Apologies if this has been posted already (can't see it here) but
Julie Burchill's Spectator column is worth a read:
It started with That Song on the World Service in the early hours, the one I’ve always loathed; for me it symbolises the start of the state we’re in now whereby perfectly good toe-tappers are routinely strung out in slo-mo by interpreters for whom misery passes as creativity.
OK, the Prince original wasn’t exactly a laugh a minute, but it wasn’t anywhere near as dragged out as the Sinéad O’Connor cover. So when I heard that the singer had died at the age of 56, my first thought was, selfishly ‘Oh no – they’ll be playing That Song all day!’ The second was ‘The tearleaders will have a field day with this one…’
Sure enough, over on social media what my husband calls the ‘tearleaders’, metaphorical ambulance chasers competitively mourning dead celebrities, were already up and at ‘em before sunrise. I remember some time back after Howard Marks’ death at 70 (that’s 70 – not 7, or 17) I once saw someone on Facebook wail that ‘the slaughter of a generation’ was taking place, because David Bowie, Ronnie Corbett, and that fat bird who designs big buildings also shuffled off this mortal coil in the same year. When the great writer E.R Braithwaite died peacefully at a whopping 104 years young, I couldn’t help posting, ‘Taken too soon – I hate you, 2016!’
Here came the clichés: ‘Troubled Sinéad’, ‘Nothing Compared To You’ and our old buddy ‘She Never Got Over X’. The most presumptuous tearleading hinged on the sad fact that her teenage son committed suicide, with one clown on the radio explaining that the tears we see on her face in the famous video are the result of this – which would herald a breakthrough in time travel as it was recorded before the poor boy was born.
The
Guardian even had Seamus Heaney (died 2013) tweeting from the afterlife: ‘A great Irish poet and singer left us today. She was beautiful, courageous and wore her heart on her sleeve.’
Those with power in the music business had written her off as barking mad years ago; it’s an easy mistake to make about someone who rejects Catholicism for its treatment of women and then converts to Islam. But nevertheless her treatment by the industry was shameful.
Morrissey summed it up well, as he does all sad things from thwarted love to terrorist massacres:
She was dropped by her label after selling 7 million albums for them. The cruel playpen of fame gushes with praise for Sinéad today with the usual moronic labels of ‘icon’ and ‘legend’. You hadn’t the guts to support her when she was alive and she was looking for you. The press will label artists as pests because of what they withhold…and they would call Sinéad sad, fat, shocking, insane…oh, but not today!
Music CEOs who refused her for their roster are queuing-up to call her a ‘feminist icon’ when it was YOU who talked Sinéad into giving up. She was a challenge, and she couldn’t be boxed-up, and she had the courage to speak when everyone else stayed safely silent. She was harassed simply for being herself.
Morrissey being Morrissey, there’s a lot of purple puff in the missive (‘Who cared enough to save Judy Garland, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday?’) and also Moz being Moz, some of it’s about himself (‘There is a certain music industry hatred for singers who don’t “fit in” – this I know only too well’.) But he’s speaking a lot of scathing sense, especially regarding the way female pop stars are still treated very different from males.
O’Connor’s death came a few days after Mick Jagger’s 80th birthday and the amount of swill celebrating this wizened old chancer in both regular and social media was sickening to see. It’s very hard to imagine an 80-year-old female singer being hailed as an enduring symbol of sex and rebellion as they tend to be written off as over the hill by 30.
The way the music industry treats women was summed well by Marianne Faithfull: ‘Aren’t I pretty – please buy me!’ When #MeToo happened, I remember thinking, ‘Will the music business will have one? That’ll take a long time!’
As it turned out the task proved too daunting to attempt, and there was only one #MeToo moment, albeit one which continued for several years. The singer Ke$ha brought lawsuits against her former producer Dr Luke in which she accused him of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and employment discrimination against her.
‘Rock Against Sexism’ was founded in 1978, just two years after ‘Rock Against Racism’, but it was striking how less stellar the endorsements were. Most musicians would have thought sexism was some sort of new kinky thrill, or merely inquired in a baffled manner a la Spinal Tap’s Nigel ‘But…what’s wrong with being sexy?’
This is a business in which a no-talent DJ like Tim Westwood is protected and lionised and Taylor Swift is groped by a no-mark DJ even after she was famous. It’s the difference between how the industry treated Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears, the way Harry Styles has been anointed ‘King Of Pop’ by
Rolling Stone after starting out on a TV talent show while Girls Aloud – one of the most exciting and innovative groups of all times – never even had their music promoted in America.
A woman who looked like Sam Smith could not be a pop star; women in music are valued for their looks as much as actresses are. But while it could be argued that beauty is important in film stars as that they are there primarily to be looked at, with singers it shouldn’t matter as much as it does.
O’Connor was allowed to be ‘eccentric’ for as long as she was young and beautiful; her crime was to age and not grow out of her rebel ways. She wouldn’t have a homely make-over the way other pretty pop stars like Kim Wilde did. She continued to be outspoken, but what was considered exciting in a young woman was considered crazy in a middle-aged one.
When she wrote an open letter to the sexed-up young Miley Cyrus, who claimed to have based her persona on O’Connor (‘Nothing but harm will come in the long run from allowing yourself to be exploited…it is absolutely NOT in ANY way an empowerment of yourself or any other young women, for you to send across the message that you are to be valued (even by you) more for your sexual appeal than your obvious talent…the music business doesn’t give a **** about you, or any of us.’) she was mocked for being envious and irrelevant, mocked for growing old in an industry where women are only allowed to be opinionated when young and cute, their stroppiness emasculated into being ‘provocative’.
But now she’s safely dead – and the police report that there are ‘no suspicious circumstances’ to prick the consciences of those who shunned her – the canonisation is underway: Saint Sinéad of the Sorrows. It’s not just the music business who have done an about-face and tried to bury their bad treatment of her.
In 1992, she tore up a photograph of the Pope on American television to protest against the systemic child abuse of the Irish state. A year later, unmarked graves of 155 women were uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the notorious Magdalene Laundries, where the state sent ‘fallen women.’
A week after she did it,
Saturday Night Live host Joe Pesci showed the same torn photo taped back together, saying ‘She’s lucky it wasn’t my show, because if it was my show, I would have given her such a smack.’ He received massive applause; she was soon condemned by the Anti-Defamation League, booed at a Bob Dylan tribute concert, and ridiculed by numerous entertainers on SNL sketches for months afterwards.
Yet now Ireland stands as the most self-righteous among nations, reborn with a new church of transubstantiation, and groovy gay Taoiseach Varadkar can sob, ‘Her music was loved around the world and her talent was unmatched and beyond compare…rest her soul.’
I still can’t stand That Song. But this bright, talented and unusual woman deserved a whole lot better from an industry – and indeed a nation – which is now competing to see who can ululate the loudest over her sad and premature death.
www.morrisseycentral.com
