60 Songs That Explain the '90s - Sinéad O’Connor—“Nothing Compares 2 U”

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Rob explores Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor’s acclaimed rendition of “Nothing Compares 2 U” by discussing how she made the Prince-written song her own, her fervent commitment to activism, and the controversies that derailed her career. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Ann Powers Producers: Isaac Lee and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Otis Redding, on stage at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, during his legendary breakout performance for most of white America, at least, resplendent in a Kelly Green suit and already out of breath after one song, took a moment to catch his breath, and reports a robbery. This is a song that a girl took away from me. A good friend of mine. This girl, she just took this song. but I'm still going to do it anyway.

And then he sang, Respect, a song he wrote and recorded in 1965. I started out profiling local musicians for an alt-weekly in Columbus, Ohio, and I was interviewing this dude named Euculele man, self-explanatory. We were at the Blue Danube Diner down on High Street, if you know it. And ukulele man went on this huge rant about people who say, a song can mean whatever you want it to mean. He was like, no, it can't. A song can't just be about whatever you want it to be about.

You can't say, like, don't fear the Reaper means change your oil every 3,000 miles. That's not what the song's about. You know how many valid interpretations, how many things a song can even possibly be about? Three. A song can mean three things, maximum. Usually it just means the one actual thing. So in that spirit, Otis Redding's version of respect is about how Otis Redding would like you'd have sex with him after he gets off work. That's what the song's about.

Fantastic song premise. Frankly, fantastic song, obviously, as Odis Redding. Redding, breathlessly, sings it. But like the man said, as of spring 1967, respect wasn't his song anymore. A girl took it away from him. I will allow two interpretations of Aretha Franklin's respect.

Maybe it's about respect in the broader societal sense. Don't just treat me like the girl who has sex with you when you get off work. Maybe I work too. Maybe it's my money, etc. Or maybe Aretha's just saying, no, you have sex with me when you get off work. Either way, it's her song for the rest of time, obviously. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is 60 songs that explain the 90s. Yeah, we're getting there. So, Prince in the 90s is a superstar,

obviously. Perhaps what you remember best now about Prince in the 90s specifically is extra musical. Perhaps you remember Prince wearing assless chaps at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards to perform a song called Get Off. Two T's in Get. Get Off is about getting off. Great premise, great song. Perhaps you remember Prince changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol in writing the word slave on his face during a bitter contract dispute with his record label, Warner Brothers. At the time, some people dismissed this as mere Prince-esque whimsy, but really he was just way ahead of his time when he told Rolling Stone, if you don't own your masters, your master owns you. Shout out Taylor Swift. As far as the tremendous amount of music Prince released under his own name or names in the 90s,

pick your favorite 90s print song, maybe it's get off or cum or cream or pussy control, each of which meaning just the one thing. The Black album finally came out in the 90s. If you're deep enough into Prince for that to mean something to you, I hope you are and I hope it does. Me, my second favorite Prince-affiliated song of the decade is Jerk Out, a tuney futzed with a couple times in the 80s, but was then popularized by his good buddies, Morris Day in the Time and released on their 1990 album Pandemonium. The Times version of Jerk Out is about either having sex with someone or wanting to be alone

after having sex with someone, or I suppose both. My favorite part of Jerk Out, just for the record, is the part right at the end of the guitar solo. This song makes me want to play softball again, just so I can be on a softball team again. Just so before every game, we can get in a circle. and put our hands in and yell, oh, sexy me! And then I'll go hit 50 home runs back to back to back to back.

Am I stalling? I'm stalling. I'm sorry. The best Prince-affiliated song of the 90s is a great deal heavier, but it's time. This is a story about the song a girl took away from him and the ugly way he responded and what the world took from her

on top of everything that had already been taken from her. This is a story about Chenate O'Connor's Nothing compares to you. Prince wrote it. She took it. It's her song, but it cost her dearly. Prince, as you were probably aware, wrote a shit ton of songs and gave a shit ton away. And it transpires that some of those songs just sound better when sung by a woman. The Bengals doing Manic Monday. Shaka Khan doing, I feel for you.

Sheila E. doing the glamorous life. You want the truth? Cindy Lopper's version of When You Were Mine is better than Prince's version of When You Were Mine. That's right. What are you going to do about it? I'm not on Twitter, as far as you know, probably. You don't know where to find me. It's not that Cindy Lopper changed the meaning of this song.

