Acclaimed and controversial, famous and tortured, Irish singer-songwriter Sinead O’Connor had a full and complex life in the public eye by the time it came to an abrupt end last week at the age of 56. The cause of her death has not been determined.
Distinguished by her trademark shaved-head look, her angelic smile, and her unwavering yet versatile alto voice, the Dublin-born O’Connor shot to fame in 1990 with her song “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a version of a track that was originally written by Prince. After the song sold over 3.5 million copies and topped pop-music charts from America to Australia, the Billboard Music Awards crowned “Nothing Compares 2 U” as the year’s world No. 1 single. The music video O’Connor made to accompany the song, featuring sustained close-ups of a sorrowful O’Connor in a raven-black turtleneck and snow-white face, arguably became even more famous than the song itself. It won that year’s MTV Award for Best Music Video. She would later acknowledge that she was able to achieve the striking grief-stricken appearance in the video by channeling her own feelings of trauma and grief from having lost her mother not long before she made the video. Tragedy would strike again later in life.
The accolades for O’Connor kept coming in. Rolling Stone magazine anointed her Artist of the Year in 1991, and the Grammys gave “Nothing Compares 2 U” four nominations. O’Connor refused to accept the one Grammy that the song won, an act of socio-political protest that would presage further political provocations. Among the awards she did accept in her career were the Goldene Europa Award for Best International Singer, the World Soundtrack Award for Best Original Song Written Directly for a Film, and the first-ever Classic Irish Album award for her album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.
Throughout her career, O’Connor received attention as much for her politics as for her music. She refused to let “The Star Spangled Banner” be played before coming onstage in her U.S. concerts. But the most provocative moment of her career was not only another mere act of protest; it was also one of the most notorious moments in modern cultural history. While performing on Saturday Night Live in 1992, she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II while exclaiming, “Fight the real enemy.” The act, as she later explained, was intended as a gesture of protest against what she believed was the pope’s failure to combat sexual abuse within the Church. In spite of the obloquy she received for her sacrilegious gesture, she refused to apologize for her public profanation of a pope who was so beloved that he was later beatified as a saint. “I’m not sorry I did it,” she declared. “It was brilliant. But it was very traumatizing. It was open season on treating me like a crazy b****.”
O’Connor’s life was suffused with tragedy. At the age of 33, she attempted suicide. Last year, her son Shane died of suicide. At various points in her life, she disclosed that she was suffering from a variety of physiological and psychological maladies, some of which included bipolar disorder, drug addiction, fibromyalgia, and borderline personality disorder. To compound her and her family’s troubles, last year, Prince’s estate refused to give O’Connor permission to use her own voice recording of “Nothing Compares 2 U” in her documentary Nothing Compares, signaling what appears to be the beginning of the Prince estate’s efforts to reclaim the song from O’Connor. The film nonetheless was highly praised and won two British Independent Film Awards. It was a sign that her legacy will not be exempt from the tumultuous nature of her life and career.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and an incoming postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published this summer by the University of Alabama Press.
