. But at that time, they announced that this long in the works memoir was going to come out in June 2021, it did. And yeah, she came and did like press interviews for it, but I think it's hard, you know, because you get asked the same stuff over and over and over again. What about your hair?

What about SNL? Blah, blah, blah. Like it's depressing. You want to tell your story so that you can move forward. And I think that some people were great. Some people not so great under the pressure. She made an announcement about retiring and then took it back and then put it out again. And then a really tragic thing happened, which was one of her kids took his own life.

He had suffered from I guess some mental health issues himself and he took his own life. And to me, you know, that was just devastating. You know, as I mentioned, I have kids. I think losing a kid just like losing a kid that way and losing a kid when you're a mother who never really had a mother in any functional sense, like the mothering stakes get raised really high. I can speak my own experience, just unbelievably tragic, you know, understandably after that happened, she has kind of been out of the public eye, which I think is a good thing.

And I hope that she's getting the support that she needs and deserves. And you know, this Outlander thing just recently was announced. So I think there is a kind of turn now the documentary came out, my book is coming out. Because her story isn't done yet, we have a lot more to hear from her and I hope that we will. Maybe this is the sort of you're wrong about of all this is that people, you know, we all hear about them in a moment in time and they end up kind of frozen in that millisecond for us and that the part of the truth of human beings that these kinds of stories obscure

a little bit is that like your story is still going. I imagine it can be very difficult to have your music or your art, whatever it is, remain a source of something that can give a lot to you and that you can process your life through even after it has gotten plugged into a machine the way that it did for her. And to me, it means a lot to hear that, you know, hopefully it's, you know, like her music is still with her, like that wasn't taken from her at any time. You know, I interviewed her for NPR when I did that story and I mean, she, you know, she is a very emotionally honest person in a way that few people are.

She's hopeful. I feel that she's actually despite all these things that have happened, she's a hopeful person and I don't think that comes through so much in the way that she's represented. Right, right. And that like anger I feel like is about hopefulness to be able to be angry is to be able to believe that things could be different than they are. How has fame treated you? How has fame been for you?

It can be a little isolating, I suppose, because, you know, people see you as something other than ordinary and actually you are just ordinary and then you're kind of constantly trying to strive to be ordinary and do ordinary things and show how completely ordinary you are. You know what I mean? So it can be a weird one. I think money can be isolating. I mean, your own new album, it sounds happy. Yeah.

Why is everybody surprised about that? No, I'm not surprised, but it's just, I just noticed that it has this happy sound. Yeah, let's say I'm 46 years old now, that's a lot easier to be alive, I think I'm 46 and it is 26, isn't it? Do you sometimes kick yourself for being vocal? No, never. It seems like everybody else is doing it for me. And that is our episode.

Allison also mentioned a recent Shenandoah Connor song, The Wolf is Getting Married, and we wanted to share some of those lyrics with you because it's nice to know that she's up too lately. I used to have no wolves around me, I was too free if that's possible to be. No safety is what I mean, no solid foundation to keep me, but the sun's peeping out of the sky where there used to be only gray. The wolf is getting married and he'll never cry again. Your smile makes me smile, your laugh makes me laugh, your joy gives me joy, your hope

gives me hope, and the sun's peeping out of the sky where there used to be only gray. The wolf is getting married and he'll never cry again. If you like hearing us talk about music, you can find a bonus episode on Patreon or Apple Plus subscriptions that Carolyn and I did just this month talking about music. What is it? How does it work? Is a pop song due to us and how and where does all the power packed into those three minutes come from exactly?

We solve these eternal mysteries and more, and yes, we do talk about Michael Bolton. Speaking of my adventures with Carolyn, we are going to be back on the road starting on April 23rd for more live shows along with our beloved friend Jamie Loftus. And we will be talking about bimbos. We will be talking about mall food. We will be talking about love and justice and all the maligned things under the sun. There are still tickets for some of our shows toward the end of our tour. If you want to come see us, we added a second show in Brooklyn on April 28th.

We're going to be in Philadelphia on April 30th, and we're going to be in Burlington, Vermont on May 16th. So if you've been putting off a visit to any of these places, you know, maybe this will send you over the edge. Have a water ice. Come see the show. Thank you as always to this show's producer, Carolyn Kendrick, who is also the Russell from Stillwater to my William Miller as we travel around America.

Thank you for listening. See you in two weeks.