the boss eats lunch. sinéad o’connor, chips, god, sex, and the fine art of not shutting the fuck up.

originally published for uncut magazine; august 2014. dublin looks like somebody has dragged a wet gray sheet across the sky and forgotten to take it down. rain works the windows. buses hiss along the street. somewhere beyond all of this the irish sea is beating the coast senseless and the gulls are screaming about whatever gulls have been furious about since the beginning of fucking time. and sinéad o’connor is sitting across from me eating lunch. this seems inadequate somehow. you spend twenty seven years watching somebody get turned into a symbol. saint. lunatic. heretic. victim. feminist. troublemaker. genius. blasphemer. bald woman. angry woman. difficult woman. the woman who sang that prince song. the woman who ripped up the pope. the woman who apparently exists so newspapers can periodically decide whether she is courageous or insane. then you meet her and she wants to know whether you are going to eat your chips. i tell her yes. she looks disappointed. this is sinéad o’connor in 2014. forty seven years old. ten studio albums into one of the strangest careers pop music has ever attempted to survive. she has a new record called i’m not bossy, i’m the boss. it was originally called the vishnu room. then she heard about the ban bossy campaign and decided the other title said something useful about the bullshit vocabulary applied to women who know what they want. the record arrives august 11 on nettwerk, produced by john reynolds, her longtime collaborator and former husband. twelve songs. love. sex. god. men. women. damage. desire. motherhood. survival. all the usual light lunchtime conversation. (Grammy) she looks different from the sinéad preserved in the public imagination. that frozen 1990 image is still apparently lodged in everybody’s skull. shaved head. enormous eyes. twenty something years old. staring directly into the camera while nothing compares 2 u turns heartbreak into international infrastructure. but that woman is gone. not dead. gone. important distinction. i ask her whether she gets sick of meeting people who expect that version of her. she gives me a look. the look says you have approximately three seconds to realize what a stupid fucking question you have just asked. then she laughs. yes. of course. because i’m not twenty three anymore. she takes another bite. people don’t like women changing. they especially don’t like women getting older. if you’re a woman in music they want to decide what you are when you’re young and then they want you to remain there forever. i ask whether the new album is an attempt to destroy that picture. no. immediate answer. absolutely not. that would mean i’m still making records according to what other people think of me. fuck that. there it is. lunch has officially begun. the new album is called i’m not bossy, i’m the boss and the title is funny because sinéad o’connor has spent nearly three decades being punished for exactly this distinction. a man tells you what he thinks and he is decisive. a woman does it and suddenly everybody needs smelling salts. the title came after she learned about the ban bossy campaign. the campaign argued that girls who demonstrate leadership are too often described with words meant to shame them out of it. o’connor saw herself in the argument and changed the album title. (The Guardian) the original title was the vishnu room. why change it. because i thought this was more important. she shrugs. and it made me laugh. she points a fork at me. you have to laugh. otherwise you’d spend the whole fucking day wanting to murder people. fair enough. the album begins with how about i be me. which is a title that sounds almost like a leftover argument from her previous album. how about i be me and you be you. but this time the question has become less philosophical. she is talking about being a full woman. desire without apology. adulthood without asking the audience to sign a permission slip. that theme keeps returning. womanhood. not womanhood as branding. not the entertainment industry version where some marketing department puts the word empowerment on a perfume bottle and everybody pretends feminism has been achieved because a pop star wore expensive underwear in a video. actual womanhood. messy womanhood. sexual womanhood. maternal womanhood. religious womanhood. angry womanhood. contradictory womanhood. the kind that makes executives nervous because contradictions are difficult to fit into press releases. the cover makes the point before the record even starts. o’connor is wearing a black wig and pvc. the woman whose shaved head became one of the most recognizable anti glamour images in pop history has dressed herself like the boss of a nightclub you probably cannot afford to enter. she grins when i mention it. people took that photograph very seriously. shouldn’t they. no. why. because it’s funny. she laughs again. people always forget i’m fucking funny. this may actually be the great sinéad o’connor tragedy. not the controversies. not the headlines. not the boycotts. not the american outrage industry spending half the nineties behaving as though she had personally driven a bulldozer through the vatican. it is that everybody gets so busy interpreting sinéad o’connor that they forget sinéad o’connor can be hilarious. she