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 Mopeds

Turn 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.