It seemed wildly plausible that the banshee behind the microphone was a straight-up witch shouting an incantation. I didn’t know it was called “zombie” for a number of years, and thought that O’Riordan was cursing the listener or grieving the dead, with some made-up word, some unknown spell. But in the second build-up, she’s expressing frustration: “It’s the same old theme / Since 1916 … they’re still fighting.”Īnd then of course there’s the chorus - which is really just the word “zombie” stretched out over and over again, practically grunted out of her otherwise bell-like voice with a guttural vowel sound. The first lead up to the chorus suggests that O’Riordan is distancing herself from what she sees in her head: “But you see / It’s not me / It’s not my family,” she implores. “In your head / in your head / they are fighting,” O’Riordan sings, before listing the tanks and bombs, bombs and guns, that are also in her head.
Cranberries lead singer tv#
“Zombie” seems to describe watching TV or otherwise taking in the news about something bad that you didn’t witness. So much of the desire to heal the world in the ’90s stemmed from the idea that healing needed to happen somewhere far away, somewhere else - be it Diana with the landmines or Bono and world hunger. It’s, of course, a complete downer, and yet strangely galvanizing - a call to action that feels like a call to action, not least because it ends on an unresolved beat that seems to be expecting you to finish the song.īut more than just earnestness, “Zombie” reflects the moment’s frustration with the still-new mass media hegemony - one that constantly communicated and informed upon the injustices of the world, but offered less in terms of action. The song is exceptional - an antiwar banger, if such a thing is possible, with an unexpected combination of grungy distortion and O’Riordan’s ethereal voice. But the sincerity of her outrage in “Zombie” resonates throughout the years, even when the vogue of performative pacifism went the way of fashionable flannel. This was, of course, the most ’90s thing ever, as was her cropped pixie hair and rebellious attitude. O’Riordan wrote “Zombie” in 1993 in response to the deaths of two children killed in the IRA bombing of Warrington - but throughout the years, she would dedicate it to others, like the victims of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Rwanda. In the entire decade of the 2000s, only one song with a female vocalist hit #1 on the alt-rock chart: “Bring Me to Life,” from Evanescence the ’90s alt-rock chart started with Sinéad O’Connor’s smash “Nothing Compares 2 U” and featured several female vocalists until 1998, when Courtney Love’s Hole hit #1 multiple times with “Celebrity Skin.” By the time I was watching “Animal Instinct,” the time of the Cranberries was already over.
Just a few years earlier, though, the Cranberries had been part of an alternative rock sound that defined a generation, but by 1999 they were being pushed out of the genre that included R.E.M., Alanis Morissette, the Goo Goo Dolls, and Chumbawamba for something markedly more aggressive and male. In 1999, this seemed patently ridiculous, but somehow still appealingly wistful. The music video is one of those that crams a whole prosepoem about poverty and displacement into a three-minute silent film. O’Riordan is wearing a flower crown over her uncharacteristically long hair in the video, dancing barefoot. More likely, this may be because I spent one long summer watching MTV when the “Animal Instinct” video was in heavy rotation. Partly this may be due to a “Community” Season 2 joke in which the lyrics of “Linger” are rewritten about lead Jeff Winger.
I’m prone to valorize the Cranberries - the Irish alt-rock band that O’Riordan fronted to wide success, especially in Europe, in the mid-’90s. The caption reads: “My idols are dead and my enemies are in power.” The other is a popular internet meme, which is reportedly a still from a Brazilian music video, of two sexily bestockinged legs and a slim hand holding a cigarette - a glamorous, ’90s kind of ennui. Upon hearing the news that Dolores O’Riordan died, writer Ruby Brunton posted on Twitter what was, to me, the most fitting epitaph.