can move from theology to sex to an impression of some idiot she met fifteen years ago without changing gears. she has the comic timing of somebody who has survived enough absurdity to recognize the joke before anybody else. the public version of her is permanently furious. the woman across the table keeps making me laugh. so what is the album actually about. love songs. all of it. mostly. romantic love. yes. sex. obviously. god. god is always there. men. unfortunately. she smiles. i ask whether the songs are autobiographical. not really. she explains that she has moved toward writing characters rather than simply writing diary entries. that matters because critics have spent years treating every o’connor lyric like evidence entered into a psychiatric hearing. she has been explicit about moving away from purely autobiographical writing and toward character songs. (The Irish Times) people assume if a woman writes something emotional it must have happened to her. she shakes her head. men get to invent characters. women apparently keep diaries. that should probably be printed above the entrance to every record company. deeper water follows. darker. heavier. desire becomes dangerous territory. then kisses like mine comes swaggering around with enough confidence to make half the male rock singers currently clogging radio sound like they are requesting permission to hold hands. the voice is still the thing. christ almighty. that voice. people talk about sinéad o’connor as a controversial artist so often that you begin to suspect they have forgotten the basic fucking reason anybody cared what she thought in the first place. she could sing. she can still sing. not merely technically. lots of people can technically sing. conservatories manufacture technically competent singers by the truckload. o’connor can make a word sound injured. she can make another sound obscene. she can make another sound like prayer. sometimes she does all three in the same line. your green jacket is tender without turning into mush. the vishnu room gets closer to the original concept of the album. love as something physical and spiritual occupying the same room without needing a committee to decide which one is legitimate. i ask her if she separates sex and spirituality. no. not really. why should they be separate. catholicism did a pretty good job separating them. yes. she gives me another look. and look how fucking well that worked. she laughs. i nearly choke on my drink. this is the peculiar territory o’connor occupies. she can talk about god with complete seriousness and religious institutions with complete suspicion. people confuse those positions because apparently modern civilization can hold only one thought at a time. her war was never necessarily with faith. it was with authority claiming ownership of faith. that difference has followed her around for years. eventually we arrive at the subject everyone eventually arrives at. 1992. saturday night live. the photograph. pope john paul ii. she tore it into pieces after singing bob marley’s war. twelve years later the catholic church’s abuse scandals would be international news. but in 1992 much of america responded to o’connor as though she had strangled a bald eagle on live television. i ask if she regrets it. no. not even slightly. would you do it again. yes. same way. yes. pause. maybe i’d tear it better. she laughs. that is the thing people never understand about sinéad o’connor. they keep waiting for the redemption interview where she says she was young and foolish and everything was terribly complicated and now she understands why respectable people were offended. they have been waiting twenty two years. bring sandwiches. she is not coming. the voice of my doctor hits the album with teeth showing. guitars grind. o’connor pushes harder. it is one of those moments where you remember she is fundamentally a rock singer even though critics have spent years throwing folk and alternative and celtic and singer songwriter and every other available filing cabinet around her. then harbour arrives. and lunch gets quieter. there is pain in this one that does not need explanation. i ask whether singing difficult material becomes easier after recording it. sometimes. sometimes not. sometimes singing something is how you put it somewhere else. somewhere else. yes. instead of carrying it around. she taps her chest. you put it in the song. that may be the simplest explanation of recording i have heard in years. you put it in the song. the industry will later sell the song. journalists will interpret the song. radio programmers will decide whether the song fits between advertisements. listeners will attach divorces and funerals and lonely drives to the song. but first the artist has to put something inside it. o’connor has spent her career stuffing songs until they can barely close. then comes james brown. seun kuti plays saxophone on it. yes. seun kuti. son of fela. because apparently this album needed another family line of musical insurgency running through it. the track loosens its shoulders and finds funk in the machinery. o’connor sounds like she is enjoying herself. i tell her this. what. you sound like you’re having fun. i am having fun. you know critics aren’t going to know what to do with that. fuck critics. i remind her i am technically sitting there as one. yes. she steals one