It's that Cindy Lopper distilled the pure, exquisite, flamboyant misery of this song. But Chenate O'Connor, doing nothing compares to you on her second album, 1990s, I do not want what I haven't got. This is different. However, cordial, the initial business transaction here. The process by which he allowed her to record and release. his song. Forget all that. This is a hostile takeover. Sheneid embodies this song on a molecular level. She changes the fundamental meaning of this song. She owns this song. She steals this song.

Just the audacity of that, the greatness and the fearlessness required of her to do that. Sheenade O'Connor saying, I'm going to steal a song from Prince. It's like Nicholas Cage saying, I'm going to steal the Declaration of Independence. But that's what she did. Who is this person? What does she want? What doesn't she want? What do we want from her? In June 2021, Chenate O'Connor published a memoir called Rememberings. It's rough. She was born in Gleena Gary, Ireland, in 1966, the third of four children. Her parents split up when she was nine. She split time between her father, who was initially granted custody of the children, and her mother, who in Chenade's account was physically and mentally abusive. Sheenade mentions a few times in the book that when she'd come home from school for the summer,

she'd pretend she'd lost her field hockey stick because she didn't want her mother to beat her with it. She says her mother would beat her with a carpet sweeper pole instead and make Shanade say, I am nothing over and over. That's it for details. Her mother died in a car accident when Chenade was 18 shortly before she got her first record deal. I tell you that much only because this might somewhat explain both the fragility and the ferocity with which Sheenade O'Connor sings, and the hard-fought self-assurance she brings to every song she's ever sung. The pop star memoir arc generally, the rise and fall narrative you know and love from any Oscar-nominated

biopic or tawdry VH-1 behind the music episode you've ever watched. At least there's a rise, right? At least there's a brief period where the pop star's discovery and breakthrough success and Apex fame and fortune are enjoyed by the pop star, over-enjoyed, inevitably, but enjoyed. But Cheney's book is rough going in this respect as well. She writes that she was sitting on the toilet. She wants you to know that she can't remember whose toilet. When she is informed that both nothing compares to you and I do not want what I haven't got, have both hit number one in America on these singles and albums charts, respectively. She writes, Whoever it was who told me got cross with me because I didn't take the news happily.

Instead, I cried like a child at the gates of hell. Sheenade's first album, released in 1987, was called The Lion and the Cobra, a biblical name from Psalm 91. If you say the Lord is my refuge and you make the most high your dwelling, no harm will overtake you. No disaster will come near your tent.

And so on. You will train. on the lion and the cobra, and so on. The record company didn't like the way Chenet looked on the cover of the lion and the cobra. Her mouth wide open, her head shaved, of course. They thought she looked angry. They thought she looked like she's screaming. The record company preferred another image from that photo shoot where she's looking down and her mouth is closed.

Good luck with that. Record company. She's not screaming, actually. She's just singing. That's just the way she looks when she sings. The biggest single off this record was called Mandinka. Sheenade was inspired by Roots, the Blockbuster 1977 TV series based on Alex Haley's famous novel about slavery. She writes, I was a young girl when I saw it, and it moved something so deeply in me.

I had a visceral response. I came to emotionally identify with the civil rights movement and slavery, especially given the theocracy I lived in and the oppression in my own home. That's a tricky comparison for Chenet to be making, but just try to convince this person, to not speak her mind. The Joshua Tree by notable Irish arena rock band U2 also came out in 1987, and you'd think this would be helpful for context, for juxtaposition. Two Irish artists grappling with the heavy legacy of Catholicism and navigating personal family turmoil

and enjoying the first stirrings of international super fame and sorting out the agony and ecstasy of still not finding what you're looking for. But Shnade O'Connor frustrates such lazy rock critic type narrative. She's not quite a folk singer or a pop singer or a rock singer or a punk singer, but she's also all of those things. Yes, even punk. Phase one of her career will climax quite infamously with easily the single most punk rock gesture of the 1990s. But any comparison you try to make between her and anybody else breaks down on contact. She's got a song on her first album called Just Like You Said It Would Be.

And the first notable thing is that the song title is styled the way Prince would style it, the letter U for you, the letter B for B. But the second notable thing is how ferociously she sings that title. I wrote down at one point that this song reminds me of the slits, the English punk band, but I disagree with myself about that now, and that's the Shnade O'Connor experience. You adopt some bearable percentage of her constant inner turmoil. The first single off the line in the cobra was called Troy, inspired by a William Butler Yates poem and has a certain mythical high-intensity Kate Bush energy,

and that it sounds like a synthesizer-laden melodramatic ballad that was unearthed by ancient druids from Stonehenge. But pretty quickly I get to feeling like that's lazy rock critic talk too, especially after Chenade sings the line, God I love you, I'd kill a dragon for you, I'll die. At the 1989 Grammys, Chenade was nominated in the best female rock vocal performance. category. She lost to a Tina Turner Live album. Shnade did attend the Grammys that year with the public enemy logo shaved into the side of

her head in solidarity with all the rappers protesting the fact that best rap performance presented for the very first time that year would not be televised. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince won that category for parents just don't understand. It's just as well they didn't put that on television.

