Sinead O’Connor: The Lion and The Cobra

I’m still reeling from news that Sinead O’Connor is dead at 56. Her creative output played a vital part in my development, particularly her first album The Lion and The Cobra which forms part of the baseline soundtrack of my adolescence. It is one of the albums that myself, and my partner, will pull out each year and listen to on repeat until we are tired of it again. Until the next year when it again feels fresh.

I remember the time I first heard this album. I was nine or ten, close to the age my daughter is right now, and hanging out with one of my best friends at his home. His oldest brother, who I think was a sophomore in high school at the time, decided to loudly play The Lion and The Cobra. They were a very musical family. The dad was a music teacher and had a massive record collection. My friend’s two oldest brothers were really into music. Indeed most of my formative tastes were conditioned by these older brothers’ preferences, and many of my favourite musicians and bands remain those that these two brothers introduced me to. Sinead O’Connor being one of them, particularly her first album.

I remember hearing “Jackie” for the first time, as this brother played it loudly, and being blown away by how it sounded simultaneously lovely and angry. I remember thinking “how can she have this very beautiful voice that is also so angry?” I was automatically in love with it, drawn to it magnetically. When “Jerusalem” hit I was ignoring my friend, who at the time was still too much into the Beatles and the Doors, and focusing on what his older brother was introducing to my consciousness.

Many years later I’m driving to Montreal with a friend from Afghanistan for an organizational meeting. I’ve got The Lion and The Cobra playing in the car and I’m trying to explain to him how awesome this album is. I’m turning up the volume on the tracks I love, blaring it at “Drink Before The War”, but he doesn’t get it. I remember wishing he did, but understand that his aesthetic preferences are not the same as mine for obvious reasons.

But this has been my longstanding MO with The Lion and The Cobra. Just as it was shared with me by my childhood best friend’s older brother, I want to share it with everyone who has never heard it. I want them to love it. I want them to be sucked in by “Jackie” so as to feel the album’s entire emotive canvas. Maybe after this experience they can also love I Do Not What What I Haven’t Got. I have complicated feelings about that album. I love “Feel So Different” and “Black Boys on Mopeds” but am only half interested in her biggest hit––it’s okay but is not as good as the shit she actually wrote.

We all know that “Nothing Compares 2 U” was a Prince song that Sinead covered. We also know now, because of Sinead’s memoirs, that Prince was an abusive prick towards her. And despite Prince’s predatorial behaviour, we already knew that Sinead’s version of this song was more important than its non-existence as a meaningful signal beforehand. But to my mind it’s the least interesting of Sinead’s singles. As I said above, I prefer the work she actually wrote. And most of that work is on her first album. The Lion and The Cobra still bangs. Jackie, Jerusalem, Just Like You Said it Would be, Troy, Drink Before The War… Jesus what the fuck is this album; it’s overwhelming.

When I play this first Sinead album for my ten year old daughter she is riveted by the songs and vocals. When I mentioned Sinead died she was like “what???” and was scandalized by the notion that this artist I introduced her to was suddenly dead––it actually upset her.

I recognize the fact that I haven’t cared about Sinead O’Connor’s work beyond her early albums for a long time, that I haven’t listened to anything past Universal Mother. I admit that this is largely because I was turned off by the weird Zionism she adopted during this fourth album, something that for a long time turned me off to her music after her early albums. I am aware now that she rejected her fetishism of Israel, that she defended Palestinian BDS in her final days. Obviously I agreed with her comments about the Pope and the Catholic church when she made them: I remember thinking “right on” at the time; I was actually confused by the hatred levelled at her––so many of us who loved her had a punk aesthetic that was opposed to any kind of universal church.

But that is why we should keep going back to The Lion and The Cobra. This is the album that has the punk aesthetic that doesn’t give a shit about maintstream pop sensibilities. Jackie, Jerusalem, Troy, Just Like You Said It Would Be, Drink Before The War… The perfect album.