Contraband O’Connor more moving than any spiritual
Growing up as a pastor’s daughter, my musical heritage was the Bill Gather Trio and a puppet named Marcy, with Jan and Dean reserved for road trips. My parents had long since destroyed their evil Elvis and Beatles albums. I was also allowed a few tapes of mediocre Christian pop along with a little pink radio to play those tapes. This device conveniently enabled me to surreptitiously record Madonna singing about prayer on KISM radio.
My musical universe didn’t really blossom, however, until my older brother gave me Sinéad O’Connor’s debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra.” “I think you’d really be into this new singer,” he said, handing me what was probably a hot tape – likely from one of the many car stereos mysteriously filling up his closet during those years. I was able to listen to it one night when I was home alone. I had never felt so moved by anything before, not a hymn nor an altar call. For the first time I found myself dancing, something I’d seen on MTV, and MTV was something I’d only stolen glimpses of during babysitting jobs.
I had no idea what sort of technical quality this album was. It was the feeling of the lyrics that mattered to me, and I felt these lyrics. It is an album of unrefined passion, of the wild emotions and fierce energy of youth. I played the album through twice, dancing the entire time, until my parents returned from Bible study.
It was my freshman year in high school, and I had just acquired my first boyfriend, a senior with a motorcycle. Predictably, my parents forbade me to date Chuck. And so, while they attended prayer meetings and family gatherings, I stayed home with excuses like cramps, headaches and too much homework. Chuck would wait down the road until he saw their car leave, and then we would make out on the living room floor while listening to “The Lion and the Cobra.” O’Connor’s repetitious and steamy “I Want (Your Hands on Me)” suited the situation perfectly. And when we broke up, her raging anthem of raw emotion, “Troy,” would come in handy.
A few years ago, I loaded “The Lion and the Cobra” on to my iPod’s “bicycle commute” playlist. It had been well over a decade since I’d last heard it. As I rode through the Palouse hills in the morning sun, that album coursed through my earbuds directly into my mind, my heart and my legs. Time collapsed, disappeared. I was 14 again. My life stretched before me, an open and unwritten adventure. And I would fly, I knew I would, cruising through life, my ponytail stretched out behind me, dancing in the wind. All of the complications and exhaustion of adulthood vanished. I was 14, I was hope, I was the world, new and amazing and everything possible. And I shaved 15 minutes off my commute time.