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In this essay, news and politics editor Lexi McMenamin reflects on the legacy of Sinéad O’Connor, who passed away on July 26, 2023 at the age of 56.
As a preteen then teen in the late 2000s and early 2010s, disappointed by the hypermasculinity of contemporary rock and pop-punk, I turned to the ‘90s to find culture I could see myself in. Whether it was Kurt Cobain gender-bending in dresses or the brazen, flawed, too-white politics of riot grrl, I experienced it all through the internet years later, absent the coloring of the media’s reactions at the time – able to focus on the art and the modern reflections that contextualized the art and artists within the era’s misogyny, racism, etcetera. Much like our modern reconsideration of Britney Spears, though the 90s called women’s unruly resistance “craziness,” pop culture has looked back decades down the line and can now recognize an attempt at courage.
I was called crazy a lot growing up, and as an adult living openly with mental illness, I think more and more about those moments I saw that made me feel less alone. One example came from a 21-year-old Fiona Apple at the 1997 VMAs, calling the award ceremony and all it celebrated “bullsh*t”; another, years prior, came from Ireland's Sinéad O’Connor.
Shuhada’ Sadaqat — stage name Sinéad O’Connor — died July 26 at 56 years old. (The singer changed her name after converting to Islam years ago, and used both names.) O’Connor was a complicated spitfire reduced by the media to her most outward-facing acts: Her globally popular cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and her teary-eyed, arresting music video in 1990; two years later, her rendition of Bob Marley’s “War” on SNL, concluded by ripping up a photo of the Pope on live television and saying “Fight the real enemy” to total silence from the studio audience; and the aftermath of it all, where her CDs were smashed, celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Joe Pesci threatened violence against her, and her music was essentially blacklisted in the mainstream.
In the ‘90s as throughout the 21st century, the mainstream media treated O’Connor like a pariah, only covering her during episodes of crisis or when she was given a platform for another hot take, though she was a prolific artist and performer. In the last two years of her life, O’Connor was finally starting to get her due, in terms of her influence on pop culture and how it connects to the political. With the 2021 release of her memoir Reckonings, the 2022 documentary Nothing Compares, and Allyson McCabe’s recently released Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters, the internet is awash with reconsiderations of O’Connor.
It’s now pat to joke about childhood sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, but O’Connor made her serious statement nearly a decade before the Church would even acknowledge the problem. Her prescience comes in part from O’Connor’s Irishness: She calls the nation a theocracy during her upbringing in her memoir, though in my lifetime, Catholicism has lost its stronghold in the country. In addition to the issue of child abuse, the Church lost support in the last 20 or so years as reporting uncovered the 20th century practice of Magdalene laundries, church-run homes “originally set up to incarcerate young girls deemed to be promiscuous.” To me, it’s no coincidence that O’Connor’s musical life started at a school that served as one.
It may be exaggeration to attribute this shift in public opinion to O’Connor, but a Dublin mural of the singer says it plain: “Sinéad you were right all along, we were wrong. We’re sorry.”
O’Connor’s SNL act was also personal. She was a survivor of child abuse herself, which led her to that school; the photo of the Pope she ripped up had been her mother’s, who died in a car crash when she was 18. Having survived a traumatizing childhood and a traumatizing ascent to pop superstardom — one near-immediately brought down by the same apparatus that forced her there — she spent her adulthood open about her mental health struggles almost to a fault, in a media environment that scoffed at and scorned her vulnerability, arguably taking advantage.
But she never wanted all that attention anyway, at least not for just the sake of it. As she said herself in her memoirs: “Everyone wants a pop star, see? But I am a protest singer.”
The image of a malcontented girl or woman has many mainstream faces now, though still too many white ones; in 1992, 26-year-old Sinéad O’Connor was one of only a few. In America’s rush to simplify and commodify her, by throwing it back in their faces, O’Connor could stay chaotic; deeply funny; unabashedly serious; mercurial; uncompromising to her values.
