This Ain’t The Sinéad O’Connor Obituary The World Wants To Read
Writing at Luke O’Neil‘s always challenging “Welcome to Hellworld” Leila Brillson takes a lifetime of fandom and the hindsight of history to unload on the narratives surrounding the now concluded life of singer Sinéad O’Connor.
Read the whole thing here, but an excerpt:
So already she was a powder keg, a scion of controversy—having already boycotted the Grammys because they are capitalist bullshit—when she walked onto the silent SNL stage in 1992, at the height of her fame. (She asked that the “applause” sign be turned off for dramatic effect.) When she did what she did, for the abuse she suffered at convents, for the way Catholicism tore her country apart—it wasn’t just a scandal. She became an untouchable pariah, dooming her career and effectively making her (to the public at large) a one-hit wonder.
The whole world hit back. Madonna (whose Like A Virgin pales next to I Want Your Hands On Me) mocked her. Joe Pesci, when he hosted SNL the next week, suggested he’d have hit her, and the crowd cheered. Disgruntled Catholics rented a steam roller outside of Rockefeller Center to crush her albums. A few weeks later, after a non-stop blitz of bad press, the 26-year-old was so loudly booed by the entirety of Madison Square Garden, she gave up trying to perform and just scream-shouted the lyrics to Bob Marley’s War into the mic and walked off. She was never given a platform that large again.
These are dangerous days
To say what you feel is to dig your own grave
Remember what I told you
If you were of the world they would love you
-Black Boys On MopedsTurn on The Year of the Horse. Watch her perform Troy, eschewing the melodrama of the cellos and band for an acoustic guitar and a spotlight. Hear her voice seethe, the range of the a capella, the way she calls the unseen subject a liar with dripping vitriol. Her fury booms out of her in a mezzo soprano range.
Sinéad O’Connor was born to a woman who abused her, grew up in a country that abused women, and then suffered abuse that only a woman could endure. She was not well, attempting suicide for the first time in 1999. When her own young son took his life in 2021 she promised to follow. She had fibromyalgia. She had bipolar disorder. She changed her name several times. Her politics were messy and often problematic, and as she sank into her newly found Muslim faith she made some regrettable comments about non-Muslims (that she soon retracted.) In a reactionary move, she even slut-shamed Miley Cyrus and her wrecking ball.
So for the last decade, she was “a woman in crisis,” while simultaneously being vindicated for her “original sin” as more and more clergy sex scandals piled up. But she was never, ever given an apology. She was never honored or celebrated. She was no longer filled with fury, but sadness and despair.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” she commented on a story about herself in the New York Times in 2021.
Gen X is angry, its members disillusioned by the safety promised by their Boomer parents. In fact, Gen X is angry at everything. But Sinéad, she was angry at something. She could see it clearly, sitting in front of her, a part of her everyday life: injustice and abuse. On I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, she sings about Black Boys on Mopeds, calling out Margaret Thatcher for being more outraged at crises outside of England than horrified by the police murder of a boy who was accused of stealing a moped that was his own. Like tearing up the picture of the Pope, this fury was oddly prescient, bubbling up in the back of her powerful throat.
There have been only a handful of celebrity deaths that have really struck me emotionally. Sinéad O’Connor’s is now one of them.
Maybe it’s that she is nearly my age. And a very pretty Irish lass, a type of person for whom I admit I’ve a bit of a weakness. So I feel some affinity.
Maybe it’s that she was such a lightning rod for emotions and controversies and even though she was vindicated, she never ever got an apology. So I feel an injustice will never be remedied.
Maybe it’s that she wore her own emotions and angers and hopes and morality so prominently on her sleeve. And her mental health struggles in the last act of her life were so visibly profound and painful. So the rush of biography inspires a powerful empathy.
Maybe it’s all of these. It’s for damn sure that she was what an artist ought to be. Honest. Provocative. Uncompromising. Talented. A life filled with such pain, such achievement, such a fall, such power. Ended now, gone. There will be more artists in our future, but there will never again be that moment of pure artistic power as when she tore up that photograph of the pope.Report
Sinéad O’Connor is one of the few people who actually were canceled for what she said…that the Catholic church was covering up abuse by priests within its ranks, a thing that was 100% correct, in case we’ve forgotten what all that was about. Remember when that was a statement that was controversial, instead of an actual fact that the church itself has admitted to?
This being an _actual_ cancellation, she was not immediately rewarded with five trillion speaking gigs about how she was unfairly canceled because one speaking engagement had been revoked. Indeed, it basically ruined her career.
Anytime we, as society, see anyone claiming to be canceled, we really need to remind ourselves what being canceled really looks like. It looks like Sinéad O’Connor…and the reason you get canceled is because you speak truth to power, not because you did some vaguely racist thing and some people are reluctant to book you so instead you get booked by other people so you can talk about the first people.Report
We have to archive this somewhere.Report
How I will always remember these two troubled beautiful souls:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q7307IWwr4Report
Shuhada’ SadaqatReport
One of the things about her first five or so albums is that each one had multiple moments that gave me chills. Her first album had the most… probably because I had never heard anything like it.
Her “Just Like U Said It Would B” has its climax at 3:58 where she howls “would you be my lover would you be my” and there’s a perfect pause just long enough for a quick breath before she lays down “MAMA”. Goosebumps.
The song “Never Gets Old” has this perfect verse and, a moment later, an amazing triumphant vocalization that is a variation of “whoa” but putting it like that makes me embarrassed at my inability to come up with a better way to describe it…
Young woman with a drink in her hand
She likes to listen to rock and roll
She moves with the music
‘Cause it never gets old
It’s the only thing
That never gets old
Troy. “I’d kill a dragon for you. I’ll die.”
I Want Your (Hands On Me). At 3:19 “AH!”
And that’s just her first album.
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got has one of the best renditions of “I Am Stretched On Your Grave” and other, better, writers have written dissertations on “Nothing Compares 2 U.
Her album “Am I Not Your Girl?” was the one that dropped right around the SNL incident and given that it was more of a “torch” album that felt like she was deliberately making music for herself rather than for commercial success, everything wrapped together to make this one her least lauded album but her “Success Has Made A Failure Of Our Home” closes with a haunting chorus of “Am I Not Your Girl?” and it’s followed up by the best cover of Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina that is out there. Better than anybody.
Universal Mother and Gospel Oak were, at worst, good and solid but Faith and Courage came out and burned the house down. Absolutely amazing. She was older, we were older… but you should listen to Faith and Courage if you liked The Lion and the Cobra. It remembers when we were all younger.
Ah, Sinead. I’m sorry. You deserved better.Report