For a symposium on sound and social space at MoMA, I made a short sound piece that collapses two events of October 1992. The first one is Sinéad O’Connor’s infamous performance on Saturday Night Live for which she sang an a cappella version of the Bob Marley song “War” and afterwards tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II. It was intended to be a protest against child abuse in the Catholic Church, and the systematic silencing of children who had come forward. “Fight the real enemy,” she declared.

At the second event, thirteen days later, on October 16th—so, 21 years ago on the night that I presented this piece—she performed at the Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden. She had planned to sing the Dylan song “I Believe In You,” but in the face of unrelenting noise from the crowd, mostly booing, she ripped her in-ear monitors out and she repeated her Saturday Night live performance. She sang Bob Marley’s “War” again, unaccompanied by the musicians on stage.

I ripped the audio from a number of videos I found on YouTube to construct this. I'll put the full text of my notes from the talk on my tumblr. http://johannafateman.tumblr.com/

JohannaFateman

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