Sinead O'Connor, the ORIGINAL short haired chick, or at least the one that's referred to the most. The one that made it famous. The one that raised the ire of people who heard from a guy who heard from a guy who heard on talk radio that she worships that devil and dangerously feminist.
OF COURSE I loved Sinead. The year is 1988. My parents polite 10th request that I get a job results in me getting a job with a Mike "Stead" Winstead at Little Caesars where the entire store would listen to 97x (the future of Rock & Roll) from open, 9am, until close, 2am. 97x was one of maybe five "alternative" stations in the country in 1988 and you could hear a lot of Sinead in 17 hours. But you could hear more when "Babinsky" Chris Jones was working and giving me a thorough education in Sinead, The Cure, Stone Roses, got me up to speed. To this day I still have a cassette mix he made me that had a killer remix of "Stretched On Your Grave."
High School memories are strong anyway, but having them tied into a John Hughes soundtrack makes me incredibly fortunate. 97x truly was the future of Rock & Roll filling our High School working asses with non-fuckin-stop Janes Addiction, Bauhaus, Sex Pistols, B-52's, They Might Be Giants, Soup Dragons, Depeche Mode, B.A.D., R.E.M., P.I.L., Urban Dance Squad, Sisters of Mercy, Afghan Whigs, Daisy Chainsaw, The Pop Will Eat Itself, Buzzcocks, The Church, Echo & The Bunnymen, Crowded House, Gene Loves Jezebel, Daisy Chainsaw, Love & Rockets, Cocteau Twins, Living Colour, XTC, Camper Van Beethoven, Hoodoo Gurus, Iggy Pop, Bob Mould, Jesus Jones ("Liquidizer" not "Doubt") more Cure and more Stone Roses. Getting a little sad here.
97x made an 8 hour shift almost as sweet as having a boss that bought us booze and let us start drinking a couple hours before close, but not quite as sweet as having four phones for call-in orders. Whenver 97x would play the "PHONES FROM HELL!" that was your cue to call in for free shit. Four phones, four redials, you do the math. Boy would Winstead bust his fat ass from the very back when he heard the phones from hell almost killing himself for a fucking Danielle Dax CD.
We'd trade pizza's with the overnight guy Bill "The Stereo Slave" for requests. "Step On" by Happy Mondays was one song I could simply not get enough of. Winstead's number one request was "Anarchy in the U.K.", Jones' was "Never Enough" by The Cure. 97x was a phenomenon, there literally was no other station in Oxford. Even when you weren't at work it was in cars driving by, Bruno's Pizza, the video store, pretty much everywhere but the bank and the library. So Oxford was just one big 97x crossfade when you went out for the night.
So...Sinead.
So outspoken that she's scary to people, LOVE THAT! I remember a lot of hacking on the hair, the threatening shortness of the hair. It's actually the most conservative haircut you can get. The marines get that cut. People would call her a lesbian, and by lesbian they meant "bad thing." I do know she has kids, whether she got them from a penis I don't. She's independent and opinionated and sometimes opinions threaten other people. I think feminism is sexy.
I love that such a gentle little thing would rip up a picture of the Pope on SNL.
Awesome! I forget why she did it, but I don't care because the reason I liked it is one part kickass chick and two part THAT'S what SNL SHOULD be like! The controversy on that show has dissappeared into a giant jamba juice paid advertisement sketch. They would get so much ratings if they became radical again, less good natured. Political again. Kind of pathetic that SNL is still on sabbatical from Bush poking. You remember the decalration that they'd no longer make fun of him after 9-11. You couldn't do shit after that holiday, couldn't even eat fuckin' french fries without 9-11 having a say. Fuck. I hated that shit. But Sinead wasn't around then to be called a commie with the Dixie Chicks. She retired and grew her hair out.
Kind of a Tina Fey vibe. Actually when Tina Fey was on mainstage she was a short-haired chick.
A little like that. Very girl-who-sat-behind-me-in-French-Film-Class.
OH FUCK, funniest story ever, almost forgot. I lived next to the 97x tower, I'm sure someday I'll grow a third arm, but the most rebellious third arm possible. And we got 97x through every thing. For 8 years you could hear 97x on the phone for every phone call. Until we bought an elaborate series of dampers, it filled every silence on tv.
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