Why Sinéad O’Connor refused to be silenced

O’Connor’s values and priorities were formed in childhood, a period when she later said she had suffered abuse at the hands of her devoutly religious mother. She found solace in music – specifically in the Bob Dylan albums her brother shared with her – and in a book of Dylan’s songs given to her by a kindly nun at the Catholic girls’ reform school she attended in her early teens. By 18, O’Connor signed a recording deal with Ensign/Chrysalis, shortly after her mother died in a car accident on the way to Mass.

Rejecting her path

These connections were largely unknown by the public, our perceptions about O’Connor filtered through the star-making machinery of the music press. Nevertheless, it was impossible not to grasp that O’Connor wasn’t interested in becoming a typical pop star. Rejecting the marketing advice of her label, she had her hair shaved and wore ripped jeans and combat boots as a protest against what she perceived as the music industry’s sexism, valuing female artists for their looks rather than their music.

Although there were few precedents for a young woman to express complex emotions in pop music, O’Connor did just that, with an incredible, almost supernatural voice that could swing from whisper to scream. When the producer assigned by the label failed to see her vision for her 1987 debut album, she took the reins herself. Although The Lion and the Cobra wasn’t engineered to chart, O’Connor found a receptive audience thanks to radio airplay on college and alternative stations and on MTV, where her striking appearance matched the intensity of her songs.

Her 1990 follow-up, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, made O’Connor a global superstar, owing in large part to her cover of the Prince-penned song Nothing Compares 2 U and its instantly iconic music video, where she sheds a single tear as she grieves for her late mother. By the time O’Connor’s album went to number one in multiple countries, she had already had enough of the silence and complicity that fame demanded of her, which was at odds with her desire to use her voice and her growing platform to become a voice for the disempowered.