of my chips. especially you. fair enough. the conversation eventually drifts toward the music business. this is where the humor changes. eight good reasons contains one of the record’s clearest statements about the contradiction. loving music while having your head wrecked by the business surrounding it. the distinction matters. she has never sounded like somebody who hates music. quite the opposite. the problem is everything people build around music once money discovers it. (The Irish Times) do you hate the music business. parts of it. which parts. most of it. she laughs. no. listen. the problem is when people who don’t love music are controlling musicians. then everything becomes about selling something. your body. your story. your private life. whatever they can use. she has reason to be suspicious. her career is basically a graduate seminar in what happens when an artist refuses to behave like a manageable commercial object. the lion and the cobra appeared in 1987 and immediately made her impossible to ignore. i do not want what i haven’t got turned her into a global star in 1990. nothing compares 2 u turned her face into one of the defining images of the era. and then she began using the attention. that was the problem. pop culture likes rebellion best when rebellion has a merchandise table. o’connor meant it. she protested. she refused. she spoke. she pissed people off. she got booed. she kept going. twenty seven years later we are sitting here discussing a record called i’m not bossy, i’m the boss. the title is almost too perfect. take me to church is the album’s great declaration of escape. not escape from spirituality. escape from an older version of herself. the song pushes toward reinvention. o’connor has described the record as love songs, but take me to church feels like somebody burning old maps because the roads on them no longer go anywhere useful. contemporary coverage has already picked up on the song’s insistence that she does not want to sing or love from the same place anymore. (The Guardian) i ask her what she wants now. peace. that answer comes fast. then she thinks. love. another pause. and good sex. she smiles. preferably all three. you know i’m going to print that. i should fucking hope so. where have you been turns darker again. love on this record is not some scented candle version of intimacy. it can be frightening. consuming. ridiculous. dangerous. then streetcars closes everything. piano. voice. space. no giant production trying to tell you how important the moment is. just the singer. this is where the entire album seems to exhale. we finish eating. outside the rain has stopped pretending it might quit. i ask her whether she still cares what people think about her. of course. that surprises me. really. everybody cares. even you. especially me. then why keep saying things that get you attacked. because caring what people think doesn’t mean doing what they want. there it is. that sentence could explain the entire fucking career. she does care. that is what everybody gets wrong. the caricature of sinéad o’connor is a woman who does not give a fuck. the real woman appears to give several thousand fucks simultaneously. about children. about abuse. about religion. about women. about sex. about music. about injustice. about love. about what somebody said yesterday. about what somebody might say tomorrow. the remarkable part is not that she feels nothing. the remarkable part is that feeling everything has not persuaded her to shut up. i ask whether she thinks people finally understand her. no. will they ever. probably not. does that bother you. sometimes. then she shrugs. but i understand me better. outside the window dublin keeps moving. umbrellas appear. taxis crawl through wet streets. somebody is probably listening to nothing compares 2 u somewhere and thinking they understand sinéad o’connor because they watched four minutes and forty seconds of her face twenty four years ago. they do not. neither do i. that is probably the point. i’m not bossy, i’m the boss is not a comeback because sinéad o’connor never actually went anywhere. the culture just periodically loses track of artists who refuse to stand in the assigned square. this is her tenth album. produced by john reynolds. twelve songs written or cowritten by o’connor. seun kuti appears on saxophone. brian eno turns up among the musicians. the arrangements move through rock and soul and funk and balladry because nobody seems to have successfully explained to sinéad o’connor that careers are supposed to become simpler as they age. (Grammy) thank god. because the best thing about this record is not that sinéad o’connor has survived. survival is a miserable standard for judging an artist. the best thing is that she remains curious. she still wants something. sex. god. love. peace. noise. intimacy. independence. another song. possibly my chips. she gets up to leave. i ask one final question. are you the boss. she smiles. of myself. then she walks out into the rain. and that might be the whole damn record right there. not domination. not control. ownership. a woman claiming ownership of her body. her faith. her mistakes. her sexuality. her voice. her songs. her contradictions. her future. after everything the world has called sinéad o’connor, boss may be the least controversial description yet. …at least that’s what i hear.