Sinéad O'Connor's "Black Boys On Mopeds" is one of those songs that only becomes more topical and more powerful with every passing year. The song comes from O'Connor's 1989 album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, and she wrote it about the 1983 Colin Roach, a 21-year-old black Londoner whose death, ruled a suicide at the time, sure looked like a case of police covering up a murder. But O'Connor's lyrics -- "These are dangerous days / To say what you feel is to dig your own grave / Remember what I told you / If they were of the world, they would love you" -- apply to a whole lot more than London in the '80s.
In a world where police brutality and racial violence won't go away, a song like "Black Boys On Mopeds" will always be relevant. EMA covered the song three years ago, and now Sharon Van Etten, who released the excellent album Remind Me Tomorrow a few months ago, has been covering the song live on her recent tour. And now Van Etten has played it in a SiriusXM session. Her solo-acoustic take on it is a real gut-ripper.
There aren't too many singers who can step to Sinéad O'Connor, but Sharon Van Etten is one of them. Etten's solo-acoustic arrangement of "Black Boys On Mopeds" is pretty faithful to the original. Her voice is completely different, but she puts all her husky intensity into the song. It's a heavy, emotional song, and she doesn't shy away from that, giving it all the stomach-punch intensity that the song demands. Check out a video below.
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Remind Me Tomorrow is out now on Jagjaguwar.
