June 21, 2009
you better have some fun no matter what you do (chapter four excerpt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
The mournful ballad “Nothing Compares 2 U” was composed around 1985 by Prince, making it an unlikely candidate to bear the impress of another time. Sinéad O’Connor’s version five years later spent a full month at the top of the Hot 100, equaling the year’s best chart performance and eventually winning MTV’s award for best video of the year; the song and its popularity were part of the air of 1990.
If there is a novelty to O’Connor’s reading of the song, it lies in its pointed monotony. Experience at an impossible distance, in another world. Nothing happens. Though not entirely lacking modulations of intensity, the vocal confines itself to a considerably narrower range of expression than any of Prince’s recorded versions. The video drives the point home, consisting almost entirely of a tight close-up of O’Connor’s pale face against a black background as she sings with minimal expression; a black turtleneck exaggerates the effect. As befits a song tracking emotional catatonia after love gone wrong, the affect is at once excruciating and excruciatingly flattened: an architecture of dry ice presented as a song. This arrives in shocking counter to O’Connor’s famously wide-ranging and passionate voice, as well as to her well-earned reputation as a political scourge. Beyond the nicely-detailed sentiment of the lyrics, the song is the tension between singer and performance. Perhaps some of the general satisfaction was seeing O’Connor in such a humble (or humbled) mode; this may speak at least in part to why the song would be the only true hit single of O’Connor’s lengthy career.
That offers only a social reason for the song’s success. But there is another way to describe the matter, intrinsic to the song and the particularity of its distant, echoey keen. This is in the attenuated shock of realizing that the song is beautiful anyway — that beauty is possible even in this death-in-life, this world where nothing can ever happen.