I Miss Dolores O’Riordan
Or: Thoughts on Grace
Seven years ago this month, the world lost Dolores O’Riordan, the haunting voice of The Cranberries. This was a poet who some say left the earth too soon, although there are many reasons—in Palisades flames, in the dreams of marauders from Palm Beach to Beijing, in whatever froths from the next “pangolin” — to say of the pre-Covid departed that they left the party with perfect timing, per Didion Rules.
All the more reason to honor them.
In just four songs Ms. Riordan wrote the full compass of human experience: the family, love and war, giving twice as much attention to love as war or family, the topic treated in two songs: Dreams, where the flesh-bound ego questions itself in the face of overwhelming eros; and Linger, where betrayal has clawed at love, and the dream ends but—somewhere between the pains of war and family—the individual declares herself willing to forgive, and so receives grace, so scarce in the world today, a theme that illuminates the entirety of O’Riordan’s work and sets it apart from anything after.
The closest we lately have had, in terms of raw passion, on the subject of love, is Amy Winehouse, but Back to Black isn’t really a love song, or even pretending to be one: it’s a perfect song about depression, of someone literally dying to see, through the narrow slits of the ego’s battle mask, what it might mean to really love, or for a love between two people to be a glimpse of divine love, which O’Riordan did so elegantly:
And oh, my dreams
It's never quite as it seems
'Cause you're a dream to me
Dream to me
The song, she said, was about feeling love for the first time. The simple soar like paper kites on the voice as an instrument beyond words, something ineffable which only makes it more impressive when she meets the other side of first love, the heartache and humbling fully captured in Linger:
I swore I would be true
And honey so did you
So why were you holding her hand?
Is that the way we stand?
Were you lying all the time?
Was it just a game to you?
Somehow, awesomely, the heart that sings the second verse feels even more full, more rich, more melodic than the heart that sings the first; there is no black to go back to, only something gold beyond comprehension. She isn’t in denial, she sees quite clearly and yet proceeds without vindictiveness, hinting at possible forgiveness as an ultimate, maybe the ultimate, act of love – never has the phrase “Holy shit” been more apt. What a gift from a poet of any era. But there’s more: in an achievement that borders on the miraculous O’Riordan, in one raw go, wrote the greatest antiwar song of her generation, Zombie.
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Something happened in the 1990s, in Ireland, among the young.
The discovery of a slightly finer human consciousness, a rejection of their parents’ steel-trap sectarian grimness. Something lush and new was found by those kids who grew up with the Troubles in the 70s and 80s, Sinead and Bono and the Pogues, all the way down to the one hit bar bands—and every banshee back to Brú ba Bóinne. Like their sisters the Jews—Happy Bloomsday—they became people apart are yet all people. Personal pain transubstantiates into universal pain.
A year and a half after the 1993 bombing that it’s about—an IRA IED in a trash can in the North of England that kills two kids—O’Riordan wrote Zombie, a rejection of ends-means politics, of identity violence, a line drawn in song around the soul that stuns to this day.
Nothing in the hoary U2 canon, not even Bloody Sunday, comes close to the achievement of Zombie, whose lyrics have only gained, in these days of razed cities—whether by wildfire or firebombing—as a liberation from the illusion that any horror isn’t universal. From any misapprehension that the costs of destruction—even that of a server farm guzzling oil as it refrigerates streaming seasons of Seinfeld outside the Mojave desert—are at all containable. As if humans didn’t share one big soul.
As if the old don’t choke the young as they cling to power:
It's the same old theme
Since nineteen sixteen
In your head, in your head, they're still fighting
With their tanks and their bombs
And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head, they are dying
And on the heels of this gorgeous poetry, where Bono might be tempted to speech-make in a spotlight, Ms. O’Riordan gives her entire being, and her song, wholly over to the dead. She starts keening—literally the Celtic song of the dead—in the haunting final strains of Zombie, a feminine Irish lament for loss that makes the song not just haunting, but arguably *a haunting*— a thin place smuggled onto MTV by an artist whose soul I won’t claim to know. But who was named, in a land where names are everything, for Our Lady of the Seven Dolours, the seven sorrows in the life of Mary, all related to the loss of a child, just as this song was written to lament two dead children. Zombie’s brilliance is to tie the battlefield to the heart, from where we move to O’Riordan’s fourth magnificent work - Ode to My Family.
My mother, my mother
She'd hold me
She'd hold me…
My father, my father
He liked me, well, he liked me
That’s it. That’s the miracle. Repeating like a caress, a memory of love as gaining incantation in a voice filled with gratitude, praising memories of two people who, against long odds, made a place where the human spark could gain hold for another generation.
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Seven years ago this month, Ms. O’Riordan was found dead in a London hotel, drowned in a bathtub near a bottle of champagne.
She was 46.
We’re habituated to say that’s old for rock and roll, that genre of 27-year-old ghosts. By most measures this was tragically young. But one need only watch video of Nancy Pelosi certifying Trump’s election in her walker, or Bono dancing for Davos (or Zuckerberg dancing in any way at all) to wonder if the gift of a true poet is that they don’t die in dissipation, like the rest, but achieve some version of Assumption: glorying — through champagne, a warm bath, angels smiling — back into the One Big Soul, there to share a fine cup of coffee with the smiling David Lynch.