Her first son, Jake, arrived just before the album did. When O’Connor became pregnant in the midst of recording, she writes that the executive called a doctor and tried to coerce her into having an abortion, which she refused. “I looked like an alien,” she writes in the book, which was a kind of escape hatch from looking like a human woman. So she marched to a barber and shaved it all off. She was still a teenager when she started work on her fierce, ethereal first record, “The Lion and the Cobra,” when an executive - “a square unto high heaven” - called her to lunch and told her to dress more femininely and grow out her close-cropped hair. To understand why O’Connor may have seen her cultural blacklisting as liberating, you have to understand just how deeply she was misapprehended throughout her career. “In that, she is very much an Irish woman.” Some artists are skilled at shocking in a way designed to sell more records, and others at tempering their political rage into palatable music, but “Sinead is not the tempering type,” her friend Bob Geldof, the musician and activist, told me. “Not because I was famous or anything, but because I was a human being, I had a right to put my hand up and say what I felt,” O’Connor said. John Paul II finally acknowledged the church’s role in 2001, nearly a decade after O’Connor’s act of defiance.īut the overreaction to O’Connor was not just about whether she was right or wrong it was about the kinds of provocations we accept from women in music. The top comment on a YouTube rip of O’Connor’s “Behind the Music” episode is: “Can we all just say she was right!” Few cultural castaways have been more vindicated by the passage of time: child sexual abuse, and its cover-up within the Catholic Church, is no longer an open secret. Now O’Connor’s memoir arrives at a time when the culture seems eager to reassess these old judgments. The Washington Times named her “the face of pure hatred” and Frank Sinatra called her “one stupid broad.” O’Connor was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League and a group called the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations, which hired a steamroller to crush hundreds of her albums outside of her record company’s headquarters. Joe Pesci threatened to smack her in an “S.N.L.” monologue, and later, on that same stage, Madonna mocked her in a gently condescending fashion, play-scowling and ripping up a photograph of the tabloid-star sex offender Joey Buttafuoco. Soon after the show, O’Connor appeared at a Bob Dylan tribute concert, and when the crowd booed, she was so taken aback she thought, at first, that they were making fun of her outfit. “It was open season on treating me like a crazy bitch.” “But it was very traumatizing,” she added. It was brilliant,” she said of her protest against abuse in the Catholic Church. But now her reputation felt at permanent risk. “I like being on my own.” But she disclosed this with such an impish giggle that it sounded almost like an invitation.īy the time O’Connor appeared on “S.N.L.,” in October 1992, she had already been branded as insane - for boycotting the Grammy Awards where she was up for record of the year (they recognized only “material gain,” she said) and refusing to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” before her concerts (because national anthems “have nothing to do with music in general”). “Deliberately, I bought uncomfortable chairs, because I don’t like people staying long,” she said. When O’Connor, 54, gave me a little iPad tour during our video interview, the place seemed to fold in on itself: The flowers were fake ones she bought on, and her pair of handsome velvet chairs weren’t made for sitting. Bubble-gum roses lined the windows, and the Hindu goddess Durga stretched her eight arms across a blanket on a cozy cherry couch. Her cottage was appointed in bright, saturated colors that leapt out from the monotonous backdrop of the Irish sky with the surreal quality of a pop-up book. “I’m lucky,” she said, “because I enjoy my own company.” On a recent overcast afternoon, she had a navy hijab arranged over her shaved head and a cigarette permanently installed between her fingertips, and when she leaned over an iPad inside her all-glass conservatory, she looked as if she had been hermetically sealed into her own little world. She has been riding out the pandemic in a tiny village on an Irish mountaintop, watching murder shows, buying fairy-garden trinkets online and mainlining American news on CNN. Sinead O’Connor is alone, which is how she prefers to be.
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