And so, 1990, Chenade's sophomore album, I do not want what I haven't got, which now that I think of it sounds like the precise inverse of the U2 song, I still haven't found what I'm looking for, actually. This album title came to her in a dream. So first, Shnade had gone to a medium, and through the medium, had spoken to her mother, who'd been dead at this point for a year and a half. And her mother asked for forgiveness for all the pain she'd caused her children.

But Shnade's older sister, Imer, could not forgive her mother. That night, Shnade's mother comes to Shnade in a dream, and Shnade says she's sorry that Imer can't forgive her. Their mother just says, I do not want what I haven't got because she knew she didn't deserve forgiveness. So that's the album title, and the last song in the album. The first song in the album is called Feel So Different.

It is also about her mother. What drives this album and seems to drive the whole of Sheneid O'Connor's career is the realization that forgiving someone can feel heavier than not forgiving someone. Or maybe it's just that her forgiveness will feel heavier to you. But I do not. The second track on this album is called I Am Stretched on Your Grave and samples James Brown's Funky Drummer. Chenade still thinks about her mother when she sings it live. The third track is called Three Babies and is about the three miscarriages

Sheenade had, though now it's also about the four children she did have. The fourth track is called The Emperor's New Clothes and is probably the single lightest and poppiest song Shinnate ever did. It includes my favorite lyrics of hers ever. Because even at her lightest and poppiest, she'll still drag you to the gates of hell if that's where you need to go. The fifth track is called Black Boys on mopeds. It's about two black teenagers in London who died during a botched police chase. England's not the mythical land of Madame George and Roses. It's the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds.

That's how the chorus starts. This record is not fucking around. The sixth track is called Nothing Compares to You. Written by Prince and originally released in 1985 by his side project, The Family. Paul Joseph Peterson, better known as St. Paul, a Prince cohort, and as it happens, a former member of the time, was the family's lead singer. sings the hell out of the original version of this song, though mostly only super intense Prince fans were paying much attention at the time.

Prince died of an accidental fentanyl overdose on April 16, 2016. He just started working on a memoir, co-written with the journalist Dan Pipe and Bring. That book, or the best case scenario of that book under the circumstances, finally came out in 2019. It's called The Beautiful Ones. Prince wrote some of it. Dan wrote some of it. Some of it is Dan transcribing Prince talking on the phone about what Prince had already written. In any event, nothing compares to you comes up briefly when Prince is talking about his parents' divorce when he was just a little kid, which you do not have to be a super intense Prince fan to know was one of the most traumatic events of his entire life. His father left. The kid stayed with his mother, and his mother used to call his father late at

night and beg him to come home and wake up young Prince and his sister so they could beg their father to come home. And at this point, Prince says, I think that's why I can write such good breakup songs like nothing compares to you. I ain't heard no breakup song like I can write. The flowers are dead. At this point, Prince pretends to receive an urgent phone call. Sir, the garden's dead. And Prince sums it up by saying, I have that knowledge. But when Sheney O'Connor gets a hold of this song, she brings her knowledge to it also. She brings a whole new meaning to it. Because as you probably guessed by now, if you didn't know it already, she's singing this song to her own mother.

This is the exact moment in the video when it's clear she's about to start crying. It's a little embarrassing, if I'm honest, how revolutionary the music video for Shnade O'Connor's nothing compares to you felt back in 1991 when MTV put it an ultra-mega-heavy rotation. The bulk of the video is just shnade in close-up, of course, with her head shaved, just singing the song and eventually crying. She's wearing a black turtleneck and singing against a black background, so it looks like her shaved head is floating in space. Per her memoir, she'd first shaved her head before her first album came out. After her label handlers told her they'd like her to, quote, cutting my hair short and start dressing like a girl. Specifically, they'd, quote, like me to wear

