The Alternative Number Ones: Sinéad O’Connor’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

"Whatever it may bring, I will live by my own policies. I will sleep with a clear conscience. I will sleep in peace." For most of its running time, the Sinéad O'Connor song "The Emperor's New Clothes" is one side of an intense domestic conversation. Two people had a baby when they were young, and one of those people has reached disorienting levels of success. This has left the couple at a crossroads. They're freaked out and confused, helpless to resist the forces pulling them apart.

We only hear one side of the conversation. It's jangled and conflicted and sad, and it doesn't exactly articulate a clear viewpoint. If we had access to the other side of this conversation, we might hear something just as refracted and messed-up. But then Sinéad O'Connor stops singing about the particulars of her romantic situation. She lifts her head, looks the rest of the world in the eye, and hits us with a bracing blast of clarity. O'Connor wrote and recorded "The Emperor's New Clothes" before she truly became a pop star and a household name, but she wrote the truth. We know that because we saw the way the rest of her story played out.

"The Emperor's New Clothes" is a rock song. Sinéad O'Connor had a few of those, but they're small enough in number that all of them stand out. In the context of I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, the album that briefly turned O'Connor into an inescapable MTV figure, "The Emperor's New Clothes" is an outlier. But then again, every song on that album is an outlier. "Nothing Compares 2 U," the one truly gigantic hit that O'Connor ever made, is an outlier, too. There was no Sinéad O'Connor sound. There was only that voice, which rang out with blazing-eyed intensity regardless of the music surrounding it.

On "The Emperor's New Clothes," Sinéad O'Connor combines that ferocious force-of-nature voice with a scrappy, scratchy take on the kind of guitar-rock that was all over circa-1990 modern rock radio. There's a whole lot of guitar action on "The Emperor's New Clothes." The guitars start out doing Morse-code tics before exploding outward into spiky little shards, locking into choppy anthemic riff-mode, and doing this weird guttural almost-industrial call-and-response with her voice. The guitarist is an old collaborator: Marco Pirroni, who played in the famously disastrous first-show incarnation of Siouxsie & The Banshees with Sid Vicious and who went on to become Adam Ant's chief collaborator. Pirroni was all over O'Connor's first album, 1987's The Lion And The Cobra, and he kept playing with her for years.

Actually, all the people involved in "The Emperor's New Clothes" were longtime Sinéad O'Connor collaborators. The bassist is Andy Rourke, who was in the Smiths right up until the moment that they broke up in 1987. For a while, Rourke and former Smiths drummer Mike Joyce played in O'Connor's touring band. In her memoir, O'Connor wrote, "Andy is the funniest person I've ever met in my life. I love him." Sadly, Rourke is another of the people who we lost last year. His work on "The Emperor's New Clothes," like most of his work in the Smiths, isn't especially showy, but it matters. When you tune into the thrum underneath the track, you can hear melody and life in there. The song wouldn't sound the same without him.

The drummer, meanwhile, isn't just a Sinéad O'Connor collaborator; he's also the song's other character. John Reynolds was the first of O'Connor's four husbands, and he's the father of the oldest of her four children. O'Connor met Reynolds when she first signed with Ensign Records, and the two quickly became involved. O'Connor was 20 when she gave birth to their son Jake and when they got married. There are lots of drums on "The Emperor's New Clothes." It's got regular percussion, and it's also got this chaotic industrial-drumroll thing beefing things up. It's almost like Reynolds is speaking his side of the conversation without using words -- supporting O'Connor and pushing back against her at the same time.

The first line on "The Emperor's New Clothes" is this: "It seems years since you held the baby while I wrecked the bedroom." This does not seem like a figure of speech. O'Connor really sounds like she's talking about wrecking a bedroom while her husband held a baby. The story that she tells on the song -- two young and messy people loving each other but failing to understand each other while becoming parents and finding unexpected success -- is the story that O'Connor lived in real life. You can hear both affection and frustration in the way that O'Connor sings about him: "He thinks I just became famous and that's sure to mess me up, but he's wrong/ How could I possibly know what I want when I was only 21?" (She sings that last word like "twenty-waaaawhn.")

There's no fixed chorus on "The Emperor's New Clothes." There is a chorus, but it keeps changing. O'Connor goes back and forth on whether she's treated Reynolds mean. She sings that she keeps seeing clothes that she likes but that she doesn't want to go out without him. She sings that she needs him, whether or not they stay together: "I would return to nothing without you, if I'm your girlfriend or not." In real life, they didn't stay together as a couple, but Reynolds kept playing with O'Connor for decades.

