Sinead O’Connor: Nothing Compares…

Shuhada' Sadaqat, also known as Sinead O'Connor passed away at age 56 on July 26, 2023. Her clear and open voice somehow contained multitudes and so much depth and vulnerability, it’s hard to wrap your head around it. Many know her from her most famous, tear-jerking song, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” originally written by the artist formerly known as Prince. The anthem, and the evocative music video that accompanied it, garnered her Video of the Year at the VMA’s in 1990, making her the first female recipient. However, there is so much more to the Irish protest singer. 

She stood out among her peers and later in the eyes of the world, as she moved through it utterly unapologetically, shaved head and all. The industry considered her a provocateur, but Sinead never thought of herself that way at all– she simply had a deep seated need to speak her mind, to speak the truth –her truth– and to speak for those whose voices had been silenced. 

Today, we have ten studio albums from the legendary vocalist and songwriter for which to thank her and to parse through, her first being The Lion and the Cobra, released in 1987, of which she sold millions of copies, worldwide. The New York Times has stated in their news post of her passing, “Ms. O’Connor rarely shrank from controversy, but it often came with consequences for her career.” However, in the Irish artist’s memoir, the overwhelming sentiment was that she would never be happy with herself or consider herself successful unless she stood proudly for her beliefs. It wasn’t money or fame, nor accolades, that attracted her to the music industry. In fact, she didn’t like the “industry” part of it, at all. She only wanted to sing. Sinead is one of those artists who deserves for us all to reevaluate how we’ve treated her as a society, much like many woman artists throughout history, and in the present, do, too. 

Her memoir, Rememberings, published just over two years ago in June 2021, is an optimistic and poetic stream of consciousness in which Sinead O’Connor looks back on the people whom she loved, and who loved her. People and memories that made unforgettable and lasting impacts on her life. Her story and all the trauma she endured shows that some of the circumstances she was subject to had, at times, pushed her to the edge. However, she was such an open, loving person, with strong beliefs and values that meant everything to her.  

Sinead O’ Connor was born in 1966, to her mother Marie and her father John, who were married in 1960 and set up a home in Dublin, where each of them had been raised. She had a brother, a sister born in 1965, and a brother in 1968. Explaining her relationship to her siblings, Sinead has written, it’s “... hard for children of abuse to be around each other… [We’re] bad tempered, the O’Connors…”

When Sinead was 9-years-old, her father left and got custody of the kids with his “new love,” Viola. The kids were very back and forth between their parents, and Sinead’s childhood was very unstable, not to mention, she suffered plenty of abuse. One day, Sinead told a priest that she liked to sing. He told her, “He who sings, prays twice.” Sinead writes this is why she started to sing. She wanted to repent. 

The evocative songstress began making music in a home for girls with behavioral issues, where she’d sneak out at night to record, much to the watchful nuns’ disapproval. It was there, however, that one special nun gave Ms. O’Connor a guitar, with which she busked on the streets of Dublin. Sinead was so gifted, that a teacher even helped her sneak out once to record music. The head nun despised this fact, so Sinead would smoke cigarettes directly outside her office, just to piss her off. She was a true punk from the get go. 

At 15, Sinead went to a boarding school in Waterford, Ireland. It was that summer that she first joined a band. The December after she turned 16, she fearlessly ran away from school and got a studio apartment, much to her father’s dread. He agreed to pay her rent if she got a job and could pay any bills herself– and if she took out her nose ring. So, that’s what she did. 

As she describes memories of her youth at this point in the memoir, she recalls Elvis Presley’s death in 1977. In her book, Sinead cries hysterically at this news and thinks to herself, “I need a new father because Elvis is gone, my father isn’t dead; I just ain’t seen him for a very long time because my mother doesn’t like him… I don’t go looking for any father because I have God.” She seeks parental figures often throughout her life. Whenever she hears music that pierces through to her soul, she’d say, “That’s my dad.” Whenever she meets someone that really impacts and uplifts her, she says, “That’s my father.” She describes the first time she heard Bob Dylan: “I like this Dylan man, singing. In my head, I call him Lebanon Man… Since discovering him, I’ve stopped knocking on doors… asking [people] if I can be their child.”

Sinead’s relationship with her mother was one of strife. Her mother was physically and emotionally abusive to her, but Sinead was never really able to reconcile with that, and she’d always defend her mother. Some kind adults at times were concerned for her, but overall, adults were not there to help. Still, she focuses on many tender moments in her life in which people were looking out for her. She is so hopeful, though her mom would lock her in her room for days at a time. Still, her outlook is so nonjudgmental and almost childlike. While at the school for troubled girls, “Sister Margaret tried to break the hold my mother had on me. I’d just cry,” Sinead writes. 

In 1985, Sinead’s mother unexpectedly was killed in a car crash, which her brother thankfully survived. It was that year that she signed to Ensign Records and left Ireland for London. The deal she’d signed got her 7% of what her records would sell, and she had to pay for the whole recording and production process herself, which is a really bad deal, to say the least. But Sinead was happy to get out of Ireland. She writes, “I’m lonely, but I’m writing songs for my first album, and songs are a lonely person’s occupation. Songs are ghosts. When my album comes out, I’ll become a traveling ghost delivery woman. There will be a lifetime of goodbyes. I can’t have a problem with that.” 

The men at Sinead’s label at that time had an issue with Sinead’s demeanor and the way she presented herself. They told her to be more feminine and more appealing. They wanted her pretty. Sinead came back with a shaved head the next day. In London, she felt comfortable amongst Rastafarians and in the reggae scene. She loved speaking with them about God. They called her daughter. They were the first people to tell her the pope is evil. They said, “Nobody can own God.”

