I learned of Sinéad O’Connor’s death at four in the morning here in Sydney, in the midst of a bout of insomnia, a common occurrence for me. It struck me like a blow, knocking the wind out of me. I scrolled in shock through the headlines and posts for a bit, then sat on the couch, tears stinging my eyes, knowing I probably wouldn’t get back to sleep again. At that hour, alone with my fatigue, the sadness of it all was incomprehensible, breathtaking, overwhelming. The universe seemed just then like an impossibly cruel and lonely place.
Finally I went back to bed and lay there for a while thinking about my nephew, who was hit and killed by a truck in May at the age of 14. It was far more intense than any grief I’d ever felt in my life, but I barely cried at the time. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t; I felt too numb with grief for days, a numbness that at its worst made me feel like I might never be happy again. Thankfully that feeling receded after his memorial service, though it didn’t completely go away.
The news of O’Connor’s death somehow put me in touch with that recent, painfully fresh, much more personal grief, helped me process it a bit, and allowed me to finally cry about it — the death of a child juxtaposed with the death of someone who suffered so much as a child.
Amidst this profound sadness there was also a great deal of anger. Like hot coals beneath ash, a burning, flickering, hissing anger at all that had been inflicted upon her, and upon survivors everywhere. Anger on behalf of all the oppressed in this world, all the victims of abuse, and most especially the children. Anger about racist cops and imperialist war and the warming oceans.
Finally I drifted into a shallow sleep, and dreamt I was walking on a lawn overgrown with wildflowers. In my dream I startled a bee, and it flew towards my face in its pell-mell confusion. I flinched and it jerked me awake — one of those dreams that wake you suddenly when you’re in a hypnogogic state between sleep and conciousness. I realized I’d only been out for ten minutes or so, and then I realized that O’Connor’s “Black Boys on Mopeds” was in my head, with such clarity it felt like I was actually listening to the recording.
Specifically it was her piercing, lilting Remember what I told you that echoed in my head — that remarkably piercing voice, now silenced forever. It was as if she was trying to communicate with me.
That refrain, Remember what I told you, occurs twice in the song, and O’Connor gives us two separate things to remember: the first is If they hated me they will hate you, and then If you were of the world they would love you.
The tears were in full flow, streaming down my face now. I got out of bed again, so as not to disturb my family next to me. It was near dawn and the kookaburras were waking up. In the dim quiet of the morning those lyrics struck me as prophetic. They most certainly hated O’Connor. And she was most certainly not of this world — not of this world as it is currently ordered and governed, at least.
So many of her lyrics have that prophetic quality. She grappled with religion all her life. I mean this in both senses: she grappled with religious authority, and she grappled with her own beliefs, more honestly than most people. Considering that and considering her unwavering, undimmed commitment to speaking righteous, uncomfortable, angry truth to power, you might as well list her occupation as prophet in addition to musician and activist.
I thought about the rest of “Black Boys on Mopeds,” recorded when she was 23 years old and released on her masterpiece, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, in 1990. It’s not only a perfect summary of her politics, it’s almost a mini-autobiography, and eerily prescient. It begins with a stinging rebuke of Margaret Thatcher’s hypocrisy over Tiananmen Square: The same orders are given by her. She makes it personal: I’ve said this before now / You said I was childish and you’ll say it now. Then the chorus connects Thatcher’s hypocrisy and brutality — indeed, the hypocrisy and brutality of centuries of British history — to the racism and violence of the London police. England’s not the mythical land of Madam George and roses / It’s the home of police who kill Black boys on mopeds. The latter is a reference to the 1989 police murder of Nicholas Bramble, age 21, who was chased by London police until he wrecked his bike, which the cops had assumed was stolen; and also to the 1983 murder of Colin Roach, also 21, who died of a gunshot wound in the lobby of a London police station (somehow it was ruled as suicide). A photo of Roach’s parents next to a poster of their son is printed on the inner sleeve of the album with the caption “God’s place is the world, but the world is not God’s place.”
