There are very good reasons why we should not speak ill of the dead, and this piece will not break with that rule. In Sinead O’Connor, the country and the world has lost one of the most distinctive and talented musical voices that any of us will ever hear in our lifetimes, and that alone is cause for a pause, and for some mourning. But what we have also lost is a relatively young woman, at the age of 56, who lived a troubled and unhappy life where professional success was paired, often and publicly, with personal despair.
And this is where we really must take issue, I think: The narrative of the tortured genius appeals to the media, and the public, because it explicitly links personal demons to creative genius. And because there’s an element of truth to it: The best writing, and the best art, often comes from a place of personal pain. The famous video for “nothing compares” worked not just because of the close-ups of O’Connor’s face, but because the tears in it feel genuine. We’re watching someone else suffering, and it’s powerful and enthralling.
Our capacity for consuming the suffering of others as a form of entertainment is almost boundless. And few were more drawn to that flame than Sinead O’Connor was. The media, over the years, facilitated it: Her pain, and her agony, and her anger, as a form of entertainment. Powerful at its best, voyeuristic at its worst, and more commonplace.
And you cannot help feel that this created an unhealthy relationship: When one’s need for personal attention is paired with that attention being readily available if you only lean into, and share, your own struggles, then the struggles become in themselves a tool for validation. A happy, healthy, and well adjusted 90’s musical star is not as newsworthy, or as valuable to headline writers, as a tortured genius. There’s a reason we don’t hear as much about the life, these days, of Susanna Hoffs, who’s not much older than O’Connor was.
There’s another irony in O’Connor’s life: That public struggle was almost always linked – either directly by her, or self-servingly by many of her interlocutors, to the politics of her own country. In the telling of her story, it was often Irish society that had left her the way she was. She raged endlessly about the catholic church, and its pernicious influence. She raged too, about the patriarchy – “what pisses me off is when I have seven or eight fat pig record company men sitting there telling me what I’ve to wear”, she famously said. She complained that it was difficult to be a woman in music.
These complaints, it is fair to say, the Irish people took to heart. Indeed, read the mainstream media coverage of O’Connor’s death, and you will find endless references to her role in changing Ireland for the better and ridding us of many of the things about which she so raged. Her tearing up an image of the Pope, for example, is recorded as one of “the moments” of Ireland’s evolution from catholic, to post-catholic country.
And so, all these changes happened, and, it appears, O’Connor was no happier as a result. Perhaps, just perhaps, she had always mis-identified the issue. And I wonder – I genuinely wonder – whether if she had identified other factors as a cause of her anger, and her rage, whether that anger and that rage would have been as consistently promoted.
It should also be said that, as others have noted, O’Connor was not herself a perfect avatar for modern Ireland either: Hers was a life-long search for spiritual and religious meaning, culminating, near the end, with a public embracing of Islam. In 1999, she appeared on the Late Late Show in the full garb of a Tridentine Catholic Priest, having been ordained as such, she said, by Bishop Michael Cox, and having taken the new name of “Mother Bernadette Marie”. It was classic O’Connor: Shocking, provocative, and in service of finding a relationship with God. And irresistible to the media.
When time has passed, though, it will be for none of that that she is remembered. The Bishopric, the tearing of the Pope, the rage against the patriarchy – all of it will fade into trivia, remembered only by a few. What will endure is that 1990 video of a vulnerable, sad, and unbelievably talented young woman crying about the love she has lost. The rest is just noise.
But in the here and now, there’s one question that should be asked: By indulging her public suffering and despair, did we really help her? I’m not sure the answer to that question is “yes”.