Sinead

A legend of popular music, Sinead had always been one of my favorite singers, and to hear that she had left us so soon was very surprising. She was a perplexed and complicated person. As a teenager she was arrested for shoplifting and sent to Magdalene Asylum. A place she described as, “a prison where girls cried every day.” She witnessed the horrors of Catholicism up close and personal. As she explains in the “Showtime documentary” “Nothing Compares,” “There was no therapy when I was growing up. I got into music for therapy. It’s not what I wanted. I just wanted to scream.” 

 

Legs McNeil, an American music journalist who knew Sinead well, reiterated on the documentary, “what bugged me was the atrocities Sinead’s mother committed on her.” But Sinead did not hold back on her mother. “She was a very violent woman, not a healthy woman, and she was physically, verbally, psychologically, spiritually, and emotionally abusive. My mother was a beast. Our family is very messed up. We can't communicate with each other. We are all in agony. I for one am in agony. I was able to use my voice to make the devil fall asleep.” Sinead said of her mother.

 

One of the most notable events of her career took place when she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. Following her performance of Bob Marley's War, she said "fight the real enemy and protest against child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.” Her actions resulted in her being banned for life by NBC with copies of her records being destroyed in New York's Times Square. Friends asked me about Sinead’s problems with the Pope and I’d try to explain that the Pope meant something completely different in Ireland. But no one listens, and once people hate you for being different, the truth no longer matters. It doesn’t matter that Sinead was right about Catholicism in Ireland, right about the “The Magdalene Girls,” right about the “Me-Too Movement,” right about racism in rap and hip hop, and right about the Grammy Award members being slaves to fame and cowards about speaking out on America’s ills. No one cared!

The only argument Sinead and I ever had was one morning when I suggested that we feast on cheeseburgers. She was appalled at the idea, “Legs you can’t have a cheeseburger for breakfast!” Sinead raised her voice. “I was incensed and snapped! Of course I can have a cheeseburger. Who says I can’t?” “I do,” she answered. “Here was the world’s most-famous non-conformist telling me that I couldn’t have a cheeseburger for breakfast. I was pissed! But I didn’t care and told her. I can have whatever the fuck I want to eat. You don’t have to have one. She sat glaring at me, while I gobbled down my cheeseburger. I knew right then and there that our relationship wasn’t meant to last. And it didn’t.”

 

In 2017, Sinead changed her name to Magda Davitt, saying in an interview that she wished to be "free of patriarchal slave names and of parental curses.” Belfast filmmaker Kathryn Ferguson, once said about Sinead O'Connor, "She is one of the most radical, incredible musicians we've had. And we were very, very lucky to have had her."

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-66318626

https://legsville.com/sinead-oconnor-the-joan-of-arc-syndrome/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinéad_O%27Connor