There are pop stars, and then there are artists for whom the audience’s personal connection and emotional investment go way beyond mere fandom, and not always in a healthy way. That can be a testament to the power of the art, but it’s not always great for the artist either. 

I think the first time I ever saw or heard Sinéad O’Connor was a live televised performance of “Mandinka,” a rocker off her 1987 debut album, The Lion and the Cobra. Like legions of us who would become her passionate admirers, I was knocked on my ass. This stark, doe-like beauty who seemed so small and fragile, except—uh—she was positively snarling, singing with a force that was almost not to be believed, a voice that had both aching vulnerability and searing intelligence, but also volcanic power. Clearly, this was Not a Woman to Be Fucked With. 

And that was only the smallest first taste of what made her such a transformational artist. 

SOON I CAN GIVE YOU MY HEART

From the moment we saw her, my brother—a musician—and I became enormous Sinéad fans, not only because of her talent and the thrilling impact of her work, but because of her uncompromising integrity, her ferocious independence, and her obvious struggle to be her own person—and artist—in a heartless and exploitative world…..what The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich, writing in memoriam, called her “unapologetic brilliance.” Which is about as pithy and accurate a two-word description of Sinéad O’Connor as there could ever be.

Petrusich writes of Sinéad’s “thrashing against the dumb, stultifying demands of capitalism and pop stardom even before she was famous.” That, I think, is a large part of what attracted so many of her fans to her, not unlike the reasons people worship John Lennon, another artist who met an awful fate due in part to the poisonous effects of fame. In last year’s feature documentary, Nothing Compares, the home videos of a very young, gamine-like Sinéad fronting a rock band at the start of her career are worth the price of admission all by themselves. The A&R guys who signed her would have had to be both deaf and blind to have missed what was in front of them, or the fact that this Irish waif—or so she seemed—was destined to be a giant star. 

But they had no idea who they were dealing with. She immediately rebelled against the conventional rock & roll sex symbol they were planning to turn her into. Hence the shaved head….except that it served only to emphasize her beauty—especially the giant, soulful, haunted eyes—and to mark her as an artist as visually striking and defiant as she was audibly so. “I always had that sense that it was quite important to protect myself, make myself as unattractive as I possibly could,” she would say later. It was the first of many times in her career when, ironically, an attempt to give a middle finger to stardom only wound up propelling her further into it.

Infamously, Sinéad’s early life was marked by terrible abuse by her family (her mother, in particular) and the repressiveness of the Catholic Church. She escaped it only to suffer similar mistreatment by the music business and the broader culture. The best analog I can think of is Judy Garland or Amy Winehouse, except that Sinéad was never quite as self-destructive as Judy, or as forgiving of her tormentors as Amy.

It was of course her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” that made her a star, a gorgeous rendition, and not coincidentally an inspired video smack in the heyday of the MTV era. (Reportedly, Prince wrote it about a beloved housekeeper who’d been suddenly called away due to a family emergency.) It’s such a good rendition that it’s actually withstood being overplayed beyond human comprehension. 

But for my money, “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” from that same breakthrough LP, 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, is the most powerful and emblematic song of Sinéad’s whole career. It’s ethereally beautiful, with vocals that go from a whisper to a scream, instrumentation that starts with a barely audible acoustic guitar and ends in a firestorm, and lyrics that convey all the naked emotional honesty, pain, and heartbreak that defined her. Go on YouTube: there are a dozen jawdropping live versions of it, but for me the greatest—unavailable as far as I know—is from her first-ever appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” on September 29, 1990. (She had previously pulled out of a scheduled appearance the previous May, in protest over host Andrew Dice Clay.) Marco Pirroni of Adam and the Ants is on lead guitar, with a hollow body Gretsch—a big fat guy playing a big fat guitar. Going into the climax of the song, when Marco rips off a series of violent power chords, and the drummer kicks in…..well, if that doesn’t send a thrill down your spine, you might be dead. 

That SNL appearance was on my 27^th birthday, as it happened, six days before I reported to US Army Ranger School, on my way to join my unit in the Persian Gulf, where Saddam Hussein had recently invaded Kuwait, so I was pretty tightly wound myself at that moment, emotionally speaking. When I got to Saudi, and on into Iraq, I had only two cassette tapes with me for the duration of the deployment, back in those pre-MP3 days of the Walkman, and I Do Not Want was one of them. I had already played the LP to death over the preceding ten months since its release, and I gave that hissy homemade cassette another workout there in the big sandbox. I spent hours laying under the star-filled Arabian night sky, listening to Sinéad as we waited to cross the border into Iraq, and many more after that once we stopped our march and sat there in postwar limbo in the middle of nowhere, for weeks, waiting to go home. When I hear that album today that is still the image it recalls for me. 

YOU GOT A LOTTA NERVE TO SAY YOU ARE MY FRIEND

Two years later Sinéad appeared on SNL again, performing a stark, acapella version of Bob Marley’s “War,” and then infamously ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II to protest the abuses of the Catholic Church, declaring “Fight the real enemy.” I remember watching it live and thinking, “Uh-oh.”

