Listen to this track by Irish singer and too-soon departed iconoclast Sinéad O’Connor. It’s “Mandinka”, the second single from her debut 1987 album The Lion and the Cobra. The song was a top twenty hit on the UK charts where it peaked at number 17 in February of the following year. It did even better in Ireland, where it scored a number 6. The album won a top 40 placement on the Billboard 200.

Launching her professional career, O’Connor’s debut album had the curious distinction of sporting two different sleeve covers between the rest of the world and North America. Both of them featured her head-and-shoulders image. When buying this record outside of the U.S and Canada, O’Connor greets the potential listener with mouth open, her young features caught in an expression and posture of defiance to a party somewhere out of shot. On the North American cover, her eyes are downcast and submissive, almost penitent. The contrast between the two is striking. It may be easy to suss out the strategy of these two record sleeves aimed at two markets, particularly in retrospect.

In both cases, O’Connor’s distinct lack of a hairdo would gain her inches in the music papers at the time, even before anyone heard a note of her music. With that in frame, what is “Mandinka” about, and what does it reveal about an artist who was just starting out by the time this song appeared on the charts?

The song is a rocker, marked by loose and ragged Keith Richards-like chopping guitar chords which O’Connor plays herself on this track. The song seems to suggest the attitude of punk that’s absorbed and assimilated the gloss of late Eighties production and claimed it for its own. And as for O’Connor’s voice, listeners are treated to its full range, from the dulcet to the feral, and with a distinct hiccup that would go on to influence so many vocalists from The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordon to Alanis Morrisette and beyond. On this song, and as always, Sinéad O’Connor made her mark on her own terms.

“Mandinka” gave listeners an early glimpse of O’Connor’s tendency to speak her mind, particularly in an era when a woman with a solo career in the music industry without some Svengali lurking behind the curtain was thought of as the exception to the rule. I mean, what’s with the shaved head? What kind of image is that and who approved it? Was it a statement of some kind? How could she not see how aggressive and threatening that makes her look as she stands there in the spotlight? Doesn’t she know how lucky she is to be there at all?

Lucky or not, Sinéad O’Connor knew the score. And this song proves it.

I don’t know no shame
I feel no pain
I can’t see the flame
But I do know Mandinka

-“Mandinka”, Sinéad O’Connor

“Mandinka” refers to a people in West Africa featured in Alex Haley’s novel Roots and who represent a mosaic of cultural groups who still live in that region of the world today. By the sixteenth century, the European slave trade turned these people into commodities, robbing many of their descendants of their culture and lineages along with their agency and full humanity for centuries after. This violence, loss, and sickening injustice was the spark to write this song, likely coupled with O’Connor’s awareness and experience of Ireland’s own bloody history in being systemically oppressed by the British Empire.

This early hit song isn’t a reference to any of that directly. But when she says “But I do know Mandinka”, she’s singing about the knowledge that she has something precious to defend and to lose, something intrinsic to her identity that others would seek to use, control, or even destroy for their own gain. This is a song that tells the world that she is ready to face all of that on her own terms with her mouth open and shouting, very much aware that exploitative forces will seek to quiet her voice, and to make her cast her eyes downward in apology if it gets too loud.

In this song, she knows all of this. She knows what she’s getting into.

Sinéad O’Connor in 2014, by then an artist with a unique body of work and history behind her. (image: Thesupermat)

***

“Mandinka” is less about protesting historic oppression and violence, and more about how she’s planning to confront it in her own life as it remains ongoing in the present. “Mandinka” is the sound of Sinéad O’Connor planting her feet in the earth expecting that a hard rain is going to fall. She knows that she’s in the spotlight, doing the dance of the seven veils as any charting musician or public figure must do to gain an audience. She wants us all to pick up her scarf; to listen what she has to say. But not at any cost. There are some things to which she won’t raise a glass. As it turned out, she’d take that glass and smash it on the floor if she had to.

No one can say that she didn’t warn us.

There have been many stories of her struggles throughout her career and life, many of those stories coming directly from O’Connor herself. Some of those sprang from her struggles with mental illness, which are well-documented. Even in those struggles, she always spoke her mind and remained true to herself in her art. In this, “Mandinka” was always her personal agreement with her audience that she would do just that, which she did and sometimes to her own detriment. That’s not a criticism against her, but rather against a world that wasn’t as ready as she was for such a confrontation.

Sinéad O’Connor died in 2023 at the age of 56, grieved by a generation of music fans who love her voice and appreciate her honesty, candour, and bravery.

You can listen to her music and buy her autobiography Rememberings at sineadoconnor.com.

Enjoy!

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