short skirts with boots and perhaps some feminine accessories such as earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and other noisy items one couldn't possibly wear close to a microphone. She accused them of trying to make her look like their mistresses and had her head shave the next day. And that was that. The Greek barber who actually did the shaving cried also. So now I've got just this woman's head, tears rolling down her cheeks, just singing. No explosions, no quick cuts, none of that hyperactive MTV style editing everybody was always complaining about. Just the stillness, the gravity, the gorgeous severity of it. It's almost embarrassing how anomalous it all felt, given the nonstop barrage that was everything else on MTV at the time. How many televisions did I see blow up on MTV during the

first 10 years of MTV? How many dudes in tight pants were trying to shock me? But, None of those dudes shocked me half as much as the pure contempt on this woman's face as she recounted her trip to the doctor. Can you fucking believe what this doctor said? Nobody tells Sheney O'Connor what to do. Not even Prince. In 1991, the readers of Rolling Stone named Shnade O'Connor Artist of the Year, and I do not want what I haven't got album of the year. And nothing compares to you song of the year.

They also named her best female singer. They also, and these were different voters, presumably named her worst female singer because she was already plenty polarizing. At that point, her biggest scandal in America is when she politely, she says, declined to let them play the national anthem before a show in New Jersey. So Rolling Stone interviews Sheneid about all of this and how much he loves Van Morrison and Roseanne Barr and Andy Garcia, all for different reasons, and how much he dislikes Frank Sinatra and Andrew Dice Clay. and Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, some of whom had talked trash about her first, some of whom had not. But she also talked about the terrible experience

she'd had with Prince. She said Prince physically threatened her. This was not the first interview where she discussed this. But by this point, she was so fed up, she was ready to leave, nothing compares to you behind.

Quote, it spoiled the song completely for me. I feel a connection with the song, but the experience was a very disturbing one. At the moment, I don't really like the idea of singing the song. I need to get to the stage where I can separate the writer from the song, which I suppose I always did before, but I'm just very angry with him. Anyway, it's not like I'm going to spend the rest of my life singing the song that I had that went to number one.

That's not what I'm all about. I do other stuff, too. I mean, I've sung the song so many times that I'm bored with the song at this stage. So in terms of new information, what she writes about Prince in her 2020. 21 memoir, which he writes about one specific encounter with Prince. This is not new information. It's just more detailed. It's just more upsetting. The broad strokes here, she's in L.A., set up in a house while she's waiting for the MTV Video Music Awards. This is nine months after her album and her song both hit number one.

One wall of this house she's staying in has a giant glass window facing the lights of Los Angeles. And she writes, at night, it's like a black frame around the lights of living hell. Prince calls her. He pronounces her name Shinehead O'Connor. He summons her to his place in L.A. He sends a car for her. This is their first interaction in several years. She gets to his house. It's weird. It's awkward. It's creepy. She's alone with him. First, they talk in his kitchen. He tells her he doesn't like the foul language she uses in her interviews. She tells him, I don't work for you. If you don't like it, you can fuck yourself. He walks off. She is summoned to a dining room. He tries to serve her soup. He gets really aggro when she refuses the soup. He hassles the assistant who brought out the soup because she won't eat the soup. This assistant turns out to be Prince's brother, Duane. Prince leaves again and returns with pillows and announces he'd like to have a pillow fight and hits her with a pillow. And clearly he's stuffed some sort of heavy object into his pillowcase.

She runs out the front door. He chases her. It's nighttime. She's alone. She has no idea where she is. She has no way to get back to her own place other than to run. She runs into the woods. Eventually she makes it out to a road into some other houses, but then Prince shows up driving a car and gets out, and they chase each other for a brief spell, and then she runs to one of the nearby houses and rings the doorbell frantically, and finally he drives off.

This chapter ends with her writing, I never want to see that devil again, but I think of Duane fondly quite often. I know you don't need me to say this, but I can't tell you what to think or how to feel about any of this. I can't tell you what to think or how to feel about any of this. I can't tell you if or how it should change the way you feel about him or about her or about this song. There is no true, clean, definitive way to separate the art from the artist. Art, fully separated from the artist, ceases in a fundamental way to be art at all. The artist gives the art meaning. I'm this sort of guy inclined to tear up, even now, just typing, let alone saying out loud the words, Prince died of an accidental fentanyl overdose on April 16, 2016. I can mourn the artist.

I can mourn the person to the extent you can mourn a person you never met. But I can also mourn my naive, saintly image of that person, when I'm given yet more compelling evidence that being one of the greatest artists of your generation does not automatically make you one of the greatest humans of your generation. One of the first posthumous pieces of music released from Prince's apparently gargarmine, Antichuan Vault was his own original studio version of nothing compares to you. He recorded it in 1984.