Uh, people were upset. Frank Sinatra and Joe Pesci took public shots at her, both of them invoking their desire to inflict physical violence on her. (You know, just like Jesus would do.) Hardly anyone, whether they were critical of Sinéad’s action or not, bothered to object to that. In fact, a lot of people cheered it. Even Madonna, who had previously made disparaging comments about Sinéad’s appearance, put her down for disrespect to the Church, which was rich considering how she had monetized blasphemy of Catholic iconography in her own career. (Her name is Madonna, for starters.)

To be precise, Sinatra’s beef wasn’t about SNL per se but about Sinéad previously declining to have the national anthem played before a concert in New Jersey, where Frank’s name now adorns a rest stop on the Garden State Parkway. At the time Sinéad opined, “Anthems just have petrifyingly contagious associations with squareness unless they’re being played by Jimi Hendrix.” Hard to argue, and the anthem continues to be a flashpoint even now. Ask Colin Kaepernick.

Two weeks after the SNL incident, the crowd at Madison Square Garden booed her just for walking onstage at a 30^thanniversary tribute concert for Bob Dylan. Sinéad stood ramrod straight at the mic and stoically endured the abuse, then angrily waved off the band, who were going into Dylan’s “I Believe in You,” which she was supposed to sing, and instead defiantly roared out that same acapella version of “War,” part of what had pissed off those troglodytes in the first place.  

Even then it was astonishing to me that a crowd at a Bob Dylan tribute, of all things, would be so fucking retrograde. Shameful doesn’t begin to describe it. But clearly there is a level of stardom—the one at which the man from Hibbing has long resided—where one attracts casual fans, and even more than casual ones, who represent everything the artist is diametrically opposed to. (See also: Springsteen.) Sinéad endured a lot of indignities in her life, but having fans like that wasn’t ever one of them. 

When those assholes booed her, it was Kris Kristofferson who walked onstage, leaned in close, and whispered in her ear, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” Sinéad can be seen visibly replying “I’m not down.” She also reportedly told him, “I don’t need a man to rescue me, thanks,” although it seems clear that she was appreciative of his support when he embraced her again as she came offstage and let her guard down.

Later, Sinéad expressed irritation that Dylan himself didn’t come out and tell the crowd to fuck right off, but she also subsequently penned a love letter to Zimmy on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 2011. She also maintained a lifelong friendship with Kristofferson, including this 2010 duet on his song “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”

(Sidenote: I like to think that, in that moment at the Garden, Kristofferson was channeling instincts from his own earlier life as a US Army officer. In the early ‘60s  he was a Rhodes Scholar-turned helicopter pilot in Germany, in the aviation squadron garrisoned across the street from my dad’s infantry battalion, where the anonymous, clean-shaven Kristofferson used to sit on the steps of his unit’s headquarters and sing and play guitar. “That chopper pilot is a pretty good singer,” my dad told me he remembers thinking at the time.)

NOTHING COMPARES INDEED

Sinéad has since said that having a number one hit was the worst thing that ever happened to her career, and that the opprobrium that followed the SNL incident was the best, putting her back on the fiercely independent track where she always belonged. (A pity the similarly misunderstood Kurt Cobain didn’t get a moment like that.) It was certainly the crisis to which her public outspokenness had been building for several years. 

At the 1989 Grammys, she sang “Mandinka” with the Public Enemy logo painted on the side of her head to protest the Grammys’ shabby treatment of hip-hop artists. In 1991, she boycotted the Grammys altogether, even as she went on to win something called Best Alternative Music Performance. (Alternative to what?)

The albums she went on to make in the three decades that followed covered a vast range of musical styles, in what felt like a deliberate attempt to confound expectations and declare her independence (not unlike choices in her private life, like becoming a female priest in a renegade, offshoot faction of the Catholic Church, or later converting to Islam). Just a brief survey of what, for my taste, are some of her finest recorded moments: “Three Babies,” “Black Boys on Mopeds,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the aforementioned “Mandinka,” a cover of Loretta Lynn’s “Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home” from her idiosyncratic album of big band standards Am I Not Your Girl? (which also includes an incredible “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”), “Reason with Me,” “Empire” (with Bomb the Bass), “Just Like U Said It Would B,” and “You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart,” to name just a few.

In 1998 I saw Sinéad in concert twice in the same week, a pair of shows that provided a perfect portrait of her troubled career. The first was a solo show at the Warfield in San Francisco, a beautiful old venue that was built in 1922. She came onstage in a high-necked, form-fitting Vietnamese ao dai, in brilliantly colored, embroidered silk, and gave one of the best concerts I ever saw. (Close second, also at the Warfield: Patti Smith, with Tom Verlaine on guitar.)

But later that same week I saw her outdoors, at a huge outdoor musical festival at a dusty racetrack in San Jose, sponsored by Guinness and advertised as a fleadh (Gaelic for festival). It was like 145 degrees, no shade, everyone drunk, and she was totally out of her element in front of the shitfaced crowd of frat boys. (Good bill, though, including Wilco and Billy Bragg, and the Pogues. They wheeled Shane McGowan out on a handtruck, like Hannibal Lecter, and propped him up at the mic. The audience loved it, like the crowd at a stock car race that had come just to see the crashes.)

