Sinéad O’Connor and the Grief for What Should Have Been
Trigger warning: discussion of child sexual abuse
I learned of the passing of Sinéad O’Connor the way much news finds me: doomscrolling on Twitter. The stories on my feed were very Apocalypse Right Now, as in: human-created End Times are upon us and have us pinned to the mat. First off, aliens are apparently a thing and have visited Earth. The news was met with a collective shrug. We all have more pressing things to worry about.
On my timeline, I saw that good portions of Europe are on fire because of the punishing, dry heat that is the result of rapidly accelerating climate change. It’s all happening much more quickly than we thought it would. In the same vein, there were horrific stories out of Arizona about people falling onto super-heated asphalt and receiving serious burns or even dying. Covid-19 is still racking up victims and reminding us all that the pandemic is a mass disabling as well as a mass casualty event. In a particularly grim exercise of his personal discretion, Elon Musk reinstated a Twitter account that had posted edited stills from a piece of child sexual abuse material so despicable and violent that the online Wild West chan communities ban you for even mentioning it, and the FBI thought it was an urban legend for years.
Climate collapse, the pandemicene, extra-terrestrial beings and a snuff film featuring small children: these combine to give a bleak accounting of the current state of the world. Among all these hope-depleting stories came the news about Sinéad. In spite of (or maybe because of) the existential crises in the mix, the death of an artist — a punk, a self-professed protest singer who hadn’t wanted to be a pop star — rang out as vitally important to me.
The placement of events in time shapes their meaning, and the placement of Sinéad’s death in my timeline brought the swirling confusion of the world into sharp focus for me. Recalling the bracing clarity of her art reminded me that the things we make complicated are often simple. We can’t boil our planet — we won’t survive. We should do everything in our power to avoid spreading highly transmissible, deadly and disabling viruses. Children should be protected from sexual predators.
Sinéad O’Connor was right about so many of the wrongs in the world. She was Cassandra as artist — cursed to tell truths that wouldn’t be listened to and to be smeared as “crazy.” Never one to bow to stigma, Sinéad was open about her struggles with her mental health over the years. According to her, she had spent the better part of six years of her later life in and out of a psychiatric hospital and credited the treatment she received as having saved her life. In hindsight, of course she endured this struggle. To see the world as it truly is is to be driven out of your mind. Sinéad not only saw the darkness, she bore the additional burden of being the light sent to drive it out. What I learned from Sinéad is that much of the world hates the truth, and they despise the messengers who bring it.
I’m a bit late with my tribute to Sinéad because I hadn’t intended on writing one. My response to her death was to revisit her work and reconnect with the powerful messages of truth she had shared with us. I began my sojourn into the past with her 1987 debut album, The Lion and the Cobra (which has no skips). I wondered about the creative process that had been at work. How could that much skill, talent and force have been crammed inside a tiny Irish woman? Sinéad had something important to say and the artistic prowess needed to touch the soul and make her words stick. Her voice was angelic and brutally raw. It wasn’t just the tool she used to ply her trade, though. It was a weapon in the fight against injustice and oppression. Sinéad’s power was that she could make you look and listen.
Sinéad stopped the world in its tracks in 1990. The album was I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. The song was “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a cover of a ballad Prince had written and released through his side project, The Family. This was the moment I (and most of the rest of the world) was introduced to Sinéad. I was too young to understand the heartache she bled into her performance, but I knew the song was something else, and the singer was someone else, who didn’t quite belong among the pop stars she’d beaten to the top of the charts. A lot of that was down to the music video. Sinéad was ghostly pale, her head shorn and wearing a black turtleneck. She was as stunningly and starkly beautiful as her vocal performance. The camera held her in close up as she sang and cried.
In hindsight, it’s clearer to me what powerful visual artist Sinéad was. She understood image and gesture and how to leverage them. The tip of this spear was her shaved head. A traditionally beautiful young woman with shorn locks was a blunt challenge to the harsh beauty standards that permeate the music industry. Sinéad wanted no part of that and exuded a fragility and toughness that endeared her to fans. “Nothing Compares 2 U” may have tricked some listeners into thinking that her tough side was a gimmick. That changed the night she was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live and received a lifetime ban from the show for her performance.
When she performed on Saturday Night Live in 1992, Sinéad demonstrated the truth in her statement, “I was born for live performance.” Sinéad was an international star on the strength of the “Nothing Compares 2 U” and had a new album of jazz covers to promote. Her choice of song was not from her body of work, though. She chose to perform an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “War.” Sinéad wore a simple white shift. Lit candles stood on a table next to her. She looked like a novitiate in a religious sect about to perform a ritual. The camera was tight on this mise en scène. The visuals were as expertly crafted as the arrangement and changes to the lyrics to include Sinéad crying out, “Child abuse!” multiple times.
