Don’t let it fade…
QUICK NOTE: I’ve been meaning to write something like this since her untimely passing in two years ago in January 2018. But like most things in life, I’m late. I’d rather not write this at all.
We meet the infinite. This is a fact. We try not to think about it lest we go insane. Instead, we try to live. Some of us live better than others. It is a worthwhile struggle to improve everyone’s quality of life. Some of us care more than others to try to do this through our conscience, our votes, or even our individual actions. Most of us don’t give a shit, even if we say we do. We just keep looking at our phones. There are many, many worthwhile things to care about. I have a wife and kids, a semi-important job, hobbies that keep my knife sharp. In short, I have shit to do. Given this is the case, why do I care about a woman I never met dying halfway across the world? I’m not quite sure I know. I do know I’m getting more sentimental and emotional in my old age. When I lived in Calgary, the Military Museum had a display of a thirteen year old girl whom a photographer had met in Afghanistan. When the photographer returned the following year, he learned the girl was dead. I think I cried for an hour over that. I saved the photo of the girl. It’s in my office, reminding me… of what exactly?
And when Dolores O’Riordan passed away, I remember driving into work totally fucking stunned. I’ve never seen The Cranberries in concert. I did not know she had two solo albums out. But looking at my shelf I see seven Cranberries CDs, also all on my phone. I was just as upset when George Harrison died. But he was a Beatle. His life was cut short. He was more...what is the word? Surely not Iconic. Look at O’Riordan in a random Google image search. She’s just as Iconic as any male rock star, certainly. For the first few weeks it looked like she took her own life, which put a tint on the grief her fans and I’m sure her friends and family took hard. I did more than just put a sign on my door that announced her passing and blasted her music for months. I wondered more than just what the hell happened. I wondered… why did I care?
Linger came out when I was in high school, and you had to be an idiot to to see that she had talent pouring out of her. The minute she opened her mouth, it was like every daughter in Ireland sang at the same time. I was shocked to learn from her bandmates that other bands had turned her down because they didn’t like her ‘keening’ - the traditional Irish vocals used to lament the dead at gravesite - because it was exactly her use of keening that shot The Cranberries from Ireland and nobody to Linger and the world in less than six months. The Cranberries’ first two albums sold forty million copies. Pick up a copy of the next Rolling Stone, if you still care to read print. Find any artist today who has moved forty million whole copies of any album - not streamed. It doesn’t fucking happen.
There was that, and there was her image. It could only be found in fast cuts on MTV “back when MTV played music videos” and on the cover of their spectacular first album “Everyone Else is Doing It, Why Can’t We?” She was petite for sure, but not a Deborah Harry, you could say, or a Pat Benetar. She didn’t look like a runway model, but it didn’t matter. It’s not that it didn’t matter because she could sing. There are millions of girls who don’t look like runway models who can’t sing. She just had a charm about her. The way her eyes would roll around in her head. The way she seemed to be nervous every time she talked to just about anybody. Her personality is what made her beautiful, and she might be the first female rock star to make me want to listen to her by deliberately not doing what the other girls were doing - and I mean that with absolutely no disrespect to Joan Jett or Grace Slick or whoever. There has to be someone like that for every generation. And for the Xers I think it was Dolores.
Obviously she was trying to be noticed. She had more hairstyles than David Bowie. Like many front women before her, she bobbed hers, got a crew cut, like Billie Eilish, she dyed it different colors, experimented like any seventeen year old punk girl would. She went platinum blonde for the their second cover No Need to Argue. Other than constantly looking at her on the cover - and Fergal, what the fuck was up with him? - everyone who I ever knew who listened to the Cranberries had the same question - what’s up with the couch? It was like being a Dave Matthews Band fan. Who the hell was Fenton? It didn’t matter why she did it. It didn’t matter that she did it at all, really, with a voice like that. But when you watch the zombie video, my lord. Striking does not even cut it.
I listened to Zombie of course, being in college in the 90’s when the Troubles were still going on and wondering when in the hell were those two sides going to end the longest violent clash in western Europe? But I was never really a huge fan of the song. Ode to My Family and Twenty One were the standouts for me, regardless of my worshipping of the guitar on that fine song. And I absolutely could not stand Ridiculous Thoughts. Perhaps it was the video with Elijah Wood. What the hell was going on? What the hell was the song about? It seemed just as random as Alanis Morrisette’s Isn’t it Ironic, which I fucking destest. But Everything I Said, Dreaming my Dreams, Yeat’s Grave. Great songs. Great album. So what if I didn’t like the singles. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.
