Let us dispense, on this sad steaming Wednesday, with how strange it is to cry hot tears of loss and shame for someone you have never met. Let us take it as read the curious nature of fame, the odd parasocial relationships we develop with the famous, the very notion of celebrity. Let us assume as front-loaded the whole idea of art as something that defines a generation. Let us save those explorations for another, less mournful day, and instead agree to remember, to make amends, and to make a promise that we will do better if we are ever again given a gift as staggering, as beautiful, and as generous as Sinéad O’Connor.
She died today. She was only a few years older than me, and part of the shock of her departure (the precise nature of which is as yet unknown, and will forever be less important than the immutable fact that she won’t be around anymore) is that, like so many others of our generation, we are not yet accustomed to seeing people we grew up with leave the world of the living. Generation X, once caricatured as too cynical to care, have been rattled by the disappearance of its lights; as the inheritors and continuers of the most malevolent aspects of the Baby Boomers, we cannot quite yet accept that we are on a one-way ride to that same dark place.
But there is something especially cruel, especially tragic, especially unfair about the removal of Sinéad O’Connor from our ranks. It is not so much a shock that she has left us as it is a grim rebuke that we knew this was likely coming and we could not — in some cases would not, and in every sense did not — stop it from happening. A great artist makes the people who love them feel as if they were personally touched by work they created, and so it is hard not to feel, as solitary and agonizingly lonely as we know her life to have been, that we were all part of it. And now it’s over, and we will never see anything like it again.
Sinéad O’Connor was a performer of radiant, constant, and profoundly vast talent. Her voice — which was so suffused with emotion and depth of feeling that by her own accounts, she often found it difficult to sing loudly enough to keep in control — was the kind of instrument that comes along once in a lifetime. At only 23 years old, she released an album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, that possessed such striking power and heart that it seemed to have seeped up from the depths of the earth. She wrote, played and sang with such total commitment and sincerity that she could stop you in your tracks, arrest your thoughts, make you think of nothing but what you were hearing. She did not stop making great music for the rest of her too-short life, but it is fair to say that many of us stopped paying attention.
That is because Sinéad O’Connor was, from that painfully young age, concerned with much more than just making music. She was utterly, purely, and self-destructively fearless, and there was so much she had to tell us about. The years of her greatest fame (1990-1993, loosely) coincided with much of my political development as an adult, and a nexus of several factors — the riot grrrl movement, the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and Sinéad O’Connor’s unblinking, brutal insistence on exposing the myriad sins of the Catholic Church — came together to make me aware of the nature, extent, and insidiousness of misogyny in our society. If I am any kind of a feminist today, I owe much of it to Sinéad O’Connor.
As the tributes to the life of this astonishing woman pour in today, it is easy for people — many of whom have the advantage of youthful hindsight — to point out that she was right all along about the rampant sexual abuse of the Catholic Church. Of course she was right; the phrase ‘lived experience’ was not in common currency then, but Sinéad O’Connor had experienced it firsthand in Ireland’s schools and orphanages and homes, where it exerted a power that is hard to comprehend today. But it is important to her memory to understand that, first, she was right about it when practically no one else was talking about it. This made her so terribly isolated and alone, an unfathomably brave young woman demanding attention to what was, for many at the time, a wild-eyed conspiracy theory. Second, she was right in a way that walled her off, in those days before allyship and social media and a 24-hour news cycle, from anyone who might help her, listen to her, believe her. When she did arguably the most memorable and certainly most courageous act of her career — tearing up a picture of the Pope on the biggest and most influential platform a performer could dream of — you could count on one hand the number of her peers who stood up for her. Everyone else turned their back on her, attacked her, threw her to the wolves.
And, in a very real sense, that was the end for Sinéad O’Connor. While she maintained an almost unbelievably clear-eyed perspective on it (“People say, ‘oh, you fucked up your career’,” she explained years later, “but they’re talking about the career they had in mind for me. I fucked up the house in Antigua that the record company dudes wanted to buy. I fucked up their career, not mine”), she would go on to make music of great power and grace to very little attention from music journalists, and when she would draw interest from the media, it was inevitably hostile, derisive, scornful, or mocking: what’s the crazy lady up to now? What does the crazy lady have to say?
The fact is, Sinéad O’Connor did struggle with mental illness all her life. Who knows which came first, her emotional disorders or the terrible abuse she underwent, I do not care to speculate, but she was the first to admit that she made impulsive decisions, spoke before she thought and acted before she spoke, and constantly said things and did things that she didn’t mean or came to regret. The press knew this, and chummed the waters of her damaged mind like fishermen scattering bait from the safety of the boat. But just like everything else, she would not simply meekly accept the reality of her poor mental and physical health. They were problems, and problems needed to be discussed, to be dealt with, to be solved. Yes, she did not feel safe and in control of her own mind, but no, she would not shut up about it. She needed help. And did she get it? Did she hell.
For all she did for us, for all she gave us, Sinéad O’Connor suffered. She was brutalized physically and mentally by her mother, who then died in a car crash when she was only a teenager. She was abandoned by her family. She was sexually assaulted in the modern-day dungeons run by the priests and nuns. She struggled with mental health, addiction, illness, and the betrayal of her own body. Her children were taken away from her. She saw precious little profit from the gorgeous, exquisite art she gifted the world. For the jaw-dropping courage of her convictions — for her insistence on drawing attention to crimes we now accept as fact when people tried to dismiss them as fantasy, and for speaking plainly about the cover-up of sex abuse by the church, the institutional racism of Thatcher’s England, the casual sexism of contemporary society, for the way we dehumanize immigrants and leave the working class out in the cold — she received ridicule, contempt, and hatred. And she felt these things so deeply that they certainly contributed to, if not directly led to, her death.
We owe her too much, for all she gave to us, to simply sit back and congratulate ourselves for recognizing retroactively how right she was. We will soon see far too many people, let off the hook because the woman they vilified all these years is no longer around to remind us of how shabbily they treated her, engage in platitudes about her greatness, robbing her of her commitment by putting it on themselves like a used jacket. After treating her, as Lenin said with “the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander,” they will make the usual show of transforming her into a defanged saint, “robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.” We must not let their silence all these years be filled up with praise that is too little, too late.
Sinéad O’Connor, like so many people who suffered unthinkable pain, sought solace in music, and the result was some of the most hypnotic, transformational, passionate songs of our time. But music did not save her. It was not enough, and we should pay her the respect of admitting that. She is beyond pain now, and if I cannot bring myself to believe that she is someplace where she will receive comforts so great that they will erase all memory of her agonies, I can at least say that she won’t hurt anymore. We owe her not just a determined effort to keep her great music alive, but to recognize the reasons she made it, and how badly we let her down when she asked us for help dealing with those reasons. Her bravery and brilliance have passed beyond our hands now, and we cannot make it up to her; but someday soon — she is already out there — there will be another person like her, an incandescent talent whose genius is fired by humiliation and anguish and who loudly demands that if we look upon her works, we have a responsibility to address the discontents behind it. It is to the next Sinéad O’Connor that we owe this effort, because we failed to give it to the first one.