Los Angeles Times
May 31, 1990, Thursday, Home Edition

POP MUSIC REVIEW;
SINEAD O'CONNOR HAS GOT IT;
CONCERT: THE YOUNG IRISHWOMAN NOT ONLY ENTERTAINS AND INSPIRES, BUT ALSO LIFTS
OUR EXPECTATIONS OF WHAT MUSIC CAN BE.

By ROBERT HILBURN, TIMES POP MUSIC CRITIC



   Call her 1990's Tracy Chapman . . . this decade's Chrissie Hynde . . . or
even a new generation's Patti Smith.

   Too much praise for a 23-year-old Irish singer-songwriter with just two
albums to her credit?

   Not if you've heard Sinead O'Connor's seductively tender version of Prince's
"Nothing Compares 2 U" or her hauntingly personal "I Do Not Want What I Haven't
Got" album -- or if you saw her concert on Tuesday at San Diego State
University's Open Air Theatre.

   In the unending parade of pop faces and styles, O'Connor offers traces on
record and on stage of being a trailblazer -- someone like Chapman, Hynde and
Smith who not only entertains and inspires, but also lifts our expectations of
pop music.

   O'Connor's songs of personal exorcism and spiritual transformation are so
intimate and unguarded that you feel at times you're eavesdropping in a
confessional -- or overhearing a stormy scene in a bedroom, or in one song
witnessing the final, bitter goodbys of a couple in an attorney's office.

   O'Connor -- who continues her U.S. tour with sold-out shows tonight and
Friday at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles -- writes about betrayal and
misjudgments with anger and fury, but she emerges from it all with a sense of
optimism and faith.

   "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage
to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference," she
whispered into the microphone at the start of Tuesday's concert, duplicating the
familiar "Serenity Prayer" that opens her album.

   With just a trace of a spotlight on her, O'Connor stared into the darkness of
the audience after delivering that prayer and sang "Feel So Different," a song
about the changes in her own life.

   Sample lines:

     The whole time I'd never seen

    All you had spread before me

    The whole time I'd never seen

    That all I'd need was inside me.

    Who would have imagined in the Me Decade of the '80s that the "first pop
superstar of the '90s" -- as Rolling Stone magazine describes O'Connor -- would
be someone proclaiming that you don't need what you haven't got.

   Coupled with the introspective, philosophical nature of her music, this
head-spinning success could tempt O'Connor into presenting herself as some sort
of precious angel -- an image she called to mind (no doubt inadvertently) when
she walked on stage at one stop on her recent European tour in a hooded robe.

   By looking like a member of some exotic monastic order, O'Connor focused
attention during that concert on the spiritual undercurrents in the album.

   On Tuesday, however, O'Connor wore a leather jacket, jeans and cowboy boots,
emphasizing the frisky, down-to-earth side of her personality and music.

   When O'Connor, an outspoken fan of rap music, took off the jacket, the
lettering on her T-shirt spotlighted the playfulness even more. In a tip of the
hat to the controversial Los Angeles rap group N.W.A, the front of the shirt
read "P.W.A." -- for, as the lettering on the back explained, "Paddies With
Attitude."

   As the concert (which was opened by low-key English soul singer Hugh Harris)
proceeded, O'Connor moved from the cathedral-like tone of the opening number
through the rock 'n' roll sass of "The Emperor's New Clothes," a tale of
confrontation, to the sensual heat of "I Want Your (Hands On Me)."

   The thin, doleful-eyed Irishwoman underscored the latter expression of desire
by caressing her body with as much eyebrow-raising abandon as anything Madonna
exhibited in the bedroom fantasies in her "Blond Ambition" show. Where the
Madonna caresses seemed choreographed, O'Connor's were more startling -- and
sexy -- because they appeared to be spontaneous: a lightning flash of naked
emotion.

   It's precisely that quality that makes O'Connor so compelling. Like her
shaved head, there is something strikingly unadorned about everything she does
on stage -- from the naturalness of her mostly understated manner to the way she
uses her four-piece band. Instead of finding a place for them in every song,
O'Connor was sometimes alone on stage, and sometimes was joined by just one
other musician.

   Her greatest talent at this early point in her career is her singing, which
moves between a whisper and a scream with the suddenness and authority of a
stunt-car driver swerving to avoid an accident.

   But her most prized attribute may be her ability to infuse music with the
most profoundly personal feelings, yet leave enough room for the audience to
find its own emotional connection.

   She also demonstrates, in "Black Boys on Mopeds," an ability to move beyond
her introspective feelings to reflect on social injustice. Sample lines:

   England's not the mythical land of Madame George and roses

    It's the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds.

    And I love my boy and that's why I'm leaving

    I don't want him to be aware that there's

    Any such thing as grieving.

    It's a mother speaking intuitively in the line about leaving England, not a
literal declaration. O'Connor, who is married and has a young son, hasn't left
London in protest because she knows there is injustice everywhere.

   But she left in the line in the song because it reflected her immediate
impulse, and it's that uncensored freedom of poetic expression that connects
O'Connor with the great artists in pop. This young talent has a long way to go
to prove she is an artist for the ages, but her beginning is as inspiring as any
in years.