The wider world finally got to hear it in 2018. I teared up the first time I heard this, too. But it's not his song. Another thing Chenet talks about in her memoir is how sometimes when she meets people, she can picture their houses. I should have let her explain this. Quote, from the time I turned 18, if I was sitting with people I had met only once or twice, I would see in my mind the inside of their houses.

I see the carpets, the walls, the paintings on the walls, the tiny trinkets on bedside cabinets, the colors of the pots and pans, the stash of private letters, everything. It was as if I were floating about in their rooms. Shane O'Connor's nothing compares to you as the sound of her floating in Prince's room. If you're even a casual Prince fan, you know something of the whole Paisley Park mystique of Prince. God, but he's also just a man. He's a weirdo, but he's also sometimes emphatically normal, which is somehow weirder. I've read so many Prince profiles, Prince interviews, Prince think pieces, prints, books. I know the rhythm. You can't use a tape recorder to record his voice. You can't

take pictures. You can't swear, but he's also disarmingly polite and disarmingly human, the kind of guy who invites you over to play basketball and then serve you pancakes. I don't know how to separate the art from the artist here, or the artists from the But in this song, Shnade sees something that no one else sees and feels something no one else feels. Things Prince very likely wasn't aware of himself. It's a beautiful song. He wrote a beautiful song.

But she gets more out of it than he does. She gets more out of the word try than he gets out of the whole song. In 1992 for her second song as the musical guest during her second appearance on Saturday Night Live, Sheenade O'Connor sang Bob Marley's War Acapella, and after singing the last line, we have confidence in the victory of good over evil. She tore up a picture of Pope John Paul the 2nd and yelled, Fight the Real Enemy. Her mother's photo of Pope John Paul II, as it turns out, the photo she pulled off her mother's bedroom wall on the day her mother died. She did this to protest child abuse within the Catholic Church. She had a point. Leave it

at that. However you feel about this, maybe especially if it upsets you, this was, indeed, the single most punk rock gesture of the 1990s. In her book, she writes about going back to her hotel afterward and turning on the TV. Quote, the matter is being discussed on the news, and we learn I am banned from NBC for life. This hurts me a lot less than rapes hurt those Irish children. You asked for the truth, and she told you. Sheenade O'Connor has put out eight more albums, since I do not want what I haven't got and struggled quite publicly with mental illness, an endured all manner of further personal calamity and tabloid scandal. She gets into all of that in her memoir, of course. I'm going to need a while to process it all, frankly.

Amanda Hess interviewed her for the New York Times right before the book came out, and of course Sheenade talks about SNL. She says, I'm not sorry I did it. It was brilliant, but it was very traumatizing. It was open season on treating me like a crazy bitch. She converted to Islam several years ago. Now she also goes by the name Shahada Sadakat. I would say she's at peace now, but I don't get the impression peace is necessarily the state to which she aspires. She neat, of course, talks about Prince in the New York Times also.

She says, You've got to be crazy to be a musician, but there's a difference between being crazy and being a violent abuser of women. She also says, as far as I'm concerned, it's my song. My guest today is the great Anne Powers, a critic and correspondent for NPR music. She's worked as a rock critic for The New York Times and the Village Voice in the Los Angeles Times. Her latest book is Good Booty, Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music. And thank you so much for being here today.

I would want you to choose no one but me to talk about Chenet, Rob. So thank you very much. Nothing compares to me. Oh my God, I'm going to be making these jokes the entire time we're talking. This is a safe space. So, Anne, you've written a great deal about Chenade. You wrote a wonderful piece for the Los Angeles Times in 2007 about how Chenade was your critical secret love. And you love even her missteps and you love her even when her controversies make it awkward to love her. She's had an eventful 15 years or so even since then. Like, what is it like to have Chenade as your secret love at this? point. Well, to think about how Chenate is my secret love now is to be plunged back into my early rapturous fandom for Chenade when her first record came out. I was a young

aspiring music writer and poet in San Francisco and that album just hit me like a hurricane. I identify with her, I think. And some of it has to do with her Irishness as a child of Irish-American parents who very much instilled in me a sense of like connection with Ireland. Her struggles with spirituality and religion also really important. But probably most of all, it's just the voice, you know, and the immediacy of her singing technique, which we can talk about.

