Why Sinéad O'Connor Matters by Allyson McCabe

Author:Allyson McCabe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

WE DO NOT WANT WHAT SHE HAS GOT

Years later, O’Connor would write in her memoir that SNL rerailed rather than derailed her career, setting it back on the right track, far from the world of pop celebrity.1 But the reality was a lot more complicated. As O’Connor alternated between retirement and failed comeback attempts, most of her music went unheard, eclipsed by controversial statements, actions, and struggles that often played out in the public eye.

Before SNL, O’Connor contributed vocals to Peter Gabriel’s 1992 album Us. Then in early 1993 she went out on tour with him. They became involved, a relationship that she would describe years later as being used as “weekend pussy.”2 When their affair ended, Gabriel abruptly replaced her on the tour bill with Paula Cole and O’Connor reportedly attempted suicide.

She returned to Ireland, where she fidgeted relentlessly on a TV appearance, telling host Pat Kenny that she had torn up the pope’s photo “because she was bored.”3 To some watching, it recalled a radio appearance in the immediate aftermath of SNL wherein she had blamed the Catholic Church for Hitler, and described the New Testament as “forgery.”4

There was also an interview with Vox where she went even further, claiming that “the Jews in Germany would not have been exterminated if Hitler had not been abused as a child. Adolf Hitler wasn’t a bad person; he was a very [screwed up] person.” And in another interview, with NME, she said that people were raping their babies, and the only solution to the world’s problems was to get rid of money.5

More and more people were asking an unavoidable question: Is Sinéad nuts? After Legs McNeil parted ways with SPIN in 1993, he launched a tabloid magazine called Nerve, slapping O’Connor’s face on the cover with that very headline.6 McNeil enlisted a therapist to interpret statements she had made to the press as the supposed evidence, defending the move by telling McCall’s that “people who get up on stage are severely damaged . . . we just want to see if the damage is interesting.”7

So much for chivalry. In an attempt to stem the damage, both externally cast and self-inflicted, O’Connor wrote an open letter to the Irish Times in 1993 explaining how her childhood abuse had affected her life as a young adult who suddenly became famous and was famously ridiculed. She recognized that at times she had turned her grief inward, causing her to say and do things that were self-destructive. She pleaded for people to stop hurting her.8

O’Connor’s hope in returning to Ireland was to make a private life for herself after more than a year of nonstop tumult. She rented a simple house in the Dublin suburbs right down the road from her sister Eimear. She made lunch dates with ex-husband John Reynolds. She enjoyed taking their six-year-old son Jake to school in the mornings and readying him for bed at night. She also started studying bel canto (singing from emotion) with Frank Merriman at the

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