Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible.
Because the label had paired her with a producer she did not trust, or particularly like, the teenage songwriter from Dublin realized she would have to internalize these metrics in order to preserve her music the way it sounded in her head.
Even after she fired the producer and took his place—scrapping the sessions and starting over, putting herself in a hundred-thousand pounds of debt before the album’s release in November 1987—this would be an important lesson in control and self-reliance.
She would go on to record albums of traditional Irish folk music and roots reggae, transform a Loretta Lynn song into an apocalyptic showtune, rap about the Great Irish Potato Famine, and manage never once to sound ridiculous doing any of it.
Even at her most accessible, O’Connor wants you to hear the way she summons this music from the dark, quiet places where it has been buried; it floods and calms and stretches beyond our sight, like the sky after a storm.
In songs like “Mandinka” and “Jerusalem,” the magic is in the interplay between O’Connor’s voice and the bed of cavernous rock music: how she stretches the titles into one-word choruses, weaving the syllables through their knotty arrangements.
At the time, she called it a “tongue in cheek song about sex,” and it would eventually receive a dance remix with a verse from MC Lyte about how, despite the seduction in its title, “When I say no, yo, I mean no.” The hook feels almost preverbal as she finds ways to subvert the directness: “Put ’em on, put ’em on, put ’em on me,” O’Connor sings until the words bleed into the rhythm.
The lyrics were addressed in part to her abusive mother who died in a car crash when O’Connor was 19, but who would haunt her life and work long after.
One of her favorites was his 1979 album Slow Train Coming, the start of the icon’s brief run as a born-again Christian songwriter, a polarizing and misunderstood period in his career.
There was also, of course, the time she appeared on Saturday Night Live and tore a photo of the pope that once belonged to her mother—removed from the wall while she was cleaning the house after her death—and made an unrehearsed statement against the Church’s history of child abuse.
When O’Connor performed “Mandinka” at the 1989 Grammy Awards—with the Public Enemy logo dyed into her hair in solidarity with the radical hip-hop artists snubbed by award ceremonies—she appeared genuinely gleeful, received by rapturous applause.
And like the fragmented opener “Jackie,” narrated by a woman waiting every day for her lost husband to return from sea, defying the warnings of her community, some of her best later work was delivered in the form of mantras, secluded from the noise of the world around her.
Within a few years of its release, O’Connor was already distancing herself from the blinding rage and catharsis of The Lion and the Cobra: “Now I’m an old woman of 23,” she explained in a whisper, only half-kidding.
How could I choose between my career or a child?” she told Rolling Stone three years later, in a profile that coincided with “Nothing Compares 2 U” reaching No.
1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got expanded the debut’s emotional canvas in ways that welcomed an entire record-buying public, but The Lion and the Cobra, dense as a dark cloud, proudly bent to the whims of only its creator.
For the American release, the label went with an angelic portrait of O’Connor with her arms crossed against her chest, eyes cast downward, mouth shut before a glowing, white background.