It's rooted in certain Irish traditional forms, but also just the soulfulness of it. Yeah, I felt she was speaking to me directly. And I always have, even in those more arcane efforts she's made going into playing reggae music or, you know, her ideas of gospel, somehow I just feel like she made that record for me every time. Yeah, I was setting aside the public image, everything to come, I was going to ask, like, just as a singer, as an interpreter of songs, like what made her singing voice so remarkable? But what is the quality that it had that you weren't getting from anyone else in 1987? Her ability to meld Irish traditional singing. And, okay, Irish traditional folk folks out there, I'm going to just ruin this pronunciation. There's a style of singing called Siannos, and it's actually briefly studied it in college.

So maybe another reason why she's my favorite. but that is an a cappella style of singing that involves a lot of trilling and vocal manipulations, but it's a storytelling style, a kind of griot style, if you're going to invoke the African tradition of singing as storytelling. And I think Cheney just like, she connected that so beautifully to her love of black American R&B and soul and of reggae. You know, many Americans, especially in the 21st century, forget. how ubiquitous reggae was as an influence in the 80s when she first began her career. So she was able to connect these streams and find the authentic connections between them. It never feels put on.

It never feels like minstrelsy or anything like that. It just feels right like she is there in the room with you. But there's a lot of craft involved as well. Yeah. The first single off her first record, the line in the co-brose. I believe it was Troy, you know, which is such an, it's an incredibly intense first single, like introduction, you know. What is it about, I think you write about that song about hearing that song for the first time and it immediately imprinting on you. What was it about that song?

So I was living in San Francisco in the Western edition in this, you know, ramshackle Victorian. This is when San Francisco was very ramshackle. And, you know, I was thinking about it today. Like now San Francisco is a place you might go to get rich. It used to be a place where you'd go to get poor. You're a middle class kid. You'd go there to become a bohemian, you know. And I lived in a crazy old Victorian with lots of roommates who worked at like Buffalo Exchange,

you know, the thrift stores are worked in the local bars and stuff. And so I was laying in bed in my little room and I had KUSF on the great college radio station from USF in San Francisco. And I was really waking up and this voice. I mean, the beginning of Troy, it's similar to the beginning of nothing compares to you. It's just like a stark moment with Sheneid's voice. And I couldn't move. Right, right.

It's like, what is this? Everything in the song was everything I loved. It was like a rock song and she just kills it by the end. She's like Led Zeppelining it out, you know. But also it's, you know, it's connected with mythology. William Butler Yates was my favorite poet at that time, and it's based on a William Butler Yates poem, no second Troy, plus just the sense of honesty and truth-telling and sort of, I mean, you could call it vengefulness, I guess, about a man who had done her wrong, which when you're,

I think I was, you know, 22 or 23 or something. Like at that age, that's a very, that's at the fore of a young woman's thoughts. often. It resonates, yes. Yeah, it resonates. So for you, as a fan at that point, what made her version of nothing compares to you so remarkable? Like, what does she bring to the song that wasn't already there? I think we have to start by crediting her collaborator, Nellie Hooper, the producer, on the track. An amazing producer was an architect of Trip Hop and the dance floor sounds of that time with the group Massive Attack and other artists. Bjork, yeah.

Yeah, and Bjork. And they made some great decisions. So if you listen to the original version by the Prince's protege band, the family, what's interesting is, okay, so it's a male voice and it starts very similar to shenades. But then within moments, background vocals come in, right? You have this sort of chorus. There's a call and response, and that's playing off of the gospel, kind of the essential gospel. quality of the song. But with Shanades, you have the organ, which evokes gospel music,

but it's just her, you know? And that captures the loneliness of the song, which is what the song is. It is an embodiment of a loneliness that can't be remedied. And so that really struck me just the way the song creates a patina around itself so that, you know, you kind of can't insert anything else into your listening experience, you were there with her alone. And I think that's the heart of it, you know? And then, of course, the video reinforces that. Of course. I mean, it's hard to imagine the impact of this song without the video. I sort of vacillate between not wanting to give it too much credit, but it was just, it was shocking. It was a legitimately shocking image, just her staring at you, like crying, her head is shaved. I mean, I feel

embarrassed by how shocking it was, but it was just like nothing I had ever seen, you know, as a naive 13-year-old, but it's just, it's such a striking image. Shocking and very beautiful, because she, she just has that face and those eyes that truly peer into your 13-year-old soul. I don't think she liked what she saw. I don't think I liked what I saw. But, but, you know, the other thing about Chenet is that she is a beautiful woman and certainly was a very beautiful woman, when she came on the scene, but she was in that punk vein of anti-beautiful, anti-fashion, with her shaved heads similar with that first record line in the Cobra. I actually remember going to a press conference she gave on that first tour

because I was working for the SF Weekly at the time. And just, you know, she's a small woman. And she just was like this amazing charismatic combination of like delicate and so tough and so alluring and so forbidding. And I think you get that in the video. Also, there's another thing about that video that relates to the sound of the song, which is that it almost has a church-like quality,

the way she's dressed in the video, the way she's lit in the video. She is like the only member of the choir singing to you. And I think that adds to its power as well because you can't talk about Chenade without talking about religion, just as you can't talk about Prince without talking about religion. Of course.

