I Have Refused to Take Part

I believe I first saw the name—and the face—in a new-release circular from Hastings Records in the fall of 1987. According to the blurb, she was Irish, she was a favorite with critics overseas, her head was deliberately shaven, and her first name was pronounced shih-NAYD (I’m guessing at the phonetic spelling). I can’t remember my introduction to her music…most likely the video for “Mandinka” on some syndicated show in our neighborhood’s pre-cable wilderness. When I started clubbing on a regular basis in the early months of 1989, both “Mandinka” and “I Want Your (Hands on Me)” were in steady rotation every weekend. I’d own both singles in due course (on cassette and 12″ vinyl, respectively) and they’d play a part in my early, crude attempts at mixtapes.

“Mandinka”, inspired by a West African tribe discussed by Alex Haley in Roots, debuted on Billboard‘s Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart on January 30, 1988 (a week before its parent album, The Lion and the Cobra, first scratched the Billboard 200). It reached #14, and although there was a promotional 12″ single with a remix by the celebrated Justin Strauss and Murray Elias, I only heard the original album mix at clubs in the day. “I Want Your (Hands on Me)”, reworked to include a guest rap by fellow newcomer MC Lyte, peaked at #20 Club Play that summer. Frustratingly, none of the single mixes featuring Lyte are available to download or stream; I have a European CD single with all of the 12″ versions and I treasure it. (Lyte’s sweet remembrance is here.)

Had Billboard established its Modern Rock Tracks chart just a few months earlier, both “Mandinka” and “Hands” (and possibly the Yeats-influenced “Troy”) would have easily made its ranks. She was ready for it: “Jump in the River” debuted on the second-ever Modern Rock survey dated September 17, 1988. It peaked at #17 in a three-week run. (An extended remix featuring confrontational performance artist Karen Finley was also issued; it missed the Club Play chart, not to mention radio playlists. Don’t click on that link in public.)

Let’s jump ahead to January 1990: your author is in line at Record Rack to meet Ministry, in town for a two-night engagement at Numbers. The shop’s owner announces that a) he’s just received an import shipment of the first single from our heroine’s forthcoming second album and b) here it is. I remember thinking it was gorgeous (and antithetical for a Ministry in-store) but wouldn’t hear it again until proper American promotion began to snowball. “Nothing Compares 2 U”—written by Prince, introduced by Time offshoot The Family—became her first Hot 100 hit in the week ending St. Patrick’s Day, reaching #1 in just over a month and staying on top for four weeks. (Additional Billboard data: #1 Modern Rock, one week; #2 Hot Adult Contemporary, three weeks; #23 Mainstream Rock.) It remains one of those songs (“Pure” and “Enjoy the Silence” to name others) that best evoke an exciting yet scary time in my life: on the verge of turning twenty, working in music retail at last, finding love and losing it and finding it anew. (I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, procured on the job the weekend before its official US release, is a difficult end-to-end listen today for the memories it awakens.)

“The Emperor’s New Clothes” followed its predecessor onto the Hot 100 but fell short of its glory, topping out at #60 in a nine-week summer cycle. It’s a great song in the context of the album but might have been too personal for American audiences to take to heart, though it did provide her second #1 at Modern Rock and returned her to the Club Play chart with a #27 peak. (“New Clothes” was paired on the latter survey with her definitive reading of the Irish folk standard “I Am Stretched on Your Grave”, best experienced in its original “Funky Drummer” arrangement over any subsequent remix.)

Here the headlines take over: her refusal to let the national anthem precede her American shows, stoking the wrath of noted choirboy Frank Sinatra; her boycott of the 1991 Grammy Awards ceremony, citing the Academy’s continued emphasis on commercial success over artistic ingenuity. And then there’s the incident recalled most frequently in the past twenty-four hours: her October 3, 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live, climaxing in an on-camera decimation of a photograph of then-Pope John Paul II with a call to “fight the real enemy”. Most reports at the time made no mention of the impetus behind her actions—the long history of clandestine sexual abuse by Catholic officials, from priests on up—reducing the event for millions to a crazy bald Irishwoman making a spectacle of herself.

Although “The Emperor’s New Clothes” would be her last dalliance with the Hot 100, she would continue to make other Billboard charts over the years. The all-covers Am I Not Your Girl?, released two weeks before the SNL incident, debuted on the Billboard 200 a week after the broadcast, unable to push past #27. Her only subsequent album to not make the 200 was 2005’s Throw Down Your Arms, a reggae covers album produced by Sly and Robbie that still cracked Billboard‘s Independent and Reggae LP charts. She would see her biggest Club Play hits take root in 2002: both a remix campaign of “Troy” and the Conjure One collaboration “Tears From the Moon” (as remixed by Tiësto) peaked at #3 in separate 16-week chart runs. (Her remaining Modern Rock hits, solo and otherwise, will be spotlit in future editions of FOOLS GOLD.)

Just as the media glossed over the truth of the Saturday Night Live matter, there have been few obituaries and tributes that make mention of the name she adopted upon her conversion to Islam in 2018. She continued to use her birth name for professional reasons until her death, but for the past five years of her life, in the course of daily events, she preferred to be known as Shuhada’ Sadaqat (having changed her legal “patriarchal” name to Magda Davitt the year before). The reader may remember her as they wish. Forgetting her is another matter.

Everyone can see what’s going on
They laugh ’cause they know they’re untouchable
Not because what I said was wrong
Whatever it may bring
I will live by my own policies
I will sleep with a clear conscience
I will sleep in peace