O’Connor’s sense of solidarity felt particularly Irish, a solidarity that generally identified more with civil rights protesters globally regardless of race than with an Irish-American cop, for instance. You can find countless examples of what Sinéad considered solidarity in her own words — just in the last two years alone, her memoirs, a documentary, and another retrospective book have highlighted them — but after her death, I was touched by the messages of who she touched with those words, either directly or by example.
From the very beginning of her career, O’Connor resolutely committed to being true to herself. That looked like partnering with rap and R&B musicians, like a collaboration with M.C. Lyte in 1988 that featured her collaborator’s name and image equally as prominently on the cover. In 1989, she painted Public Enemy’s logo onto her shaved head for the 1989 Grammies in protest of the rap category not being broadcast. It’s now widely known that O’Connor’s Pope protest was over child abuse, but her criticism of the Catholic Church included their homophobia. A 1990 photo of O’Connor giving an interview in a Dublin AIDS Alliance shirt 36 years before Ireland would become the first nation to legalize gay marriage circulated Twitter after her death. The 1992 SNL brouhaha didn’t even start with the Pope thing: In 1991, she refused to be the musical guest for an episode hosted by shock jock Andrew Dice Clay over his misogyny and homophobia, a choice the media jeered.
O'Connor's convictions didn't shrink her down or remove her contradictions. She was an active advocate for abortion rights in Ireland, which legalized it in 2018, and a proud mother of four, refusing an abortion herself while working on her first album in her early 20s. Her record label pushed her to do it and she basically told them to piss off; the same people's insistence she should sex herself up inspired her iconic shaved head.
In an era of sellouts, O’Connor unabashedly eschewed the practice until the very end. A quote from her about how the Pope story came to define her career “in a beautiful way” near-immediately after her passing began circulating on Twitter: “There was no more mistaking this woman for a pop star. But it was not derailing,” O’Connor told The Guardian in 2021. “People say, ‘Oh, you f*cked up your career’ but they’re talking about the career they had in mind for me. I f*cked up the house in Antigua that the record company dudes wanted to buy. I f*cked up their career, not mine. It meant I had to make my living playing live, and I am born for live performance.”
So what, O’Connor suggested, call me crazy. When she needed to, she asked for help, for which she was shamed, but she remained unbent. In a comment on a New York Times article she shared a quote widely attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti, written in all caps: “IT IS NO SIGN OF HEALTH TO BE WELL-ADJUSTED TO A SICK SOCIETY.” When I reshared the comment after O’Riordan’s death, it surpassed 20,000 likes in less than 24 hours.
O’Connor’s life post-”Nothing Compares” was full of music, releasing several albums, but also dictated by her struggle to process the trauma that ruled her life throughout her childhood and into her career. She spent much of the 2010s living in a mental hospital, the staff of which she dedicated her memoir to. But these last few years were also marked by personal tragedy, with the 2022 death by suicide of her son Shane. O’Connor was meant to release an album soon, which Nothing Compares director Kathryn Ferguson said “might be her best one yet,” but those plans were scrambled by Shane’s death; we may never hear it. (Or worse, we may only hear it posthumously, like the final works of her contemporary, the Cranberries’s Dolores O’Riordan, who died five years ago this January at 46.)
The moment that led Allyson McCabe to write Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters came in 2020, when she saw 2017 internet videos of Fiona Apple trying to get in touch with a suicidal O’Connor, who she called her hero. I no longer see myself as a woman, but I’ve spent my career trying to uplift the voices that have made more space for women’s anger. When I profiled Phoebe Bridgers and her commitment to staying angry and politically motivated, I traced it back to Apple and O’Connor. Just the other day, I wondered if I would’ve taken serious steps to address my own disabilities without the example of Apple, a hero to me now as she was in my adolescence; to know that Apple likely set her example inspired by O’Connor is too raw for me to touch, so soon after her death.
In a 2021 interview with The Guardian, as a parting thought, O’Connor warned the writer, “Don’t make it all misery. Just remember, my story’s not Angela’s f*cking Ashes.” As ever, she was unwilling to be reduced or simplified. I’ll leave you with her words, from 1990’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”:
