Several weeks ago, in quieter moments, we began hearing Sinéad O’Connor’s “
It’s a simple lyric, really; sung beautifully, of course; and it comes with a nudge from the past that won’t go away, as though no matter what O’Connor does – and her life has been full of incident since she released that song 30 years ago this month – she will also always be that raised fist in a velvet glove. A burning question.
It is the fall of 1968: A 23-year-old musician from Belfast, son of a shipyard electrician, enters a New York City recording studio and improvises his way through a 10-minute song that seems to be about everything and nothing. Van Morrison’s “Madame George” is probably about a transvestite and possibly about Georgie Hyde-Lees, wife and muse of the Irish poet Yeats. It posits a sunny past and present, the two merging in skittish yearning and compassion.
Just when Morrison was born, at the end of World War II, the United Kingdom had very few non-white residents. That changed over the next three decades, as West Indian immigrants and other people of color flocked to cities such as London.
In early 1983, Colin Roach, a 21-year-old black man, is riding his moped in the London Borough of Hackney when police give chase, assuming he must have stolen it. Roach ends up dead in the doorway of a police station. The police say it’s suicide. They’re scarcely believed.
In June of 1989, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army suppresses pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Troops with tanks and assault rifles kill at least hundreds; we still don’t know how many. That month, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is beginning the 11th year of her rule. The daughter of a middle-class grocer, she has risen through Tory ranks with a relish for law, order and political combat. Of Tiananmen, she pronounces herself shocked and appalled. Only in 2017 do we discover, from newly declassified documents, that the British government knew the massacre was coming two weeks before but felt there was nothing it could do to stop it – only react with the strongest possible words.
In March of 1990, the 23-year-old O’Connor, formerly a troubled Dublin youth, releases her second album, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.” It contains her hit cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” and one of her own compositions, “Black Boys on Mopeds.” On the inner sleeve is a photograph of Colin Roach’s parents standing in the rain beside a poster of their son.
“Margaret Thatcher on TV,” “Black Boys” begins:
Shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing
It seems strange that she should be offended
The same orders are given by her.
The album is not out long before Thatcher, 66, is, coincidentally, deposed by her own party. Halfway through, we get to this couplet:
England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses
It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds.
Thatchers may come and go, but it cannot be both. And just look at these lines: Van Morrison’s mythical land that isn’t – it’s long with unstressed syllables. The second line, the title line, is a series of stressed jabs – “home, “black,” “boys.” A Yeatsian maneuver. And here it has the persistence of a question: How could anyone profess to be shocked by the denial of freedom half a world away when the same speaker believes people do not have a right and a duty to protest racism and violence at home?
But surely, says the inner cynic, there is a difference in scale, and in the nature of authoritarian –
No, O’Connor says. After Colin Roach, there is no other.
And that is why, 30 years on, the song lingers. It’s irrefutable.