On the song, O'Connor shifts gears partway through, and she stops talking about Reynolds. She might be talking to him, but she's talking about the oppressive forces that are never far from her mind: "Through their own words, they will be exposed/ They've got a severe case of the emperor's new clothes." Maybe it's a kind of preemptive apology. Maybe it's O'Connor letting Reynolds know that her fierce, committed honesty is about to make life much more difficult for both of them but that she doesn't know any other way to be. O'Connor wasn't ultra-famous yet when she wrote and recorded "The Emperor's New Clothes," but it's almost like she could see her future laid out in front of her. It all played out exactly the way that she envisioned. She was right about everything.

"The Emperor's New Clothes" was Sinéad O'Connor's follow-up to "Nothing Compares 2 U," her gigantic out-of-nowhere surprise hit. The song is catchy and powerful, and it shows off the tingly power of her voice nearly as well as "Nothing Compares." She attacks that scratchy alt-rock track with warm, conversational fervor. She talks to us, the listeners, the way she might talk to anyone, but when she suddenly reaches up for big notes, she still raises goosebumps. There's such rawness in that voice -- the yip that turns into a yodel, stabbing and caressing at the same time. When she doubles that voice up? Fucking hell. Nothing else like it. "The Emperor's New Clothes" isn't the most powerful song on I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got -- it might not even be top-five -- but it still has a physical effect on me. I hear that voice, and I sit up and pay attention.

O'Connor made the video for "The Emperor's New Clothes" with John Maybury, the same director who made "Nothing Compares 2 U." "Nothing Compares" was an instantly iconic video. "The Emperor's New Clothes" is a weird one. O'Connor sings in front of a sort of school-play backdrop -- disco ball, tinsel curtain, confetti -- while judgmental yokels look on. She's doing an unbelievably awkward dance, a kind of herky-jerk get-the-bugs-off-me thing. But she still stares at the camera with that supernatural power, and she's still unbelievably beautiful. It's a compelling watch, almost despite itself.

O'Connor also commissioned an "Emperor's New Clothes" remix from Hank Shocklee, one of the sonic architects behind Public Enemy. When O'Connor sang at the Grammys in 1989, she had Public Enemy's logo painted on the side of her head -- her way of standing in solidarity to that group's protest against the Grammys' treatment of rap. Rap was not a native language to Sinéad O'Connor, but she always understood its power. O'Connor also put MC Lyte on a remix of her 1988 single "I Want Your (Hands On Me)." Even R&B singers weren't regularly working with rappers at the time. The "Emperor's New Clothes" remix is jittery and awkward, and it doesn't really work, but I'm glad it exists.

Even if the video and the remix had been raging successes, "The Emperor's New Clothes" was never going to be as big a hit as "Nothing Compares 2 U." It's too weird, too unstructured, too personal. ("Nothing Compares 2 U" was personal, too, but it was O'Connor reinterpreting the work of another songwriter. "The Emperor's New Clothes" is all her.) Sure enough, "The Emperor's New Clothes" was not a proper hit. On the Hot 100, the song peaked at #60, and then O'Connor never appeared on that chart again. But modern rock radio was still a small pond, and O'Connor was still a big enough fish to push "The Emperor's New Clothes" to #1. It was her last top-10 hit on that chart. The transfixing "Three Babies," the album's final single, didn't even make the chart.

Nevertheless, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got was a huge deal. The album spent six weeks at #1 -- right in between Bonnie Raitt's Nick Of Time and MC Hammer's Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em -- and went double platinum. It won the first-ever Grammy for Best Alternative Album, beating out records from Kate Bush, World Party, the Replacements, and Laurie Anderson. (Even from the beginning, nobody had any idea what the word "alternative" meant.) O'Connor did not show up to collect the award. She stayed away to protest the Gulf War, and she was already talking about quitting the music business -- something that she'd continue to do for many years.

On the 1990 Pazz & Jop poll, America's critics voted I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got the year's #2 album -- behind Neil Young's Ragged Glory, ahead of Public Enemy's Fear Of A Black Planet. Speaking as a critic, we get shit wrong all the time, but my profession was right about I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. One of the most rewarding things about this job is recognizing a major work like that when it first arrives. In this case, my colleagues did not fumble. (I can't personally claim any credit for that. At the time, most of my writing was in the elementary-school book-report format.)