O’Connor sings that this is why she’s leaving England, to protect her son Jake, then two. I don’t want him to be aware that there’s any such thing as grieving. All of this is so spot-on in light of the modern movement against police violence, from Ferguson to the George Floyd Rebellion — a movement that O’Connor, true to form, took part in. Asked about the continuing relevance of the song in 2021 (it was covered by Shea Rose and Phoebe Bridgers, among others, during the 2020 rebellion), O’Connor told the Washington Post “Oh, my God, isn’t it sad that this is still so fucking relevant, you know, after 30 years?”
But she doesn’t leave the song there; she’s looking at the entire picture. In the second verse, O’Connor raises the issue of poverty in the UK, describing a mother holding three babies and looking for food on the street in London — a direct callback to the lyrics of “Three Babies,” which occurs two songs earlier on I Do Not Want. O’Connor said the three babies were a reference to the three miscarriages she had. So it’s about poverty, but it’s also poetic, and it’s loaded with religious symbolism. Lurking beneath all that is the knowledge of the abuse she suffered as a child, and how it colored her view of motherhood. Again, her ability to intertwine her own experiences with the political and the social without it seeming pretentious (this is why I felt justified beginning this piece with some personal reflections).
The song reaches its climax with the lines that could be O’Connor’s epitaph: These are dangerous days / To say what you feel is to make your own grave.
She wrote this song three years before her life-altering appearance on Saturday Night Live in October 1992, in which she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II and it seemed the whole world wanted to do violence to her. If they hated me, they will hate you. She already knew what hate was before she became one of the most hated women on the planet.
Author’s note: Her proper name was Shuhuda’ Sadaqat. I refer to her throughout this article as Sinéad O’Connor, her birth name, because that was accepted as her professional name, and she continued to refer to herself by that name in public forums.
In his eulogy of O’Connor on Instagram, Flea wrote, “For us all us street kids, all us wildlings, when she became huge, it felt like one of us had made it.” That’s exactly how I felt. She was the embodiment of punk. She was a homegirl. She was working class all the way. She dressed like us, with her bomber jackets and torn jeans and t-shirts. She had no idea what to do with fame — so uncomfortable on red carpets and in front of cameras, so much more comfortable making music or at political protests or hanging out with ordinary people in the street.
In her 2021 autobiography Rememberings, she describes befriending some Rastas who ran a juice bar on St. Mark’s in New York. She spent days and nights with these guys in 1992, the same week she appeared on SNL, learning about Rasta and Jamaican culture from them, feeling like she was among her people, which she was. She formed close bonds with them in a short time; she says she was thinking of them during her protest on the show.
That fact that she was so fully embracing of hip hop and reggae only made her seem even more like one of us, not one of them. Note the Public Enemy logo on her head in the photo shared by Flea; she wore it to the Grammys in 1989 as a protest against the exclusion of hip hop. In hip hop’s early days, it was a massive thing for her to show her support like that, and it was not forgotten.
O’Connor was widely admired by Black folks; I saw many tributes from Black friends and musicians this week. Certainly her music was infused with Black music. “I Want Your Hands on Me” was a big club hit and the remix featured MC Lyte, which was unusual for a white artist at the time, as was her sample of James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” on “I Am Stretched on Your Grave.” Her signature hit was an exhilaratingly soulful cover of a Prince song. Her 2005 reggae album, Throw Down Your Arms, is beloved by reggae fans. And of course, she sang Bob Marley’s “War” as she struck her blow against the Catholic church and for abused children on SNL.
But I think a bigger reason for the respect she earned from the Black community is because her politics were always for the oppressed and downtrodden, and she was clearly so genuine and committed to them. As Ice-T put it, “She stood for something… Unlike most people.”
And by incorporating Black music into her own it didn’t seem so much like appropriation; given her history it seemed fitting. As with most things, O’Connor had a wide-angle view of this soulful aspect of her music. In a 2005 interview, she invoked the history of British colonialism in explaining why she identified so much with reggae:
You know, there are huge blood ties, for a start. You know, there are huge ties between Africa and Ireland going way back, you know, before Jamaica even existed as it is now. And we were colonized by the same people and by the same religion in a lot of ways. And we have the same, I think, similarities in our music in that there’s a huge kind of longing, yearning and calling in the music from Ireland and Jamaica, particularly the singing.