I was driving home the day she died, and a song I thought was a throwaway lyrics about a breakup teamed with a great melody suddenly struck me as a shot across the bow of the press and paparazzi. Twister. Oh. Does anyone see through you? It’s not a boyfriend. It’s the media. But you’re so happy. Oh. I didn’t go along. Nothing she did would ever be right in their eyes, and in the same way, everything she did was fodder for them. There was no escape from the endless cycle of friendless fucks who make their money off her image and music. But she had to move on. She felt alive, but she cried so hard about it. Jesus Christ, I thought. Ridiculous Thoughts. Why is she even giving them space in her head? I must have played that song at the top of my factory speakers on repeat on the way home for a good month after she died. I felt like an idiot. I could have been enjoying this song for twenty five years by now. It’s like I found it for the first time. When I played the video for my son, he fucking got it right away. He’s fifteen.
When they pulled her body out of the bathtub of an upscale London hotel room, she was clothed with a shirt and pajama bottoms. Most people who drown themselves in bathtubs are clothed. They don’t want to be found naked. Suicide seemed to be the most likely answer. When the toxicology report confirmed that she was way over the limit in alcohol, it became apparent that she was on a bender. Not that suicides don’t happen under the influence, but it’s not the majority of the time. This coupled with phone calls she made to her producer at two am, and other evidence that she was planning meets the next day, all indicate that it was most likely a stupid mistake. Some people accidentally...shoot themselves...in the head. We can make whatever jokes we want about it, but the fact is that it happens, and when it happens to anyone, whether they sold forty million albums or not, it’s a tragedy.
YouTube has an entire concert in Paris the Cranberries played in 1999. I urge everyone to watch it. Watch it, not watch her. You get the feeling of how good a band they are, and they are an excellent band. Fergal is mad on the drums, absolutely underrated. I’ve heard some say he’s a dime in a dozen. Well, he must be the best dime? I don’t know. I was impressed. And the Hogans don’t even look at each other. They just…do. They play. And of course Dolores is the consummate rock star, and she did this tour after she gave birth. Just…wow. For a time my daughter would go to sleep in the cinema room in our house where I have a projector hooked up to a Blu Ray smart player. So I put the concert on so Dolores could sing my daughter…and me… to sleep. So much so that now she asks me to skip the Cranberries whenever they shuffle on in the car. I have endlessly played Roses, which arguably is track for track their best album, all to her dismay. Some people just aren’t into her voice or The Cranberries’ post-Smiths sound.
I didn’t realize how much in love with her I was. It was more than just knowing all the lyrics, even to the songs that I hated. It was an appreciation of a person and everything they had given me for twenty five years, which was in a way everything they had. And I didn’t know a fucking thing about her. I had no idea she lived in Canada, had married Duran Duran’s tour manager, had three kids, was recently divorced. Yadda Yadda Yadda. I’m not a celebrity junky, despite being a committed cinephile. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s just that I’ve been more cognizant of my intrusion into ‘public’ people’s lives since Princess Diana died (by the way, I’m NOT a Diana fan, and that’s not the topic of this rant). I saw what it was leading to, so I said a long time ago, I’m not going to be a part of the problem. So I just didn’t know anything past what she cared to say on an Island record or on Twitter, which she used sparingly.
So when I started reading NPR and BBC articles about her and her bandmates, I was really surprised at how much I didn’t know, and completely unprepared for an emotional journey as her bandmates continued to speak to the press openly about their grieving process. Unlike bands like No Doubt, which struggled internally with Gwen Stefani’s image and treatment in the press, and the unfair attention which netted the rest of the band the ability to walk down Fifth Avenue and NOT be recognized, Fergal and the Hogan Brothers were completely at ease with Dolores being the front woman, despite the song credits being so mixed and shared. “Doing photo sessions was easy with Dolores,” Noel Hogan told the media, “all we had to do was get behind her.” And they supported her as best they could. There are millions of pictures of The Cranberries, and she’s always up front. The cover for the 20th Century Masters Millennium Collection is almost a farce. Fergal looks like he doesn’t know what to do. Noel looks like he’s tired of all this shit. Mike looked bored. Where’s Dolores? Right up front, with fishnet stockings, sitting on a ladder, and staring into the camera with her lips parted. Yes, I fucking bought it, and no, I didn’t need it. The set itself is funny. They’re on a photo backdrop, but you an see all the equipment and the backdrop is exposed. The ladder Dolores is sitting on is covered in paint splotches. It’s a deliberate choice to say none of the glossy stuff matters, because she’s in the shot. But what got me crying the day of her funeral, after reading all this about a person I shouldn’t care about, is a picture from the BBC of her brothers and bandmates carrying her miniature coffin out of a church and negotiating down a flight of stairs. You can clearly see Noel, Mike, and Fergal. They’re still getting behind her, even in death. I hope I have friends like that.
As I’m writing this I have Lost from In the End playing. It’s their last and her postumous album and excepting the inevitable re-releases and rarities that usually follow the death of a star who’s had such a long career as hers, it’s the last time I’ll hear her. And I don’t know, I still don’t know why I care about Dolores O’Riordan. I don’t know her, or her story. Or her friends. Or her family. All I have is her music. And maybe that’s the way it should be. Maybe that’s enough.