newyorker:

The Ferocious, Sublime Dolores O’Riordan, of the Cranberries

“It wasn’t until “Zombie,” the first single from the band’s second album, “No Need to Argue,” that the sublime recklessness of Dolores O’Riordan’s voice became fully evident. “Zombie” was written as a memorial for two children—the twelve-year-old Jonathan Ball and the three-year-old Tim Parry—who were killed in an I.R.A. street bombing, in Warrington, England, in 1993 (the explosives were hidden in garbage cans). She goes feral on the chorus: “Zombie-ie-ie-ie-oh-oh-oh-oh!” It’s all terrifically guttural—ugly, wild, and paralyzing. For an American kid, her round Irish accent made the word seem even stranger, as if she were conjuring something otherworldly, only to vanquish it.

I suspect every young woman eventually finds a figure (or, more likely, a series of figures) who helps disabuse her of certain stifling notions about femininity, of all the outmoded binaries—the things a woman is supposed to choose between as she comes into her own. It feels almost quaint to point out now, in a cultural moment in which we’re rethinking the whole of gender dynamics, but, in the early nineties, O’Riordan helped further the then-iffy-seeming idea that a woman could be both beautiful and ferocious.

She appeared accountable only to some internal voice—which meant we could be, too.” —Amanda Petrusich 

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