Sep 5, 2023·edited Sep 5, 2023Liked by Millennial Woes
Sinead was essentially the Catholic Cassandra of the turn of the century. On that basis and for the suffering and psychological toll she endured for reproaching the Church for its corruption and abuses, she deserves a sainthood. She was God's scourge, deranged, broken, imperfect but still served a divine purpose.
This is a beautiful, searingly honest tribute to a person I didn't know a lot about, outside of the occasional media moments that O'Connor seemed to court throughout her life. I have her memoirs (I have a habit of buying and reading auto/biographies of musicians and people I know little about) but had felt somewhat disinclined to read hers until now. Even hearing about her death didn't seem to give me the push to want to do so. But this essay of yours was featured on Josh Slocum's 'Disaffected' podcast and after hearing him cover a portion of your writing, I came here to read your entire essay for myself. I'm incredibly impressed with how well balanced this piece is and thanks to you I think I'm now ready to read O'Connor's memoirs for myself.
I always knew that you had a flair for both the polemic and the personal (having especially enjoyed watching you and Sargon talk, during your 'Milleniyule' content over the years) but this piece today elevated your voice especially well. Thank you for writing this and getting me to put aside my personal disdain for O'Connor's behaviour over the years. And thank you for giving her a beautiful yet unflinchingly honest obituary.
Would have been a great essay but for the Catholic-bashing (BTW, the clerical abuse problem is a problem centered on homosexual ephebophilia, not heterosexual pedophilia. And sexual abuse is 100X worse in American public schools than it ever was in the Church. See http://tinyurl.com/yxcfbgn4 and read the two reports there. Nothing excuses the shuffling around of abusive priests, but the problem shouldn't be exaggerated, should be understood for what it actually is (was?), and shouldn't lead to the fallacy that Catholic teaching isn't true because bad administrators did or allowed great evils).
Anyway, poor Sinead. All those years of emotional torment! I so hope that she didn't kill herself. And I so hope that if she had she is forgiven. And I so hope she has found peace at last. Very sad...
Wow! I am blown away by the beauty and brilliance of this essay, by the delicacy and depth you display in dissecting the social tidal waves that pummeled this quirky, frail, imperfect shoot of a woman, whose "Nothing compares to U" from 1990 still rings in my head with perfection, evoking timeless love and longing.
Sad thing is that Ireland and counties across Westernized world have more child abuse via transgenderism, prostitution and surrogacy and all else the techno feudal religious corporation encapsulated over the last 10 years, and Sinead hasn't been able to figure it out.
It's on the middle aged fans of hers to do it. They keep thinking the Catholic church is the worst. Yet, reality shows abuse of children across the political divide.
Aug 4, 2023·edited Aug 4, 2023Liked by Millennial Woes
Terrific piece, Woes; lucent with nuanced psychological insight, and shot through with a sense of fairness and justice towards its subject with all her vices and virtues. A blunt observation if I may: would there have been so much clamour around O'Connor's death had she not been beautiful? This is not the trivial question it might sound. We are naturally in awe of good-looking people because they are the extreme exception (the vast majority of us are so soul-crushingly plain, hence the obsession with physical beauty!) Indeed, ally beauty with talent and you have a very dangerous force to be reckoned with.
In this context O'Connor had that seductive, wide-eyed look of the vulnerable waif, almost a spiritual quality of fragility, a beauty we all wish to protect in this brutal world. I think she played on that to a degree, despite the deliberate 'uglification' of the shaven hair that you so articulately analyse. I don't think her talent as a composer was anything other than uneven: when she was good she was absolutely brilliant ('Three Babies' I find almost unbearably moving); but when she was average she was very, very forgettable. Yes, her voice was bewitching but it wasn't unique in any way - there are, and have been, very many chanteuses with equal or superior vocal talents.
All this makes me sound a little unkind about Sinead, and I don't mean to be - though very rarely a musical genius she was genuinely touched by real artistic talent. In this context I would wish merely to side with those such as yourself who seek to articulate some thoughts and emotions about her that humbly aspire to greater depth and illumination than the mawkish and downright inaccurate outpourings of sentiment about her over the past week or two.
I especially appreciated your analysis of the left's theft and ultimate abuse of her late, personal epiphany for their own ideological ends - a typically disgusting piece of moral larceny. Lord, how one loathes the process by which the leftist 'borg' dehumanises human experience.
As regards her own politics: it was perhaps predictable, given her mental decay in latter years, that she should behave with increasingly deranged bitterness towards her own people. Her calls for the hugely admirable John Waters - an Irish freedom fighter if ever there was one - to be arrested were nothing short of contemptible at best and downright wicked at worst. But perhaps in even making mention of this incident I dwell on it too much. John himself was, I note, typically gentle and elegant in his own brief reference to Sinead's death recently.