Through it all she was by all reports a really nice person. So many tributes to her this week referred to how nice and sweet and and down-to-earth she always was. It’s important to hang onto that given that she’s so well-known for being troubled and angry. I don’t mean to downplay the anger — I very much mean to play it up as you’ll see — but her anger came from the same place as her compassion, which is how it should be. MC Lyte said, “She was really honest and kind — sometimes it’s hard to be those things at the same time, but she was able to do it.”
She had a massive impact on me right from the start. I thought she was the coolest person I’d ever seen when The Lion and the Cobra, her jaw-dropping debut LP, came out in 1987, when I was 17, and she started getting play on MTV. O’Connor’s appearance was so controversial at the time, and has remained controversial in some circles for 35 years. It was, and still is, so hard for some people to get used to the idea of a woman with a shaved head, so incredibly hard! I got used to it before I was done watching the video for “Mandinka” for the first time. I don’t know if it was my love of punk, which was only nascent at the time but which had already changed my life, or if I would have embraced O’Connor no matter what based on something in my makeup.
As a rule I don’t focus on the appearances of women musicians in my writing, but I’m making an exception here because the sexist dehumanization of O’Connor based on her androgynous style is something to push back against. The hatred of her politics and her person begins with this fear and loathing of her very looks.
I thought she was amazing and beautiful and sexy. Her shaved head only highlighted the striking angles of her face, and those enormous, lovely, soulful eyes. It made her seem both tough and vulnerable, made her seem to occupy more space though she was only 5’4.
She remained beautiful all her life, even when all the shit she’d been through took a visible toll. I love the photos of her in the New York Times in 2021: those eyes as penetrating as ever, and the radiantly cheeky look on her face, clearly enjoying her cigarette, her no-fucks attitude still in place.
By the simple act of shaving her head, O’Connor showed how stupid all our beauty standards for women are, and how readily people will single you out and abuse you just for being yourself (like Madonna did to O’Connor in 1991). She was living a protest, walking a difficult path, from the very first moments she was in the public eye. I can’t tell you what an influence this was on me, in small ways (shaving my own head in the 90s) and big (becoming an activist and a radical myself).
Then there was that miraculous voice. How do you describe that voice? Listening to it, it’s so sweet and gentle at first, so delicate, and then it opens up, and it feels like the earth opening up and erupting. It does that thing where it rises in pitch and becomes louder and bigger all at once, and it’s like a voice from the grave, or a voice from outer space. She does it almost right away, less than a minute into “Jackie,” the first track on her first album, as if she arrived on this earth in an explosion, as a herald of some kind, an angel in the scary Biblical sense. The fact that she was a small person made it seem even more like she was channelling that voice from somewhere else.
So many friends and others have mentioned how that voice gave them a voice of their own — a voice for their adolescent angst, for their own trauma or heartbreak, a voice as a gay youth, or as a girl. That was its power.
O’Connor applied that voice to so many kinds of music. She played rock, pop, folk, soul, traditional Irish music, country, and reggae, just for starters. Dance music and hip hop were integral to her sound at different points. She covered Cole Porter beautifully. She often combined these forms, like on the still-astonishing “I Am Stretched on Your Grave,” an Irish ballad with a ferocious hip-hop drum loop. And it didn’t seem like she was flailing around trying to impress different audiences, as this eclectic approach often seems. She considered herself a protest singer first and foremost, and it’s like she saw all these genres as different kinds of folk music, which they are. She showed the unity between them.
Listening to O’Connor’s early albums now makes it more clear than ever how influential and ahead of her time she was. I think the fact that she was relegated to the margins after her SNL protest, along with her stubborn habit of doing exactly what she felt like doing instead of trying to please anyone else, obscured her massive contributions to pop music and ensured she was somewhat underrated for years. But try to imagine the 90s and everything that came after without it. Try to imagine PJ Harvey, Cat Power, Amanda Palmer, Fiona Apple, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or Tori Amos without her (many of these artists paid tribute to her this week). She looms over entire genres: grunge, riot grrl, emo, the various branches of alternative and art pop. She anticipated shoegaze, dream pop and post-rock with “Just Call Me Joe,” the haunting closing track on The Lion and the Cobra.