The Lion and the Cobra had been recorded. During the making-of, Sinead had come to find out she was pregnant with her first child. She told her record label, two men in particular who had already been jerking her around, and they sent her to their doctor, who told her to abort the baby. She immediately leaves the label and finds herself 100 grand in debt. At that time, Sinead was only earning 5 grand a year, so since she now had to re-record the entire album, it was imperative that it do well. She writes, “If this record doesn’t make the money back and more, because it’s the second time it’s been recorded, then I will never be financially independent of people with penises.” Sinead gave birth to her first child just three weeks before her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, was released.

Thankfully and unsurprisingly, the masterpiece of an album was a huge hit, and it was time for Sinead to go on tour. She explains that touring was “nothing but sex.” Her label earned millions off of her without batting an eye. Around this time, Sinead had begun singing with her eyes closed and writes, “I’m like Stevie Nicks. She keeps her visions to herself.” Sinead writes about L.A. and how much she absolutely hates it. She hated the music industry. But she loved 90s rap. She related to it because the industry looked down on rap, similarly to how they looked down on her (until, of course, they co-opted it and made tons of money off of it).

“I’m a punk, not a pop star,” Sinead proclaims in Rememberings. The industry and the world at large so badly wanted Sinead O’Connor to be a pop star and to fit into whatever box they wanted her in. Many artists swear they won’t sell out, but lots and lots do, because the money, fame, power, and success are all very alluring and attractive. But Sinead never wavered in who she was or who she dreamt of being, and essentially demanded that people look at her the way she wanted to be looked at. 

Cut to– New York. On Avenue A, there was a tiny Irish bar Sinead frequented. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but she did love to smoke weed, so she befriended the Rastafarians at the juice bar across the street. They took her in and watched out for her. “I thought they didn’t like me, was why they were silent, but it ain’t anything other than: They are watchers. They’re watching out for God everywhere. They’re like God’s security detail. That’s how they see themselves, and that is exactly how they are,” Sinead lovingly recalls. One man there in particular, Terry, was an older fella Sinead had grown to love a great deal. One day, he confesses to her they’ve been using children to run guns and drugs out of the juice bar. He tells her he’s going to be killed soon. Sinead is obviously horrified. She’s been taking spiritual guidance from these people that she now knows have been using kids as drug mules, and the main thing she has stood against all along is child abuse. It was the ultimate betrayal. 

It was that very weekend that Sinead was slated to go on SNL. The year is 1992. She brings a photo with her, one she has been carrying with her for years. It’s a photo of Pope John Paul II that her mother kept from when he visited Ireland in 1979, kissed the ground, and said he loved the people of Ireland. “Nobody loved us, not even God. Even our own mothers and fathers couldn’t stand us.” To Sinead, this photo represented everything she stood against: lies, liars, and abuse. “Destroy it I would, when the right moment came.” She brought it with her for years, through many different living situations, because “nobody ever gave a shit about the children of Ireland.” As her second song on the live NBC program, SNL, Sinead sang War by Bob Marley. She’d been reading horrible stories for weeks, tucked in the back of Irish news, where it was only briefly mentioned that children were being violently abused by priests, but who’s stories weren’t believed by anyone they’d been reported to. After Sinead finished singing “War,” she stared right into the camera, ripped JP2’s photo into pieces and yelled, “Fight the real enemy. I’m talking to those who are going to kill Terry,” and she blew out the candle next to her. The entire building was engulfed in a deafening silence. “Everyone wants a popstar, see, I’m a protest singer”

Of her decision to make this statement, Sinead O’Connor explains, “I had no desire for fame… Success was making a failure of my life, because everyone was already calling me crazy for not acting like a pop star, for not worshipping fame. And I understand I’ve torn up the dreams of those around me, but those aren’t my dreams. No one ever asked me what my dreams were. They just got mad at me for not being who they wanted me to be. My own dream was to only keep the contract I made with God before I ever made one with the Music Business, and that’s a better fight than murder. I gotta get to the other side of life.” NBC banned her from their studios for life. “This hurt me a lot less than rapes hurt those children, and a lot less than Terry dying, which happens the following Monday, anyway.”

Like it was suggested by The New York Times and I’m sure many other publications reporting on the iconic visionary’s death, many people say or believe that it was this moment of the tearing of the pope’s photo that ended up derailing Sinead O’Connor’s career. She clarifies, “That’s not how I feel about it. I feel that having a #1 record derailed my career, and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track. I had to make my living performing live again, and that’s what I was born for. I wasn’t born to be a pop star. You have to be a good girl for that, not too troubled.” From then on Sinead stuck to doing what she loved, making music, and playing live. She was a mother to four children, paid all the bills herself, got to make her art, and be herself. “What’s more successful than that?” she asks. “I’ve been extremely successful as a single mother providing for her children.” Later, she writes, “I’m feeling flattered that the establishment considers me enough of a threat that it needs to try and discredit me along with all the other bands and artists who’ve been under attack in the censorship of music that is America since Straight Outta Compton.”

It’s not that Sinead liked being hated. It’s that she had an undeniable and unbreakable selfhood that could not be shaken by the “man”. She was and always will be a true punk. 

When we lose brilliant minds, people who have changed so many lives without ever directly touching them, it’s hard to reconcile with our feelings of loss when we don’t even know the person. However, what we can learn from Sinead O’Connor is that it is better to move through life focusing on truth, beauty, and angels, rather than on the powers of evil. Her outlook on life was tender and lovely, and it was the simple things that made her life worth living. She’s been called Rock Music’s Joan of Arc because she was fearless, but it was almost like she had no choice but to be so. It was just who she was.