Anyway, thanks again for a really superior piece of writing expressive of much needed insight into this subject and the tragic woman whose very sad life inspired and provoked it.
"BPD often stems from a woman’s relationship with her father. A weak or overly-doting father seems to be relevant to the condition, but also an absent or distant father. All of these descriptions mean that the father cannot impose order on his daughter, and some of them seem to fit Sinéad’s father, Seán."
This gets it precisely backwards; BPD is classically passed from mother to daughter, through relentless, inescapable love-hate abuse of the kind so vividly described here. It's true that an absent or weak father unable to shield his daughter from her mother enables this situation, but it blames precisely the wrong party, particularly when, as here, the father was valiantly and futilely fighting a rigged system for custody, while working to support not just himself but his broken family for years of her childhood and adolescence.
Very good text. Very nuanced. Yes, Sinéad was completely nuts. But I really loved her during her prime (1987-1997). Some of her tracks, like this version of Danny Boy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYN5iAMHukA), are performed with such unadorned grace and frailty ; her voice was a terrible beauty. But yes, she had done too many insane things to ever be redeemed. For me, it was running around with a Islamic veil, while right before that, going on TV with a bunch of awful tatoos saying how she needed to get laid. She should have just sang, but she was as famous as much for her controversial opinions and shaved head as she was for Nothing Compares 2U. As a singer, she holds a special place in my heart.
The amount of child abuse in the Catholic Church has been overstated by Jewish media and Hollywood.
There is far more child abuse in schools but it is rarely mentioned because the entire educational establishment is a vital cog in the woke left's machinery, from the communist bilge they brainwash children with to the financial support provided by teachers' Union dues.
As for sinead O'connor, she was no crazier than a lot of women. She just had an unusual talent which provided her a bigger platform to broadcast her insanity. She would have had a happier life, and done far less damage to others and to her society, if she'd spent it in that Magdalene Laundry.
Another excellent article! I knew very little about Sinead or her career, but I feel you offered me some deep understanding. In many ways her life seems very emblematic to our age, and as such a very good topic for discussion.
What appears glaring to me is the complete lack of HUMILITY in her behavior. I cannot help but wonder what her religious life was like given the incredibly selfish, arrogant, willful, proud demeanor that both her words and decisions reveal. I believe humility would have been the tonic, the missing piece, the 'miracle cure'.
Easier said than done of course. Complete lack of humility was likely the reason that made her impossible for the father to deal with, and what made her run from the education offered by the nuns. I'll bet they absolutely demanded she humble herself. I hope she learned to bend the knee before she met her Maker.
Thankyou for this thoughtful article. I first saw SInead O'Connor on The Roxy, in 1988, ITV's version of Top Of The Pops. I didn't think much of her even back then. But I did recognise just how powerful her "Nothing Compares 2U" was.
Do you have any contemporaneous accounts about why O’Connor tore up the photo of the pope?
I was ~30 when it happened, and remembered it as a general condemnation of the Catholic Church, using its most famous (living) representative. While recent accounts link her actions to the cover up of sexually abusive priests, a 1992 account in the Washington Post merely refers to O’Connor’s protests about the Catholic Church’s stance on birth control, abortion, and divorce.
O’Connor’s wiki page says:
<<At the time, she did not mention the Roman Catholic Church as a culprit nor distinguished between forms of abuse but in January 1995, in an appearance on the British late-night television programme After Dark during an episode titled "Ireland: Sex & Celibacy, Church & State", she linked abuse in families to the Church saying that O’Connor linked familial abuse to the Catholic Church.>>
It’s not clear whether this referred to abusive priests or priests telling women to stay with
abusive husbands; unfortunately the cited article does not have a link.
Was O’Connor being prescient? This was, after all, a decade before the Boston Globe’s explosive reports on sexual abuse, and O’Connor was allegedly abused not by a priest but her mother. Was she truly trying to bring attention to predatory priests? If so, she certainly left everyone in the dark! It’s far more exculpatory if she was protesting issues that were common knowledge, such as priests urging battered wives to stay, along with their vulnerable children, with abusive husbands.
Refreshing to read an obituary/appreciation that doesn't sidestep the reality of a troubled existence and doesn't glamorize it in a tortured artist trope.
Thanks for your considerable effort in bringing your thoughts and research to your readers..
I personally suspect that there is a spiritual dimension to both her difficulties and her brilliance - but that could of course just be me projecting what little I understand about such things. I like the way you have drawn a parallel between her personal issues and the collective problems that beset our collapsing culture. It allows me to entertain the notion that maybe there is an unseen ocean of angst fed by a collective unconscious which found a channel of expression in the flesh and blood and the mind and the larynx that was Sinnead O'Connor.