The eclecticism on display across her first two albums has a specific feeling for me. It’s that feeling of the late 80s and early 90s, when hip hop and dance music were exploding into the mainstream and upending and influencing everything. New technology like synths and drum machines were allowing young musicians from De La Soul to 808 State to change the world in their bedrooms. Rap was the new punk, rock was getting funky again, acid house and rave music were exerting their influence on indie, and the future seemed unbelievably bright. O’Connor was right there with all that. The video for “Put Your Hands on Me,” which includes MC Lyte’s verse, perfectly embodies the multiculturalism, the optimism, and the high-tech psychedelia of that era. It makes me feel good just watching it.
The thing about her follow-up LP is that it contains O’Connor’s biggest hit and one of the greatest covers of all time (“Nothing Compares 2 U”) as well as one of the greatest protest anthems of all time (“Black Boys on Mopeds”), and yet those may not even be the best songs on the album. I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got is one of those LPs that sounds like a greatest-hits collection because it’s one bomb after another from start to finish. “Three Babies” is just devastating, and it’s the second track. You get past all the other classics and you think the album might start to wind down now, and then “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” grabs you in the face and shakes you. That song always made me emotional even before O’Connor’s death but now I can barely listen to it.
The way she wails, I’ll talk but you won’t listen to me. It’s a song about her first divorce but also it’s about… everything. No wonder so many women are talking about what a positive impact O’Connor had on them when they were young.
And again, that prescience. “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” had to have been an influence on Massive Attack and the entire genre of trip hop. And I wouldn’t exactly argue that O’Connor was an influence on Björk — both artists were breaking out about the same time in the late 80s. But “Feel So Different,” with its majestic string section backing up O’Connor’s soaring, powerful, unflinchingly vulnerable vocal, sure sounds like it set the table for Homogenic seven years before the latter was recorded. And O’Connor was incorporating dance beats into her alternative pop years before Björk made that her trademark.
There’s also that eerie sense of prophecy. Much like “Black Boys,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes” would sound like she was singing about the SNL fallout if you didn’t know it was written three years earlier:
Everyone can see what’s going on
They laugh ’cause they know they’re untouchable
Not because what I said was wrong
Whatever it may bring
I will live by my own policies
I will sleep with a clear conscience
I will sleep in peace
The amount of abuse O’Connor endured in her lifetime is staggering to contemplate. She detailed a lot of it in her autobiography, and it really shook me. I don’t feel like going back and checking, because I don’t think I can handle it right now, but I remember something about her mom furiously beating her on her private parts with a mop while she cowered on the kitchen floor; and something else about her mom locking her out of the house all night, so that she had to sleep in the yard like a dog.
As a teenager she was placed in a Dublin institution that was a holdover from the Magdalene laundries, the nightmarish Catholic-run facilities where women and girls were locked up by their families if they were mentally ill, if they got pregnant out of wedlock, or in many cases if they were just considered troublemakers. Rape, torture and deaths in custody were epidemic in these hellholes. (Watch The Magdalene Sisters, Peter Mullan’s 2002 drama, if you want an idea of what these places were like, and more broadly to understand the vicious patriarchal structures of Irish society that O’Connor railed against all her life.)
She wrote that her memories of child abuse came flooding back during that crazy night in 1991 when Prince tried to detain and assault her at his mansion in L.A. and it took her all night to escape. Reading about that permanently altered my view of one of my most beloved artists. I’m not saying I’ve cancelled him as such; his music means too much to me. But there’s a kind of disquiet I feel whenever I think of him now.
Naturally the tendency among some is to dismiss her recollections of such incidents as the fraught memories of a mentally ill woman — especially if it involves questioning the legacy of a male artist who is viewed in almost godlike terms by fans (including me). Perhaps it doesn’t help that O’Connor also describes spiritual visions and other supernatural encounters in other parts of her book, but that’s not the same thing. It makes me so angry. It’s so typical for questions of mental health to be used to cast doubt on women’s reports of abuse, to label them “hysterical,” and so on. The fact that her mental-health struggles based on her trauma were real (and openly, frankly discussed by her) doesn’t change this one bit.
