‘This is a Rebel Song’: Sinéad O’Connor and the greatest vocal performance of the 1990s
Just before Super Bowl XXV kicked off on January 27th 1991, Whitney Houston confidently walked to the centre of the field at Tampa Stadium, dressed in a bright white track suit and a headband, and confidently took on one of the most intimidating challenges an American vocal performer can face: defeating the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ By that, I mean transcending a very old, very dull, very difficult composition to make it sound new and compelling again, willing it to greatness through your own incomprehensible talents.
Jimi Hendrix did it once, so did Marvin Gaye. But Whitney Houston’s was the best, and because she was weaving gold out of straw in front of one of the largest television audiences in US history and a much bigger worldwide fan base, her performance springs to mind as a good candidate for the finest of the entire decade of the 1990s. There is just one small problem, though.
Contrary to popular belief, Houston wasn’t singing live that day in Tampa. Well, she was—but the performance she was giving on the field wasn’t the one committed to the historical record. Her field microphone was intentionally unplugged, and the actual performance heard in the stadium and around the world was pre-recorded earlier that weekend. This wasn’t done because Houston couldn’t sing the national anthem right then and there, but because the producers of the event knew that loads of things could go wrong if they went live, what with a massive outdoor sound system, jets flying overhead, premature pyrotechnic launches, etc. And so, the famed recording, which went gold in the US in 1991 and platinum in 2001 when it was re-released in the aftermath of 9/11, is not so much a capturing of a great live performance as a “slight re-imagining” of one, which brings us, at last, to Sinéad O’Connor.
While rarely compared directly to Whitney Houston for plenty of understandable reasons, O’Connor (who later changed her name to Shuhada’ Sadaqat) was reaching the peak of her international fame around this same period in the early 1990s, having released her hugely successful album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got in 1990, led by that year’s ‘No 1 World Single’ according to Billboard magazine, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U.’
One could even argue that O’Connor was more in demand than Houston in January of 1991, when Houston performed at the Super Bowl. Suffice it to say, though, there was never any thought of asking O’Connor to have a go at the anthem. She had already earned her first bit of stateside blowback after announcing that she wouldn’t perform at any venue in America that would play the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ before her shows, as she felt the American music industry was racist. Blind patriotism, of pretty much any sort, was not something O’Connor was eager to lend her talents to.
By 1992, of course, O’Connor’s steadfast refusal to fit into an appropriate pop star role led to her controversial appearance on Saturday Night Live, when her protest against the Catholic Church—represented by tearing up a photo of the Pope—essentially ended her mainstream career in the U.S. and many other countries.
“I expected not to be understood for a while,” O’Connor said in a 1997 interview with journalist Lucy O’Brien. “I knew it was a long-term thing. I knew things would be difficult. I don’t think I was punished. I think I was, whatever the word is – reviled – in certain places and applauded in other places. . . . I guess I went through the mill a bit, but that’s just part of it. Anybody that introduces any kind of new idea or emotion can only expect to go through a certain amount of being called a liar. I guess that was the worst thing.”
Though O’Connor’s output of new music slowed down considerably in the late 1990s, that was actually a consequence of focusing more of her time on raising her kids. During this period, in 1997, she released a little-heard EP called Gospel Oak, which was well reviewed but only reached No. 28 on the UK charts and sold a meagre 70,000 copies in the US, peaking at No 128. To support that record, O’Connor appeared on the television program Sessions at West 54th, filmed in New York and aired on the PBS network.
One of the new songs she performed, a simple folk ballad about a relationship told as a metaphor for the Troubles, was ‘This is a Rebel Song.’ The three-minute song, which has gained a second life on Youtube with over 9million views, is the polar opposite of the bombast of Houston’s ‘Star Spangled Banner’, and yet it’s an even more impressive and powerful statement on love and country.
It’s also performed incredibly well (and live), not just by the technical measures of “greatness,” but as an authentic piece of art by one of the most authentic voices of her era, coming just months before the Good Friday Agreement gave its subject matter extra heft. It’s unlikely that it would win many public votes for greatest vocal performance of the ‘90s, but it feels nice to humbly endorse it.