Sinead was essentially the Catholic Cassandra of the turn of the century. On that basis and for the suffering and psychological toll she endured for reproaching the Church for its corruption and abuses, she deserves a sainthood. She was God's scourge, deranged, broken, imperfect but still served a divine purpose.
This is the kind of nuance take on a “problematic” celebrities death that legacy media outlets often fail at. Good Job, Woes
This is a beautiful, searingly honest tribute to a person I didn't know a lot about, outside of the occasional media moments that O'Connor seemed to court throughout her life. I have her memoirs (I have a habit of buying and reading auto/biographies of musicians and people I know little about) but had felt somewhat disinclined to read hers until now. Even hearing about her death didn't seem to give me the push to want to do so. But this essay of yours was featured on Josh Slocum's 'Disaffected' podcast and after hearing him cover a portion of your writing, I came here to read your entire essay for myself. I'm incredibly impressed with how well balanced this piece is and thanks to you I think I'm now ready to read O'Connor's memoirs for myself.
I always knew that you had a flair for both the polemic and the personal (having especially enjoyed watching you and Sargon talk, during your 'Milleniyule' content over the years) but this piece today elevated your voice especially well. Thank you for writing this and getting me to put aside my personal disdain for O'Connor's behaviour over the years. And thank you for giving her a beautiful yet unflinchingly honest obituary.
Bex
Well Woes... You are becoming a hell of a writer. Deeply touching, this.
Would have been a great essay but for the Catholic-bashing (BTW, the clerical abuse problem is a problem centered on homosexual ephebophilia, not heterosexual pedophilia. And sexual abuse is 100X worse in American public schools than it ever was in the Church. See http://tinyurl.com/yxcfbgn4 and read the two reports there. Nothing excuses the shuffling around of abusive priests, but the problem shouldn't be exaggerated, should be understood for what it actually is (was?), and shouldn't lead to the fallacy that Catholic teaching isn't true because bad administrators did or allowed great evils).
Anyway, poor Sinead. All those years of emotional torment! I so hope that she didn't kill herself. And I so hope that if she had she is forgiven. And I so hope she has found peace at last. Very sad...
Wow! I am blown away by the beauty and brilliance of this essay, by the delicacy and depth you display in dissecting the social tidal waves that pummeled this quirky, frail, imperfect shoot of a woman, whose "Nothing compares to U" from 1990 still rings in my head with perfection, evoking timeless love and longing.
Sad thing is that Ireland and counties across Westernized world have more child abuse via transgenderism, prostitution and surrogacy and all else the techno feudal religious corporation encapsulated over the last 10 years, and Sinead hasn't been able to figure it out.
It's on the middle aged fans of hers to do it. They keep thinking the Catholic church is the worst. Yet, reality shows abuse of children across the political divide.
tremendous article and really accurate on her mental health problems which were definitely at the severe end of the spectrum
Terrific piece, Woes; lucent with nuanced psychological insight, and shot through with a sense of fairness and justice towards its subject with all her vices and virtues. A blunt observation if I may: would there have been so much clamour around O'Connor's death had she not been beautiful? This is not the trivial question it might sound. We are naturally in awe of good-looking people because they are the extreme exception (the vast majority of us are so soul-crushingly plain, hence the obsession with physical beauty!) Indeed, ally beauty with talent and you have a very dangerous force to be reckoned with.
In this context O'Connor had that seductive, wide-eyed look of the vulnerable waif, almost a spiritual quality of fragility, a beauty we all wish to protect in this brutal world. I think she played on that to a degree, despite the deliberate 'uglification' of the shaven hair that you so articulately analyse. I don't think her talent as a composer was anything other than uneven: when she was good she was absolutely brilliant ('Three Babies' I find almost unbearably moving); but when she was average she was very, very forgettable. Yes, her voice was bewitching but it wasn't unique in any way - there are, and have been, very many chanteuses with equal or superior vocal talents.
All this makes me sound a little unkind about Sinead, and I don't mean to be - though very rarely a musical genius she was genuinely touched by real artistic talent. In this context I would wish merely to side with those such as yourself who seek to articulate some thoughts and emotions about her that humbly aspire to greater depth and illumination than the mawkish and downright inaccurate outpourings of sentiment about her over the past week or two.
I especially appreciated your analysis of the left's theft and ultimate abuse of her late, personal epiphany for their own ideological ends - a typically disgusting piece of moral larceny. Lord, how one loathes the process by which the leftist 'borg' dehumanises human experience.
As regards her own politics: it was perhaps predictable, given her mental decay in latter years, that she should behave with increasingly deranged bitterness towards her own people. Her calls for the hugely admirable John Waters - an Irish freedom fighter if ever there was one - to be arrested were nothing short of contemptible at best and downright wicked at worst. But perhaps in even making mention of this incident I dwell on it too much. John himself was, I note, typically gentle and elegant in his own brief reference to Sinead's death recently.