O’Connor said some lovely things about Prince when he died in 2016, and similarly her mother’s 1985 death in a car crash was very hard on her despite how much torment she brought O’Connor. I’m not an authority on the psychology of survivors but I have a basic understanding that their relationships with abusers can be very complex — and that these complexities are often used to cast further doubt on them.
In light of the actual violence done to O’Connor, it’s telling to go back and read the words of the men who rhetorically threatened violence against her. When she famously refused to have the U.S. national anthem played at a 1990 show in New Jersey, Frank Sinatra said he wished he could meet her so he “could kick her ass,” and said, “For her sake we’d better never meet.” Appearing on SNL one week after O’Connor tore up a picture of the pope, defender of the faith Joe Pesci told the audience that he “would have gave her such a smack” and would have “grabbed her by the eyebrows,” and received cheers from the audience.
Along with all the direct abuse there were all those who ditched her. Like Bob Dylan, who didn’t come out onstage to comfort her or calm the crowd like he should have when she was viciously booed at his Madison Square Garden tribute concert two weeks later, leaving Kris Kristofferson to do it for him. She calls Dylan out for it in her book and rightly so. There were so many famous and powerful people in those days who abandoned her, or dropped her from rotation, or worse, enabled her attackers (like Lorne Michaels when he allowed Pesci to threaten her on-air), but Dylan’s example is especially appalling because he was her hero, and of course an artist whose legend was based on protest songs.
Something that’s been irritating me about many of the eulogies of O’Connor I’ve seen this week is their tendency to locate her pain and trauma solely within her. Tori Amos’s Instagram post is typical in its wording: “a beautiful soul, who battled her own personal demons so courageously.” (I don’t mean to pick on Amos in particular, it’s just one example; and by the way her live tribute to O’Connor is gorgeous.)
But the demons weren’t hers. The demons were the people who abused her and others, and the institutions that protected them. She saw the problem as a structural one, and she made that very explicit in her action on SNL when she focused her protest on the pope. Think about why she chose Marley’s “War” of all songs to sing in that moment — she wasn’t just speaking out about herself; she wasn’t even just speaking out about child abuse. Until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race / Then we say war. “Fight the real enemy,” she said, and she didn’t mean something internal, some nebulous demonic force within her, she meant the Catholic church, and the forces of patriarchy, racism, imperialism and colonialism.
People say “She’s finally at peace.” But I don’t like the narrative that implies: someone is abused as a child, she speaks out about it in uncompromising terms, she’s attacked and ridiculed and gaslit and threatened, and then marginalized for decades, or just forgotten, then she dies… and now she’s “finally at peace”?
What would have been really great is if she’d had more support, and known peace during her lifetime. What would be really great is if we didn’t have to live in a world where things like this can happen — if we could overthrow the institutions and governments and systems that rob children and women and other survivors of their peace.
The way we look at mental health in this society is so upside down. We always talk about an individual’s brain chemistry or trauma, and how an individual can be treated or learn to cope. We don’t talk about systemic violence against women and Black people, or lack of affordable housing, or capitalist alienation, or the climate emergency that’s threatening all life on earth, and how those things affect our mental health.
As O’Connor herself wrote in the comments of the New York Times article about her two years ago, “IT IS NO MEASURE OF HEALTH TO BE WELL ADJUSTED TO A PROFOUNDLY SICK SOCIETY.”
Another thing people are saying about O’Connor this week is that she was right all along. You better fucking believe she was right. It’s not just that institutional child sexual abuse in the Catholic church is now widely reported and litigated. She was on the right side of so many things. She was one of the few public figures to oppose the invasion of Iraq. Her support for Palestine was unwavering. She marched against racism and fascism, and for abortion rights in Ireland. She wasn’t just a “nonconformist” — she was an activist and a radical, who stood for something.