It’s an understatement to say that Sinéad stirred strong emotions in her critics and her fans alike. Let’s walk back that word “critic”—haters is a better term. The vitriol aimed at her was beyond irrational, and it’s obvious why. In every way she represented an affront to privileged, lemming-like douchebags of all kinds: with her refusal to be a conventional model of femininity (or even a conventional “rock chick”), her earnestness, her critique of organized religion, her astonishing emotional openness, her defiance of authority, her singular artistic vision, and with her insistence on being herself even against the machinations of the machine at its most vile.

In other words, the same things that made the haters hate her made us, her fans, love her.  

What was most gratifying, though, was to see the way that she never backed down in the face of insult, misogyny, or ridicule, let alone the know-nothing criticism of people who wanted to tell her how to live her life or run her career, or sneered that the injustices that outraged her were no big deal. And over the ensuing decades she has largely been validated.

“The culture in some ways has caught up to her,” Hanif Abdurraqib wrote in the most recent The New Yorker, “about the hyper-commercialization of the Grammy Awards, the role of the national anthem before concerts or sporting events, and, most notably, the epidemic of abuse within the Catholic Church.”  He continues:

Her greatest crime, underlying all of these defiant actions, was that she didn’t seem to be a gracious pop star, grateful for the sales that pushed her single to No. 1 and her album to platinum status in the United States, where such levels of success are expected to be met with dutiful compliance, especially if the pop star in question is a young woman.

Sinéad’s departure has already set off what I called the Tito Puente Effect, which I wrote about in these pages in the wake of David Bowie’s death— that is, a sudden outpouring of affection by what I called “bandwagon-jumping arrivistes claiming longtime allegiance to the deceased,” and a collective amnesia about how shittily they were treated when they were alive. It’s a grotesque phenomenon neatly captured in the Smiths’ “Paint a Vulgar Picture,” as observed by Morrissey in his pre-fascist incarnation, or at least before he showed those true colors. (“At the record company meeting, on their hands a dead star / And oh, the plans they weave, and oh, the sickening greed.”)

Just last week Morrissey himself issued a scathing public statement on that count, writing: 

The cruel playpen of fame gushes with praise for Sinéad today….with the usual moronic labels of ‘icon’ and ‘legend.’ You praise her now ONLY because it is too late. You hadn’t the guts to support her when she was alive and she was looking for you.

He may be a racist and a neo-fascist, but he’s not wrong, even if couldn’t resist making it about himself as well, adding “There is a certain music industry hatred for singers who don’t ‘fit in’ (this I know only too well).” 

Ironically, Sinéad is being somewhat spared that vile spectacle because the polarization surrounding her is still very much in effect. All the tributes dutifully recall the abuse and the attacks; no one has forgotten how badly this immensely gifted, immensely vulnerable—yet simultaneously immensely strong—young woman was treated.

Yet.

YOU THINK I JUST BECAME FAMOUS AND THAT’S WHAT MESSED ME UP

The adoration of artistic idols—musicians especially, for some reason—has always been a little bit askew. We don’t really know those people, and they certainly don’t know us. The person we imagine them to be, one who is so intimate and important to us, is often nothing like the real person, and the way they speak to our most private dreams and fears and desires is largely illusory. That doesn’t mean we can’t love them, or that their work isn’t genuinely meaningful, but it does mean that the grief we feel for losing them is not like the grief of losing a real, flesh-and-blood person in our actual lives. 

It’s the same with the associations connected to albums and even individual songs, powerful catalysts of memory (second only to smell), which often have nothing to do with what the artist intended or what inspired the work. I know that I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got does not remind most people of the Iraqi desert. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, which came out when I was a teenager in Hawaii, for me will always conjure up images of Oahu, not of the recording studio in Sausalito where that musical soap opera was recorded. I suspect Gerry Rafferty isn’t psyched that “Stuck in the Middle with You” will forever make people think of a Van Gogh-like ear amputation, but he can console himself with the royalties. Little Alex is definitely unhappy that Beethoven’s Ninth was ruined for him.

But all that is OK, as long as one knows it and bears it in mind. The imaginary artist we adore can still be incredibly powerful and meaningful in our lives. For so many, Sinéad, or at least Sinéad as we imagined her, certainly was.

“The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” is about a divorce, but in a purely literal sense, the simple notion of having her gone from our world is hard to accept. She led a life filled with trauma and mistreatment and mental anguish, exacerbated by a vicious, heartless public that treated this rare talent and gentle soul like dogshit. The suicide of her teenaged son Shane in January of 2022 was surely the final straw. As she tweeted: “Been living as undead night creature since. He was the love of my life, the lamp of my soul. We were one soul in two halves. He was the only person who ever loved me unconditionally. I am lost in the bardo without him.” 

A lot of people are a little bit lost in that bardo without you, too. 

Sinéad O’Connor endured a terrible amount of abuse and pain for any one human being, but it took an unspeakable family tragedy like that to break her, in a way that none of the crap that the culture subjected her to ever could.

Rest in peace, a stór. You earned it.