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I was a month shy of 15 years old in March 1990, when Sinéad O’Connor released her breakthrough album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. In those days, MTV was the only channel that mattered—my own little Gen X TikTok—and the video for Sinéad’s lead single, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” would prove to be as misleading as it was entrancing. Who knew that Prince had written this plaintive song of heartbreak? And who could imagine, watching a single glistening tear slide down Sinéad’s cheek, how much fire there was in her belly?
To hear the fire, you needed to buy the album—or in my case, the cassette. One track after another built the case for Sinéad O’Connor as a holy prophet of rage, sure, but also as a poet, in the high Hibernian tradition, of love and loss, justice and injustice. She sang about miscarriages, child abuse, police brutality, the shite government. She sang love songs that sounded like fuck-you songs, and fuck-you songs that sounded like love songs. She whispered. She keened. She wailed. She belted. She dared you to take her side, making it clear it wouldn’t be easy. But being antsy in her corner was surely better than being in her crosshairs when she spat out stanzas like:
Why must you always ask me?
Why can’t you just leave it be?
You’ve done nothing so far but destroy my life
You cause as much sorrow dead
As you did when you were alive
The tape was stunning, front to back. And as a lefty Irish-American teenager desperate to carve out an identity other than “American white boy,” I sensed that there was more, much more, I needed to know about this strange and magical artist. So I bought her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, which if anything was even more spellbinding. It ranged from the New Wave-y pop of “Mandinka” and “I Want Your (Hands on Me)” to the furious Yeats-ian banshee epic “Troy,” which ended with yet another white-hot denunciation:
And the flames burned away
But you’re still spitting fire
Make no difference what you say
You’re still a liar
You’re still a liar
You’re still a liar
In short, I was in love.
Sinéad was nominated for four Grammys in 1991, but she boycotted the ceremony, telling the Recording Academy, in so many words, to sod off. Then, in 1992, she made her infamous appearance on SNL, the one where she tore the pope’s photo in pieces and instructed viewers to “fight the real enemy.” In the age of social media, it can feel cheap to perform outrage, but back then it was still shocking for someone to take a public stand against a revered authority figure. As an adult with a managerial role at a media company, I can see how this was received poorly by those inside and outside NBC. As a 17-year-old still thirsting for role models who were as pissed off at the Catholic Church as I was, I found it thrilling, heroic, and exactly in line with what the voice behind all those fiery songs would and should do. Who were these people expressing shock and outrage? Had they listened to her music?!
The SNL incident clearly harmed her prospects, but she made things easier on her enemies by being utterly uncompromising. The serenity to accept the things she could not change was not really in her repertoire. And she was an easy target, with her bald head and her righteous indignation. (Everyone my age remembers Phil Hartman, as Frank Sinatra, referring to her as “Sinbad O’Connah” on a different episode of SNL.) In reality, she was shy, sweet, and much funnier and more self-effacing than her public image suggested—she was Irish, after all. But the caricature stuck and then America mostly moved on, even as Ireland slowly came to realize how prescient she had been about so many things—starting with the church.
It’s also worth remembering that, as The New York Times noted in 2021, she remembered things the other way around. “I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career, and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track,” she wrote in her memoir, Rememberings.
Last year, we got the news that Sinéad’s son had died. And today comes news that she too is gone, far too young, far too soon, after struggling for years with mental health issues. As was her way, she was outspoken about that too.
My personal strategy for paying tribute to her is to go back and spend more time with those two early albums that lit such a fire in my teenage self.
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