It wasn’t just words either; let’s not forget that her interventions made a huge material difference. Her SNL action was a historic turning point for church abuse survivors. She’s celebrated by HIV activists for a “groundbreaking” and “profound” intervention when she wore a t-shirt for the Dublin AIDS Alliance and talked about the stigma of the disease on TV in 1990. Many Irish commentators credit O’Connor with changing the political landscape of the country through her staunch advocacy for women’s liberation and against theocracy (abortion finally became legal in Ireland in 2019). “There is no Ireland moving away from the Church as we have without Sinéad,” actor and activist Tara Flynn told Esquire.
She wasn’t right about everything. She was impetuous and had a tendency to rant. She had to apologize recently for some unfortunate remarks about Jamaican men; and while her open letter to Miley Cyrus in 2013 contained plenty of bitter truth about the exploitation and abuse of women in the music industry, it was also pretty moralistic.
But she was right most of the time, and she always had so much clarity despite her reputation as the “crazy lady in pop’s attic,” as one sexist critic put it.
I love so much that she never apologized for her SNL protest. She slept with a clear conscience.
Far from the pope episode destroying my career, it set me on a path that fit me better. I’m not a pop star. I’m just a troubled soul who needs to scream into mikes now and then. I don’t need to be number one. I don’t need to be liked.
What amazing courage it must have taken to mount such a protest all by yourself against some of the most powerful and untouchable authorities in society, knowing there would be severe repercussions on your own music career in the process. Even the details of how she pulled it off are impressive: she had to sneak her mother’s photo of the pope into the NBC studios, and during rehearsals she held up another photo (of a Brazilian activist) for the cameraman to focus on, so that no one would know what she was planning. She was so determined. She lived with that kind of determination.
As a socialist, I’ve stood up for what I thought was right, and lost friends and alienated family, and that was hard enough. I can’t begin to comprehend the scope of what O’Connor went through. It’s enough to say that her principled courage has always been an inspiration for me even if I could never live up to it
I could write another whole essay about O’Connor’s lifelong quest for spiritual truth, and her yearning to be closer to God — as she described it in her book, “the contract I made with the Holy Spirit.” Considering how much religion had to do with her oppression, it’s striking that rather than giving up on it entirely, she pursued it in many forms with unusual passion and openness for the rest of her life. At different points she embraced Rasta, Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity (she was ordained a priest in 1999). Finally, in 2018, she converted to Islam, explaining that it was the “natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian’s journey.” She describes Rastas as “watching out for God everywhere,” and that was her, too.
No doubt some see this as dilettantism, or just confusion, but I don’t. Having wandered on some of these same spiritual paths, I can deeply relate to a life lived like this. Now that I’m a Marxist it’s no longer the way for me, but I still feel so much kinship with her. She saw a clear distinction between the repressive, patriarchal, spiritually empty religion of the ruling order, and that practiced by visionaries and truth-tellers and rebels. Her approach to God was that of Bob Marley and Malcolm X. It was anti-imperialist and antiracist.
I don’t mean to focus only on the weightiest aspects of O’Connor’s life and career. She was filled with joy too, and she brought so much joy into the world. You could see that joy in so many ways: her wonderful smile; her mischievous sense of humor; the sensuousness of “Put Your Hands on Me” and “Jump in the River,” the delight she took in sex, as evidenced again and again in many raunchy passages of her book; the way she put on a wig and infiltrated a protest against her in upstate New York in 1992 just for a laugh; the fierce love she had for her kids; the sheer bliss on her face in this clip of a reggae set with Sly & Robbie in 2012; her humbleness and generosity and childlike sense of fun as she joins this kids’ chorus in singing her own “Jackie,” also in 2012; her radiance as she gives this utterly ethereal performance of the traditional folk song “She Moved Through the Fair” on Irish TV in 1997:
Let’s remember Sinéad O’Connor for that infectious joy as well as for her once-in-a-generation musical talent and all that she accomplished in this world in the struggle for justice. Though she was so brutally honest about her own trauma, and though she fought like a lion to make sure others didn’t have to experience it like she did, she shouldn’t be defined by it. She embraced life and ran with it like few others ever do. Her life may have been far too short, but it sure wasn’t wasted.
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Under the Paving Stones 
LOVE…PRAISE…BLESSINGS…LOVE…
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