Drink Before the War— Sinéad O’Connor
#365Songs: January 2nd
In my late twenties, I spent a month in a small seaside village on the Irish coast. Wrote prose in peat-scented pubs, sang Pogues songs with strangers, wandered the Dublin streets where my heroes crafted the sort of art that taught this small town Ohio boy how to dream. In Ireland, everyone is a poet or a grifter — often both. But what I remember most about my brief time there was how insignificant my art felt, tiny stories about ordinary people who’d never been oppressed, characters whose worst days involved a break-up or momentary breakdown.
All those Irish stories I read, and heard, all those songs that filled the rooms I visited, all had purpose. Necessity. Revolutionaries, fighters, drunks with political gripes. We lost one of them late in the year, the great Shane MacGowan, whose words will never die. But there was a loss before that that still sits heavy with me.
You say “Oh, I’m not afraid, it can’t happen to me
I’ve lived my life as a good man
Oh, no you’re out of your mind
It won’t happen to me
’Cause I’ve carried my weight and I’ve been a strong man”
Listen to the man in the liquor store
Yelling “anybody want a drink before the war?”
I was in early high school when Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of the Pope on SNL. I was too young and naive at the time to know how truly revolutionary that was, how culturally significant. It also took several years before I learned the toll she paid, before I realized that a true revolutionary is willing to sacrifice everything to draw attention to a cause.
Somebody cut out your eyes, you refuse to see
Ah, somebody cut out your heart, you refuse to feel
And you live in a shell
You create your own hell
You live in the past and talk about war
And you dig your own grave, yeah
But it’s a life you can save
So stop getting fast, it’s not gonna happen
And you’ll cry but you’ll never fall, no, no, no
You’re building a wall
Gotta break it down, start again
We live in an era of grief, a long stretch when everything feels unhinged and unsettled, when oppressors seemingly control both power and popular opinion. Whose voice powers our next revolution? Who fills the spotlight left empty when our heroes die? Why not you? Me? If not now, when?
No, no, no, it won’t happen to us
We’ve lived our lives, basically we’ve been good men
So stop talking of war
’Cause you know we’ve heard it all before
Why don’t you go out there and do something useful?
