Goodnight, Thank You, You've
Been a Lovely Audience
Sinead O'Connor
Eagle Vision
DVD (2003)
$20.98
Available at Insound.
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Sinead O'Connor is an angry, sensitive bird who'll always sing, but no longer perches in a studio. Goodnight gives us the last
Dublin show from her Sean-Nos Nua tour; it brings new life to some
of her most personal, least appreciated songs ("Thank You for Hearing Me"
and "John, I Love You", a song for her son). The DVD also includes an
interesting documentary that parallels traditional Irish songs with those of
the Reggae Islands, and offers six bare-bones videos that probably cost far less to produce than the
sweaters and robes O'Connor wore in them. "Oro Se do Bheatha Bhaile", the most
riveting live song from her set, stands as the silliest video: it fails to
synchronize her moving mouth with the music, and you inevitably expect
her to drop into a kung-fu kick.
The concert performance from Goodnight is also the bonus CD within
O'Connor's final album, She Who Dwells in the Secret Place of the Most High
Shall Abide Under the Shadow of the Almighty. This makes the DVD title
and the final live track ("The Last Days of Our Acquaintance") seem
well-chosen. You get drama and some tongue-in-cheek tension (she resents
most of us, no?), but also her genuine appreciation for Ireland and her
Dublin home.
O'Connor's fans will love the DVD's value-for-money quotient. The bonus
material goes on and on, and it's all stuff you'll be willing to sit through a
few times. The disc is also structured intelligently -- you can play the whole
concert or all the videos without hitting the play button thirty times.
The documentary reveals that the traditional songs from Sean-Nos Nua
are used to open a hole in the sky for O'Connor's autobiographical work, which then moves
upward. To free her mind, and free herself from any creative rut, O'Connor paid homage to the
songs she sung as a kid, and to songs like "Peggy Gordon" ("You are my
darling / Come sit you down upon my knee") that she saw Irish lesbians
appropriate as their own. She sold the project like a temporary sojourn, but
it has the same spirit as Alex Chilton's work from
Cliches onward. The right music backs her vocals -- whereas Chilton
needs sloppy, O'Connor needs ethereal -- and those vocals remind us why we've enjoyed her in the past.
The only thing lacking is O'Connor's own words, or some indication that the songs she
chose to cover have a great connection to her inner self. Songs sung in the
woods and on hiking trips are not the same as a song that tears her heart
when she hears it. "The Moorlough Shore" and "My Lagan Love" just
sound pretty; that makes them worthwhile to any true music fan, and
endearing to any Irish patriot, yet it's distinct from the "Sinead
experience". It's just pretty music, the way that the Chieftains can be
pretty.
Still, it's very hard to take issue with "pretty" music. O'Connor's band is as top-notch as
her exquisite voice, and the renditions all work on some level. It's far
easier to find fault with her concert outfit (ugly plaid silk shirt) and her
minimal, impersonal song introductions, than with the gorgeous music. You
listen, and you can't help but be entranced; eventually, though, your
mind screams, "This is Sinead". This is the Sinead who dogged the Pope, the
Sinead who seemed like an open, weeping book. And it's at this point that you
discover your baffling desire to criticize, or at least be
disappointed by O'Connor's efforts.
The best comparison I can muster to my own horrid example of Sinead O'Connor
fandom is to compare it with Anne Sexton's cult of fans. For a brief spell
in the late sixties and seventies, Sexton was happy, and her work reflected
it, which pissed off the sad-eyed Poetry Club. Sexton's cult of fans
rebelled, and Sexton was put in a position where she could lose her base or
fake her emotions. She chose to fake it. She won back her audience with
fictional suicidal poetry until the words reflected reality again and they
killed her.
Days of watching this DVD and thinking about it make me notice that I don't want
to accept Sinead O'Connor as a simple vocalist. I don't want to see her as
just another Irish lass (and I don't think she is). She's been
pigeonholed as a fragile bird, and she can't escape it, and so I hate that
she's stopped wanting to show her wounds. I hate that she can no longer
write about herself, and be the static Sinead (of pain and fragility) to whom no other female singer compared. I don't like watching her sing a song
beautifully, and thinking that maybe Celine Dion could do the song just as well.
I watched the DVD with admiration and sadness. I know that no creative leap
was made with She Who Dwells, O'Connor's final CD. It's full of
unreleased tracks, B-sides, live material, and more renditions of
traditional songs. It continues to showcase a woman who'd far prefer a hug
from her own countryman to one from a from diary-hugger. Like Sean Nos-Nuas,
it's more enjoyable and more personal than any Chieftains record, but it's a
record for other naked souls, not her own. I watched the DVD fully aware that I
should be impressed with it, and it made me depressed. I'm a huge fan of
confessional art; I wish that Sinead were not too thin-skinned (like Sexton, or
Cobain) to continue to weep in public. Her "Goodnight" is sincerely spoken,
and I wish it weren't. The DVD has become less about its subject, a
confessional artist now singing covers, than about her fans' unsatisfied appetites.
-- Theodore Defosse
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