Sinéad’s voice rang clear and true. The lack of accompaniment was jarring. The performance wasn’t “fun” or “quirky” or “brash and irreverent.” It was searing. It was political. It was protest. There wasn’t a shard of pandering present. As Sinéad ended her rendition on the word “evil,” she held up a photograph of Pope John Paul II, and ripped it to pieces. In closing, she said simply, “Fight the real enemy.” The response from the studio audience was a cavernous silence. It proved Sinéad’s point by demonstrating the complicity that allowed the Catholic Church’s abuses to go unchecked. It was perfectly executed performance art.
The backlash against Sinéad was immediate and immense. Looking back, I see now how she could have fudged the protest to make it more palatable. The audience would have decried the abuse of children along with Sinéad if she hadn’t named who should be held accountable. Moreover, she was too far ahead of her time. The child abuse scandals of the Catholic Church hadn’t exploded yet, but enough information had trickled out that it was something of an open secret. Nobody wanted to be accused of letting the cat out of the bag, and certainly not on network television. Disrespecting the institution and its leader was taboo, even on a late night television variety show. The jesters had no interest in telling truth to power that night.
As for Sinéad’s peers in entertainment, there was no groundswell of support. Frank Sinatra threatened her with physical violence, as did Joe Pesci when he hosted Saturday Night Live the following week. The studio audience cheered. Madonna defended the Catholic Church in the press and had her own go at Sinéad when she hosted the show. Soon after taking her stand, Sinéad got on stage to perform at a tribute to protest singer Bob Dylan. Much of a packed Madison Square Garden booed. They actually booed her for being “disrespectful,” while claiming to honor a man who penned in earnest the lyrics “And I hope that you die / And your death will come soon” in his song, “Masters of War.” After Kris Kistofferson (who had been sent to escort her offstage) embraced her and told her not to let the bastards get her down, Sinéad cut the music and performed the a cappella version of “War” again. The boos continued. So did she.
England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses
It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds
– Sinéad O’Connor “Black Boys on Mopeds” from the album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
Going back through this history over the past few days has been an unpleasant reminder of how conditioned most people are to side with power. I appreciate better now how much courage it took for Sinéad to stand up to a thousand-year-old institution that still had her country in a stranglehold. I have also been reminded that there is true violence in the demand for “civility” that comes after a protest, even one as peaceful as Sinéad’s. What is especially galling is that SHE WAS RIGHT! She was right, and everyone knew it. Twenty-twenty hindsight shows just how right she was about so much. Her eventual vindication doesn’t erase the toll, though. Sinéad could have orchestrated an easy life for herself following a massive hit like “Nothing Compares 2 U.” She chose a much more challenging path. According to Sinéad, she didn’t “ruin” her career, she ruined record company executives’ vacation home purchases. Even so, her protest rendered her disposable in some people’s eyes, and they took their pound of flesh.
Sinéad’s Saturday Night Live protest created a line of demarcation in her career and life. There was a clear before and after. That the uproar in response was so ferocious is something of an irony. Sinéad never hid who she was or where she stood politically. The evidence that she might stage an uncomfortable protest was right there in her work.
“Nothing Compares 2 U” is the sixth track on I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. The song that leads into it is the protest song Black Boys on Mopeds — a condemnation of anti-Black racism and police brutality in England. The song takes its title from the true story of Nicholas Bramble, who was chased to his death by police who had racially profiled him and believed he had stolen the moped he was riding. The album is dedicated to Colin Roach, a 21 year-old Black man who died from a gunshot wound at the entrance to a police station in 1983. The police claimed he died by suicide. Thirty years later, Black Boys on Mopeds is as relevant as ever, and Nicholas Bramble and Colin Roach’s Black lives still matter.
Rewinding the tape to take a closer look at what Sinéad chose to say to the world at the height of her fame has been unsettling. She and so many others were right about so much. Grief for the loss of Sinéad as a human being and an artist is compounded by grief for why she was so necessary then and why her art is still so resonant now. Looking back reveals alternate timelines. In a way, we’re grieving what should have been. Sinéad was one of the voices that removed the excuse that we weren’t told why things needed to change. Like Cassandra, she wasn’t listened to and was denigrated as “mad.”
Shuhada’ Sadaqat — “witness to the truth” — is the fitting name Sinéad took when she became a Muslim in later life. To tell the unwavering truth is dangerous. It brings suffering. It costs dearly. The question Sinéad’s life presents to us is resolutely urgent: “What truth are you willing to speak?” The doom scroll of news cascading on top of us shows clearly that we are nearly out of “should have been” moments. The alternate timelines are falling away as we pretend the pandemic is over and race towards climate collapse. Fascism has taken its mask off. White supremacy and anti-Blackness are as entrenched as they were 30 years ago. Maybe the aliens will save us. They probably won’t. Standing idly by is not an option this time. The survival of our species hangs in the balance.
Sinéad’s life reminded me: This is war.
You say “Oh, I’m not afraid, it can’t happen to me
I’ve lived my life as a good man
Oh, no you’re out of your mind
It won’t happen to me
’Cause I’ve carried my weight and I’ve been a strong man”
Listen to the man in the liquor store
Yelling “Anybody want a drink before the war?”
– Sinéad O’Connor “Drink Before the War” from the album The Lion and the Cobra
