You’ve heard the news by now...Irish Singer & Musician Sinead O’Connor is dead at the age of 56.
Born in Ireland in 1966, O’Connor tasted worldwide fame in 1990 with her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” For many, that remains her best-known song. For others, it’s only one glittering example of the passion and intensity she brought to her music. Her talent was undeniable. So, it turned out, were the demons that haunted her, that drove her from country to country, rock to folk to reggae, religion to belief system to religion.
Sinéad O’Connor – Nothing Compares 2 U (Live in Europe 1990)www.youtube.com
For a while, music served as a means of expressing and assuaging her turmoil, rage, and her pain. Those first two incandescent albums, The Lion and The Cobra (1987) and I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got (1990), are her essential artistic legacy, along with the earth-shattering “Fire on Babylon,” a 13-minute love/hate song to her mother, Ireland, the world.
Sinéad O’Connor – Fire on Babylon- Live – Pinkpop 1995www.youtube.com
In these majestic works, O’Connor wrestles with, mocks, implores, supplicates, and embodies her demons, and her struggle is nothing less than exhilarating. And, yes, inspiring.
Controversy followed her. When she pointed an accusatory finger at the Catholic Church’s systemic and shameful sexual abuse of children, she suffered the fate of so many truthtellers before her and was pilloried. Familial and institutional abuse (at the hands of her mother and during her time in Ireland’s infamous Magdalene Laundries); the widespread sexism of the music industry; the profoundly disrupting “benefits” of fame – all took a toll on her career and on her well-being.
She’d be the first to admit her lifelong battle with mental health issues. That’s why the news of her death, sad as it is, is not entirely unexpected. She’d been drawn to suicidal ideation on more than one occasion; her seventeen-year-old son Shane killed himself last year. I won’t be surprised if the cause of her death is ultimately revealed as suicide. The price exacted by mental illness – and by society’s unwillingness to acknowledge its existence – is truly staggering.
In the autumn of 1987, the “Troy” video completely blasted MTV’s bland, conventional fare. Who was this raw, rare, unconventional figure? Just what was Sinead’s torrent of gorgeous, angry, apocalyptic sound all about? Where did it come from? And where will it take the world?
W. H Auden’s poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” contains these lines:
…Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
One hopes the hurt has ended. O’Connor’s poetry survives, a way of happening, a mouth.
We at Popdust adore Sinead. She’s been a beacon through the hard times, the tough days. This one’s for...the Mighty Kevin.