Personally, I’ve often been struck by the shared aesthetic goals of the Cranberries and Radiohead circa Pablo Honey, with both bands generating sparks by rubbing grungy guitars up against subtle, sensitive voices. The other band Street was producing at the time was Blur, making the sleepy psychedelia of “ Blue Jeans” and “ Badhead” an interesting point of comparison for the Cranberries’ early smashes.
More imaginative listeners drew a line back to the Smiths, whose engineer/producer Stephen Street took on the Cranberries as a client in the early ’90s, giving their first two albums a distinctive sighing sweetness. Early on, American journalists mostly compared them to U2 and Sinead O’Connor, neither of which is an especially illuminating connection (aside from the degree to which U2 influenced nearly all rock bands in the British Isles post-1980). Just like with any great pop act, we heard the Cranberries so often that they became a mirror in which we can see any number of reflections winking back at us.Īnd the Cranberries are a great pop act, even if they’re not always credited that way. The reference works both ways because the songs are part of a shared cultural backdrop, both then and now. Some of these scenes use the Cranberries’ music to evoke a dreamy, romantic mood, others use it as the punchline to a sly joke. Others flashed to My So-Called Life or You’ve Got Mail or their own prom night. When I heard yesterday that singer Dolores O’Riordan had died at age 46, I thought immediately of the Cranberries scenes in Clueless, that iconic text of teen life in the late 20th century, and Elif Batuman’s 2017 novel The Idiot. It’s true in other ways, too, though - ways that are harder to measure, but more important in the long run. That’s true in numerical terms: The Irish band’s first two albums, 1993’s Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? and 1994’s No Need To Argue, went platinum five and seven times over, respectively, yielding enough hit singles to keep the Cranberries all over alternative radio and MTV through the mid-’90s. The Cranberries were one of the alt-rock era’s biggest successes.
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