JOAN OSBORNE is a crazy chick. At least, this seems to be the consensual view in the more retro and retarded areas of rock culture, as in the latest issue of Q magazine, where she's listed in that category alongside musicians such as Alanis Morissette and Sheryl Crow. When she released her debut single earlier this year, One Of Us, "kooky" was the word applied to its lyric lines, "What if God was one of us/Just a slob like one of us?" Crazy? Kooky? That sure seems toe be the way rock'n'roll now seeks to define, deny, reduce and potentially limit the latest breed of female singer songwriters, as happened roughly three years ago when a similar label was slapped on that other magnificent triumvirate Tori Amos, PJ Harvey and Bjork. But it ain't gonna work, boys.
Crazy? I might be slowly approaching that state, but I wasn't when we recorded that song!" Joan responds, speaking on the phone from Nevada. "But that kind of stuff has probably been, historically, a way to marginalise somebody who has a view that may be a little bit threatening. Yet I don't let it bother me too much. I don't think most people think I'm crazy."
Or if they do, clearly Joan Osborne is not alone. The mere fact that One of Us has spent the last three months in the Irish Top 30 would suggest that there are many people in this country who are tuning into her God/slob question at some intrinsic level, as though it tapped right into the core of some religious zeitgeist. That definitely seems to be the case in America, where this 33 year old "lapsed Catholic" has discovered that women, in particular, seem to cheer deliriously when she sings that line in concert, from a song she describes as "relatively light hearted" but "asking some pretty fundamental questions about what you believe in terms of God and the universe and all that".
Equally, Osborne's glorious, Grammy nominated album, Relish, reflects her own current obsession with what she calls the "concept of falling from grace" and even more sinfully, perhaps, relishing that descent, as in the song Dracula Moon where she sings "I'm naked in a hotel room/making out with my one true love/You say, come back home/I say I'm just falling from grace/I said, I like falling from grace.
"It's not that I'm subscribing to falling from grace as necessarily a way to self discovery it just seems that in religious fundamentalist culture there is this picture of a spiritual person as being something of a child, a sheep following orders and that this is the only way to get into heaven," she elaborates. "I rejected that a limited perspective. I believe you can be a really spiritual person and still be in touch with your own intellect, sexuality and free will all the things that make you a human being."
That all sounds perfectly plausible, and even commendable, Joan, but aren't you going a wee bit too far when you put on the cover of your new single, called St Teresa, a photograph of yourself in what seems to be a post coital dance, if not trance? In this, aren't you almost as shamelessly sexual as the narrator in the song Right Hand Man, who has just had a night of gymnastic lovemaking and is floating home "grinning like a fool" and thinking, "the cops on the block/Know what I've been doing/They see the way I walk"? Isn't all this rather distasteful, Ms Osborne, particularly to those Catholics who were raised with a quite proper the body doesn't exist below the waist attitude to sex?
"It is, I admit, shocking! And `shameless' is right! But if you want to know which line, above all I've written, people respond most strongly to during concerts, it is that other one from Right Hand Man, where I sing my panties in a wad/At the bottom of my purse before I head out for that walk home! So many women, obviously, can relate to that. And tell me so!" she says, laughing.
"But, in terms of St Teresa, it's not like Catholicism doesn't have its own long tradition of eroticising its saints. It's not like this is an alien concept. Now I know that to some people, even my linking the words eroticising" and saints" might be a problem, but let's look at reality here. Part of the appeal of the Catholic church is the mystery, even in relation to sexuality. And someone like St Teresa experienced a lot of these mysteries through her body, so this idea has some kind of precedent in the history of religion. And I've no problem linking the themes of sexuality and spirituality in that way. Again, it's trying to reclaim a woman's sexuality, in particular, from the history of oppression in the Church."
Joan Osborne stresses that for herself the quest to "reclaim the soul", in a religious sense, is less important than the overall need to "reclaim an identity as a female" in society in general. "In this media oriented culture it has been really hard for me, as a person and as a woman, to find any kind of female personas to identify with and feel I'm being represented by in any real way," she explains.
"You grow up in this country and, by the time you are 12, 13, you do think that to be a woman means you have to run around with a bikini, with big boobs and try to sell people a beer and that's it. That's supposed to be your role in society. So what I do is really more of a search to find some real representation of female sexuality and realising it's not completely separate, as I say, from spirit, intellect" and emotion.
Yet surely attempting this in the patriarchal world of rock'n'roll makes Joan's task even more difficult? Hasn't the role of women in this particular arena always been not so much to sing and write but more so simply to show a hint of thigh and thus feed the venal fantasies of the boys' who make up the bulk of its audience? Isn't this the object lesson Joan herself must have learned when she recently, apparently, dropped the song Let's Just Get Naked from her concert because of screams from sections of her audience?
THAT song is easily misunderstood, she responds. "People don't necessarily listen to the words of the verse which is about a relationship that is in a state of torpor, and the phrase of getting naked is really talking about trying to toss aside all those learned behaviour patterns that we use as shields against each other, irrespective of whether you use sex as a tool to do that, or something else. And if I look out at an audience and there's a bunch of college guys saying, yeah, let's get naked, it is disheartening. So I decided to drop the song because it wasn't being received as I wanted it to be received."
Stressing that this decision was her choice and that "there are other ways to get my message across", Joan Osborne suggests that even if the world of rock'n'roll is patriarchal, sexist and, as such, politically divisive, she takes her inspiration from the "great R'n'B singers" such as Etta James and Tina Turner.
"In R'n'B there has always been a tradition of women who are not embarrassed by their sexuality, or by being strong and physical. Sure, the blues also has a tradition of women who are victims but there's also the side that is openly sexual and powerfully assertive, as in some of Bessie Smith's come into my kitchen songs. That's more where I come from and part of what I hope people relate to, in my work."