Anyway, thanks again for a really superior piece of writing expressive of much needed insight into this subject and the tragic woman whose very sad life inspired and provoked it.
"BPD often stems from a woman’s relationship with her father. A weak or overly-doting father seems to be relevant to the condition, but also an absent or distant father. All of these descriptions mean that the father cannot impose order on his daughter, and some of them seem to fit Sinéad’s father, Seán."
This gets it precisely backwards; BPD is classically passed from mother to daughter, through relentless, inescapable love-hate abuse of the kind so vividly described here. It's true that an absent or weak father unable to shield his daughter from her mother enables this situation, but it blames precisely the wrong party, particularly when, as here, the father was valiantly and futilely fighting a rigged system for custody, while working to support not just himself but his broken family for years of her childhood and adolescence.
Very good text. Very nuanced. Yes, Sinéad was completely nuts. But I really loved her during her prime (1987-1997). Some of her tracks, like this version of Danny Boy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYN5iAMHukA), are performed with such unadorned grace and frailty ; her voice was a terrible beauty. But yes, she had done too many insane things to ever be redeemed. For me, it was running around with a Islamic veil, while right before that, going on TV with a bunch of awful tatoos saying how she needed to get laid. She should have just sang, but she was as famous as much for her controversial opinions and shaved head as she was for Nothing Compares 2U. As a singer, she holds a special place in my heart.
The amount of child abuse in the Catholic Church has been overstated by Jewish media and Hollywood.
There is far more child abuse in schools but it is rarely mentioned because the entire educational establishment is a vital cog in the woke left's machinery, from the communist bilge they brainwash children with to the financial support provided by teachers' Union dues.
As for sinead O'connor, she was no crazier than a lot of women. She just had an unusual talent which provided her a bigger platform to broadcast her insanity. She would have had a happier life, and done far less damage to others and to her society, if she'd spent it in that Magdalene Laundry.
Another excellent article! I knew very little about Sinead or her career, but I feel you offered me some deep understanding. In many ways her life seems very emblematic to our age, and as such a very good topic for discussion.
What appears glaring to me is the complete lack of HUMILITY in her behavior. I cannot help but wonder what her religious life was like given the incredibly selfish, arrogant, willful, proud demeanor that both her words and decisions reveal. I believe humility would have been the tonic, the missing piece, the 'miracle cure'.
Easier said than done of course. Complete lack of humility was likely the reason that made her impossible for the father to deal with, and what made her run from the education offered by the nuns. I'll bet they absolutely demanded she humble herself. I hope she learned to bend the knee before she met her Maker.
Thankyou for this thoughtful article. I first saw SInead O'Connor on The Roxy, in 1988, ITV's version of Top Of The Pops. I didn't think much of her even back then. But I did recognise just how powerful her "Nothing Compares 2U" was.
Do you have any contemporaneous accounts about why O’Connor tore up the photo of the pope?
I was ~30 when it happened, and remembered it as a general condemnation of the Catholic Church, using its most famous (living) representative. While recent accounts link her actions to the cover up of sexually abusive priests, a 1992 account in the Washington Post merely refers to O’Connor’s protests about the Catholic Church’s stance on birth control, abortion, and divorce.
O’Connor’s wiki page says:
<<At the time, she did not mention the Roman Catholic Church as a culprit nor distinguished between forms of abuse but in January 1995, in an appearance on the British late-night television programme After Dark during an episode titled "Ireland: Sex & Celibacy, Church & State", she linked abuse in families to the Church saying that O’Connor linked familial abuse to the Catholic Church.>>
It’s not clear whether this referred to abusive priests or priests telling women to stay with
abusive husbands; unfortunately the cited article does not have a link.
Was O’Connor being prescient? This was, after all, a decade before the Boston Globe’s explosive reports on sexual abuse, and O’Connor was allegedly abused not by a priest but her mother. Was she truly trying to bring attention to predatory priests? If so, she certainly left everyone in the dark! It’s far more exculpatory if she was protesting issues that were common knowledge, such as priests urging battered wives to stay, along with their vulnerable children, with abusive husbands.
Refreshing to read an obituary/appreciation that doesn't sidestep the reality of a troubled existence and doesn't glamorize it in a tortured artist trope.
Thanks for your considerable effort in bringing your thoughts and research to your readers..
I personally suspect that there is a spiritual dimension to both her difficulties and her brilliance - but that could of course just be me projecting what little I understand about such things. I like the way you have drawn a parallel between her personal issues and the collective problems that beset our collapsing culture. It allows me to entertain the notion that maybe there is an unseen ocean of angst fed by a collective unconscious which found a channel of expression in the flesh and blood and the mind and the larynx that was Sinnead O'Connor.