I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got was a huge success on every level. For a little while, Sinéad O'Connor did the things that pop stars are supposed to do. She toured. She performed on TV. She contributed cover songs to high-profile tribute albums like Red Hot + Blue and Two Rooms. After divorcing John Reynolds in 1991, she briefly dated Peter Gabriel, an artist who will eventually appear in this column. She sang a couple of duets with him and accompanied him to the 1993 VMAs. (O'Connor in her memoir: "I had an on-and-off fling with him in which I was basically weekend pussy -- that would be the kindest way to describe it.")

But Sinéad O'Connor was not interested in maintaining pop stardom. In 1993, O'Connor famously ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live -- her way of protesting against the Catholic Church's widespread and institutional abuse of children. I wrote about that act and its aftermath in the Number Ones column on "Nothing Compares 2 U." O'Connor was right about everything, and her resolve in the face of widespread mockery is a model worth following. It bears repeating. But when O'Connor was on SNL, she was there to promote an album that could easily be read as career suicide.

O'Connor's follow-up to I Do Not Believe What I Haven't Got was 1992's Am I Not Your Girl?, a truly strange record of big-band covers. O'Connor had been studying bel canto singing, and she presumably wanted to show off what she could do, but this was still a knowingly contrarian move. It didn't result in a particularly compelling record, either. Unsurprisingly, Am I Not Your Girl? didn't sell. First single "Success Has Made A Failure Of Our Home," first recorded by Loretta Lynn, peaked at #20 on the Modern Rock chart.

Sinéad O'Connor only made the Modern Rock chart one time after that: "You Made Me The Thief Of Your Heart," a Gavin Friday collaboration recorded for the 1993 film In The Name Of The Father, which peaked at #24. After that, American alternative radio moved decisively away from Sinéad O'Connor. She couldn't make the chart even by covering Nirvana in 1994 or by joining the Lollapalooza tour in 1995. That was my first Lollapalooza, but O'Connor had dropped off by the time I saw the show in West Virginia. They replaced her with Elastica. I never did see O'Connor live. (Elastica's highest-charting Modern Rock single, 1994's "Connection," peaked at #2. It's a 9. Nirvana will obviously appear in this column.)

Sinéad O'Connor left a mark. You could hear echoes of her forcefully expressive singing style in the voices of many of the women who found alt-rock stardom in the '90s -- Alanis Morissette, Tori Amos, Dolores O'Riordan. (All three will appear in this column.) But O'Connor wasn't much worried about stardom or alt-rock. For the next few decades, she did whatever she wanted. She never returned to pop prominence, and it seemed like that was fine with her. She had real struggles, and her time in the spotlight did her no favors, but she kept making whatever music felt right to her.

O'Connor's contemporaries always recognized her greatness, and she worked with artists from all over the aesthetic map: Massive Attack, the Chieftans, Mary J. Blige. She always loved reggae, and she devoted a ton of her remaining career to the genre, working extensively with the great production duo and rhythm section Sly & Robbie. For a while, as she writes in her memoir, she and Robbie Shakespeare "fell quite in love and we had a big old affair." Shakespeare died in 2021.

O'Connor struggled with mental health and with her relationship to the public. She changed her name a couple of times, repeatedly announced her retirement and then retracted those announcements, and ultimately converted to Islam. She agreed to televised treatments with Dr. Phil and then accused him of throwing her into a treatment center and exploiting her. In 2021, she published her great memoir. The next year, her 17-year-old son Shane died by suicide. I don't know if it's possible to recover from something like that, but O'Connor never got the chance.

In July of 2023, Sinéad O'Connor died at the age of 56. Many of us made assumptions about her cause of death, and we were wrong. Just last week, the London coroner's office reported that she died of natural causes. O'Connor's time in the public eye was strange and often ugly, but she made great music, and she fought ceaselessly for a better, more humane world. Now, she sleeps with a clear conscience. She sleeps in peace.

GRADE: 9/10

BONUS BEATS: Here's video of Third Eye Blind saluting Sinéad O'Connor by covering "The Emperor's New Clothes" at a DC show in July 2023, just after her passing:

(Third Eye Blind will eventually appear in this column.)

BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here's fan footage of Sleater-Kinney, whose Corin Tucker is one of the few singers truly qualified to cover Sinéad O'Connor, playing "The Emperor's New Clothes" at Seattle's Bumbershoot Festival in September 2023:

(Sleater-Kinney have had a few minor Adult Alternative hits, but they've never been on any iteration of the Modern Rock chart, which feels like an indictment of this whole thing.)