You worked on a book about Tori Amos, and there are a lot of parallels between her and Chenate in terms of pop stars with vivid and combative relationships with God, or at least with organized religion. Do you see a particularly strong kinship there? Wow, that's interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think Tori's relationship with religion runs through her family line. You know, her father was a minister, and she,

She's grappling with an intellectual tradition as well as her personal relationship with spirituality. Shnade, it's connected to trauma. And I think if Tori's relationship to religion is more formal and let's say intellectual, although I don't want to say Shnade's not intellectual, Shanade's is more chaotic to use a word often used today. Absolutely. It's a good word. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, It's intuitive and it's rebellious in the way that a child who feels endangered is rebellious.

You know, that figure of the frightened child is a big presence in Chenade's early music. And I think that's there in her relationship to religion and leading right up to what I'm sure you want to ask me about, which is the Saturday Night Live performance. So Tori, you know, she is creating her own theology. Chenade is seeking. She is always seeking. And she doesn't create her own theology. Ultimately, she turns to other theologies to heal herself. I think that's her goal.

Right. Okay, so with SNL, you know, tearing out Pope John Paul II's picture, she was protesting sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. And since then, there have been further massive harrowing scandals within the Catholic Church. Does that moment fundamentally hit differently now? Absolutely. It hits differently. At the same time, I hope that our understanding that Sheneid O'Connor was right doesn't diminish the sense of like shock and awe to use an absolutely inappropriate phase that that moment generated, you know, because I was watching at the time. You were watching. You were watching live. Oh, yes. Of course, because there's my hero on SNL. I just remember sitting on the couch with my now husband, Eric, and. You know those moments when you're like, what just happened?

It was like the primary, the prime moment of what just happened. But for me, it was such a complicated rush of emotions because I was also raised Catholic and I didn't experience childhood abused as Shnade did. However, I certainly felt the church was both a place of grace and beauty and a place of very deep betrayal. You know, at that time, I think as a young woman, realizing not only, not necessarily, I'm going to say for myself, that there was this history of abuse, but also just the way the church had turned so much into a pro-life institution, so much into a, seemed like, to me, more moralistic institution. I know we only got a few minutes, so I'm not going to go into the evolution of the church from Vatican II to that 80s, but there was like a real, really big shift away from the open. up of Catholicism that it happened in the 60s 70s with Vatican II toward a new conservatism and almost like an evangelical quality. And I think Cheneid's action for anyone who was aware of that

had a very strong resonance. And I know many people were deeply offended, but for me it felt like a protest that hit on many different appropriate levels. What do you remember of the aftermath because she put out eight records and she talks now about like, I'm glad I did that. I'm glad I blew up my career, quote unquote, and now I can do whatever I want to do. And that's what she did. But what do you remember about, like we hear now, like Joe Pesci is on SNL like in the next couple weeks and like says something about slapping her, like Frank Sinatra. Like there's this outcry, but what was the backlash like?

And what did she lose as a result of that? Well, it was horrible. I mean, this is one of my favorite artists, you know, and it just felt like just so wrong. And I think also given what happened in the 90s with artists like Tori and PJ Harvey and Sarah McLaughlin and the Lilith Fair and all these different artists that emerged during that time, man,

Chenate should have been, they should have been carrying her on their shoulders, you know. And I'm not saying that. those artists said anything. I don't mean that women artists said negative things about Sheney, but the fact that her career took a downward turn just as women in rock, you know, what I like to call the decade of the year of women in rock began in 1990s.

I love that. I love that. I feel like that was just so unjust. And, you know, at the same time, I think we have to look at it intertwined with what she was going through. Mental health-wise, personally. It's very difficult with many stars of rock and roll and other forms of music to separate their struggles, their personal struggles with mental health and or addiction from their struggles with fame and notoriety. And I think she is a test case for that, like, truly. Yeah. I mean, here in 2021, we're hopefully at least a little better equipped to talk about

artists in fame and mental health in 2007 or certainly in 1991. How is the perception of her changed over the course of her career. Do we understand her a little better now? You know, her memoir's coming out. I haven't read it yet. Reading Amanda Hess's great profile in the New York Times, I'm sensing the inevitable embrace of the lost heroine, you know, which I am so happy about. You know, I was out there with her in the weeds. I reviewed the reggae album. I reviewed the gospel album. But, you know, I'm just happy to see it. And I think it's worth thinking about, like, what happens when your favorite artists are engaging in behavior that is self-endangering or feels, seems self-endangering to you. And what that does to fans' relationship to those artists and how it can be difficult, it feels scary, you know.

