The Feminist Trailblazing of Sinead O’connor

By Amanda Petrusich
The New Yorker
May 26, 2016

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-feminist-trailblazing-of-sinead-oconnor

LLast week, Sinead O’Connor took off on an early-morning bicycle trip around Wilmette, Illinois, a pleasant suburb of Chicago. The Irish pop singer—now forty-nine, and still best known for ripping up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live,” in 1992, while singing the word “evil,” a remonstrance against the Vatican’s handling of sexual-abuse allegations—had previously expressed suicidal ideations, and, in 2012, admitted to a “very serious breakdown,” which led her to cancel a world tour. Ergo, when she still hadn’t returned from her bike ride twenty-four hours later, the police helicopters began circling. Details regarding what happened next—precisely where O’Connor was found, and in what condition—have been scant, but authorities confirmed her safety by the end of the day.

I was barely ten years old when O’Connor’s second album, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” was released in America. I recall tugging my lumpy beanbag chair directly up to the television set so that I could watch the video for “Nothing Compares 2 U” in terrifying proximity to the screen. O’Connor is wearing a black turtleneck, framed close, and standing in front of a black background. The filmic effect is austere, nearly ghostly. “It’s been seven hours and fifteen days since you took your love away,” O’Connor sings, her voice barely betraying a brogue. There are moments when the vocal seems to slip away from her a little, like a phonograph needle jerking out of its groove—this is the strange looseness of the freshly wounded. Like a maimed animal, the mind goes feral.

The song journeys slowly into despair. It is fed by a single, creeping realization: whatever is gone was irreplaceable. Such is the acute pain of losing a love that feels singular; a person measures that sort of agony in minutes, if not seconds, if not nanoseconds. There’s an interesting melodic choice at the end of the chorus, in the way the last two notes—“Nothing compares to you”—are exactly the same. The sentiment flattens out. It adds a new degree of hopelessness to all prior proceedings.

In the video, O’Connor matches the viewer’s gaze in a plaintive, unflinching way. Her eyes, a clear, glaucous gray, express unambiguous yearning. Her head has been very recently shaved. At ten, I didn’t know anything at all about romantic love, but the idea of physical beauty was so elusive and intoxicating to me, the thought that a person might willfully subvert it—challenge its stronghold, deliberately reconfigure it, render it differently—seemed courageous, if not plainly revolutionary. I didn’t understand how anybody could be so brazen and cavalier about her own prettiness, a characteristic I’d by then internalized as crucial.

O’Connor later said she’d cut her hair off in response to male record executives who’d been trying to goad her into wearing miniskirts, into appearing more traditionally feminine. She’d grown up believing that it was treacherous to be a woman, she said. To be recognized as beautiful was only ever a liability: “I always had that sense that it was quite important to protect myself, make myself as unattractive as I possibly could.”

There is a moment in “Nothing Compares 2 U,” about two and a half minutes in, in which O’Connor sings about visiting a doctor with hopes of assuaging her anguish. The advice he gives her (“Girl, you better try to have fun, no matter what you do”) is, of course, patently dumb—though not unfamiliar to any woman who has ever been told, apropos of very little, to just smile. “But he’s a fool,” O’Connor spits in response. It is as if a storm has drifted, briefly, across her face. A long bridge—complete with a synthesized cello solo—follows.

I’ve often wondered, in the intervening decades, if “Nothing Compares 2 U”—despite being a pledge of unflagging allegiance, a love song in the most traditional mode—wasn’t also the first bit of overtly feminist art I encountered. O’Connor has publicly disavowed that term (as she has disavowed most labels), yet here she insists upon herself, broadcasting her flaws and devastations, demanding they be properly reckoned with. “This is all of my humanity,” her face seems to say. “Don’t you dare look away.” For me, at least, the experience of watching her was transformative. My eyes widened as hers narrowed.

“Nothing Compares 2 U” was written by Prince, in 1985, and became a deep cut on the eponymous debut of one of his side projects, the Family, where the arrangement includes some honking, dissonant chords in the chorus. (There is supposedly a studio version with Prince singing lead, squirrelled away in his Paisley Park vault; when he performed the song live, he seemed to favor a funkier third version, featuring a long saxophone solo.) It remains O’Connor’s highest-charting single. Following the “Saturday Night Live” appearance, her career began to disassemble. People were outraged. The next week, when the actor Joe Pesci hosted “Saturday Night Live,” he held up the same photo of the Pope, now taped back together, and said that, if it had been his show, “I would have gave her such a smack.” Frank Sinatra, performing in New Jersey shortly after the episode aired, reportedly announced (per Tom Santopietro’s book, “Sinatra in Hollywood”), “This must be one stupid broad. I’d kick her ass if she were a guy. She must beat her kids to stay in shape.”

O’Connor wasn’t done; there were other acts of dissent. She boycotted the Grammys (she told Spin it was because of America’s involvement in the first Gulf War); she refused to allow the national anthem to be played prior to one of her shows. She became a priest in the Latin Tridentine church, a dissident sect of Catholicism, a move she later described to the Guardian as “civil disobedience.” She released eight more albums over the subsequent two and a half decades. Some felt like genre experiments. She followed up “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” with “Am I Not Your Girl?,” a collection of mid-century jazz standards; then, in 2008, she travelled to Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong studio, in Jamaica, and recorded a series of roots-reggae covers, including the Abyssians’ “Y Mas Gan” (“If we can’t be good, we’ll be careful, and do the best we can”). In recent years, O’Connor has taken to giving her records goofy, aphoristic titles like “How About I Be Me (and You Be You)?,” from 2012, and “I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss,” from 2014. Her public persona continues to be deeply fraught. Recently, she accused Arsenio Hall of supplying Prince with the drugs that may have killed him, and also of lacing her marijuana while they were lounging around Eddie Murphy’s house. (Hall responded with a lawsuit; O’Connor responded with an invitation to “suck my dick.”)

At the Billboard Music Awards on Sunday night, Madonna, seated on a velvet throne, wearing a gleaming purple suit and a lacy cravat, performed part of “Nothing Compares 2 U” in tribute to Prince, a song choice many immediately derided as off. (Her stilted presentation, in which she appeared to be learning the words as she sang them in a strange, compressed voice, didn’t much help.) Perhaps it failed as a direct homage—Madonna famously disparaged O’Connor immediately following the “S.N.L.” incident, adding another layer of discord to her performance—but the sentiment, at least, felt germane. It remains as good a song as we’ve got about loss.

O’Connor was only twenty-three when she recorded the track, but she already seemed to have some instinctive understanding of what it meant to be left behind. She has since said that she was abused by her mother (who was killed in a car crash when O’Connor was just nineteen), and was later misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, when in fact she was suffering from P.T.S.D. She has repeatedly threatened suicide on her social-media accounts, including a Facebook post from last November, in which she wrote, “I have taken an overdose. There is no other way to get respect.”

There is a sense, regarding her from afar, of a person enduring tremendous pain, and still demanding to be seen. Those attributes are what have always driven O’Connor’s best work, especially “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Fierceness. The admission of frailty. An unwillingness to be quiet about any of it.