And so I think for a lot of Shnade fans, probably like me, that we're going through that, you know, is she going to be okay? is she going to be okay? I'm happy. She seems okay. I'm happy. She's putting out this memoir. And I hope that we can appreciate her as the amazing musician she is and songwriter she is and bold social activist she is and kind of take mental health to the back burner when we talk about her. Yeah. This is a classic, awful, unanswerable question. But what do we do when Chenade writes a 10-page chapter in her memoir about being treated horribly by Prince? and physically threatened and physically struck by a heavy object in a pillowcase, and physically chased out into the street. How in a perfect world would that change the way we think about Prince or hear Prince? Like, what do we do with this information?

Yeah, that's a really hard question that I didn't want you to ask. But since you did ask, you know, who's my other absolute love, passion artist I can't ever walk away from? and that it would be Prince, you know. Gosh, I'm going to say that since I haven't read the memoir, I'm not going to give a definitive answer on this. I think we have to believe, Sheneid. We also don't have Prince here to tell us his side of the story. But I don't know.

I don't know if I can answer that question today. There is no answer. It's unfair to ask you. Let me just say this. Let me just say this. You know, the work stands. and the music stands. And we're here to talk about one particular song

that Sheneid made her song. As she herself says, It's my song. I'm just going to take it back there because what I would hate to see, it's sort of like that recent Tina Turner documentary, Tina Turner documentary, which I appreciate, and I'm so glad that Tina is getting more flowers and all the flowers,

but I wish the documentary hadn't been so centered on the abuse story. You know, I really wish that the documentary had really only been about what Tina did, how she taught Mick Jagger, how to be a rock star, how she sang one of the greatest anthems of all time with River Deep Mountain High, with another abusive man producing, you know, how in the 80s, she redefined rock. And so while I think these stories need to be told and we need to believe women, I also always hope the music and the musical innovations of these women shine forth more than the

personal narratives in some ways. Absolutely. To that end, I believe she's made eight records since I do not want what I haven't got. And it's a very odd and varied and intense body of work, as you alluded to, there's a reggae album and a gospel album. If you were talking to someone who loved the nothing compares to you era, but was a little intimidated by everything Chenade's done since. Like, is there a good place to start with her more recent catalog? Absolutely. There's a record called How About I Be Me and UBU that came out in 2012, which is a mid period. I'm going to say mid because I want Shandane to have her late in life, you know, interpret. She can be the next Rod Stewart and just like sing the classics. I want that to

happen. But it is a freaking masterpiece. She worked with John Reynolds, who was her early producer, and partner, father of her first child as well. And there are some songs on that record. Like there's one called The Wolf is Getting Married. I swear, it could have come off the lion and the cobra. It's just that high quality. She sounds great. The songs are really beautifully structured.

They're funny. Sometimes there's so much joy on that record. And there is also rage. There's everything you want from Shanade. So go get that record. about I. B, Me and UBU. She tends to affix titles to her records that kind of make you not want to buy them. I was going to say that's an awesome title.

Well, this is a kind of great one, but, you know, I know her titles are a little funky. I guess actually, you know, Billy Elish would title a record that. So maybe she's just, maybe we're back in that moment. Yeah, Fiona. Exactly. So, yeah, but that record is really great. And then you can kind of work your way through the others. I think the one she released in 2014, I'm not bossy.

I'm the boss. The boss. Right. Has some great tracks on it. I would focus on those two. But also, don't sleep on the stuff she did right around the time that the huge scandal happened. Universal Mother is an amazing record, too. Am I Not Your Girl?

Her covers record. It just makes you want to hear more covers. You can't really go wrong. Theology is a little difficult. But beyond that, anything is good. All right. Well, Anne, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for talking. We really appreciate it. It was a joy and a pleasure. I love you, Cheneid. Thanks. Thanks very much to our guest this week, Ann Powers. Thanks to our producers, Justin Sales and Isaac Lee.

Thanks very much to you for listening. And now, without further ado, here is Cheneid O'Connor with nothing compares to you. We'll see you next week.