Like many fifty-somethings I saw Sinéad O'Connor as my contemporary. We grew up in the same Ireland.
Sinéad shaved her head and stood up and shouted out the hypocrisies that suffocated us while I grumbled and sucked it up. Sinéad was angry and courageous and fragile.
I last saw her perform at the Cork Opera House in October 2019. She was still angry and courageous and fragile. I was always in awe of her. I still am. #Sinead #Ireland #Gra

Blackbird in Dun Laoghaire
Joseph O'Connor, 2010

For Sinéad 💔

#Sinéad

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2023/08/09/blackbird-in-dun-laoghaire-a-poem-by-joseph-oconnor/

È come se avessi perso un'amica o una ragazza di cui ero follemente innamorato e le mie parole mi suonano inutili, "talking" direbbe lei, parole banali come banale è diventato il mondo senza #Sinead
https://i.devol.it/watch?v=PU5PwOHJfoA

If you have the time, skip my too-brief post and read this obituary of Sinéad O’Connor by Irish journalist Brigid Purcell.

#Sinead #SineadOConnor

https://jacobin.com/2023/08/sinead-oconnor-obituary

I'd forgotten how much of Moby's album 18 I listened to on repeat.

One highlight, #Sinead O'Conner vocals on Harbor.

@mythopoetica I had a somewhat industrial track in my head with #sinead on it and couldn't figure out what it was. I finally stumbled over it. It's a Pop-era U2 song used in a movie soundtrack, no idea when I first heard it. Only way to buy it is the soundtrack CD or the U2 fanclub Duals CD.

I'm not Your Baby - U2 & Sinead O'Connor
#music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW03qObOR0c

2022: #WorldParty’s ‘#PrivateRevolution’ Tackled #Environmental Concerns 35 Years Ago

Seeds planted in the Reagan years continue to bear poison fruit. On Private Revolution, World Party presaged today’s “There is no planet B” slogan 35 years ago.

By Cheryl Graham / 1 March 2022

"By the mid-1980s, the modern environmental movement had fractured into a cornucopia of causes, including #antinukes and #RacialJustice. The music of the day, by and large, did not champion those concerns.

"Enter World Party, the solo project of Welsh musician and producer Karl Wallinger. After a stint playing keyboards in the #Waterboys, Wallinger released Private Revolution, World Party’s debut album, in March 1987. Recorded and produced by Wallinger, its ten original songs center on environmental themes, emphasizing personal responsibility. It’s all set to a sound incorporating groovy psychedelic synths with earthy piano and percussion. Wallinger sings and plays all of the instruments, except for saxophone on one track by Anthony Thistlethwaite (Waterboys) and violin by Steve Wickham (Waterboys and In Tua Nua) on another. Backing vocals are provided by an unknown Irish singer named #Sinead O’Connor."

https://www.popmatters.com/world-party-private-revolution-atr35

#MusicHistory #80sMusic #ReaganEra #ClimateChange #IsItLikeToday
#ClimateActivism through #Music

🥀 https://youtu.be/ADYmbyzsLXo #Sinead #WillieNelson

@mythopoetica
Mad Lady and Me - https://youtu.be/FNwjQx4tqgU

they did several songs in a TV special - First Time Ever I saw your Face - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0VQPpUlQRk

Sweet Thames Flow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYMun4QdAyc

But maybe his support for her after her SNL performance and the Bob Dylan show a week later makes me like him even more. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x355lb

I liked trance Sinead an awful lot. Afro Celt Sound System. -Release https://realworldrecords.com/videos/release-feat-sinead-oconnor/

#music #sinead

@mythopoetica Thanks for something of hers I didn't know. Sinead is lovely and ethereal, of course, but the song, while super earnest lyrically is that 80s, white British guy 80s rap that never worked for me. As much as I love Adam Ant and Wham - Ant Music and Wham Rap are terrible appropriation and haven't aged any better than rapping in a McDonalds commercial. If you love Long Black Veil, I assume you know her duets with Christy Moore?

#music #sinead

#Sinead
Sick of reading coverage about Sinéad O'Connor, written by others claiming to know her mind, I just listened to the audio book of her memoir "rememberings".(read by her)

I highly recommend it.

I generally hate getting into personal matters in forums like these, but I think this gets into some bigger, more important stuff, so here's an experiment.

I was 18 when Sinéad O'Connor tore up that picture of John Paul II on Saturday Night Live, and I was watching as it happened. It was a very complicated and conflicted moment. Like her, I had also grown up in an Irish Catholic household, I also had a violently abusive mom, I was also educated in church institutions and raised in a community where child abuse was a punchline often delivered from the pulpit, with laughing approval from the congregation. I was an incredibly fucking angry kid by that point in my life, and it was directed at the church more than any other institution. I was about as ready to agree with a fellow Catholic dissenter as a person could be. And still I found that stark gesture on national TV sort of confusing.

For those who didn't grow up in an abusive, theocratic environment, let's be clear: there's a kind of Stockholm syndrome that happens, particularly when you're a kid and you've just never experienced anything else. It's possible to reject an institution, recognize it as a source of enormous harm, and feel protective of it at the same time. It's not a healthy dynamic, but it's completely real, and I'll thank you to please not tell people they're wrong for thinking/feeling that way. Getting out -- or not -- is often a lifelong process and it's incredibly personal. Looking down on people for possibly having ambivalent takes on their own abuse is not as helpful as many people seem to think. And I genuinely can't think of a better example of that ambivalence in public life than Sinéad O'Connor.

Her relationship with the church was extremely complicated and I won't pretend to have a deep understanding of it. She seems not to have wanted to leave it entirely at the time, but rather thought it had gotten off on the wrong track at some point. When she was ordained in a sect that the church didn't recognize in the late 1990s, the apparent absurdity of a woman priest and the "fringe" status of the group she had joined were presented as evidence that she was just crazy and everything she touched was tainted by her madness. All she wanted was to be a priest. I don't get it personally, but it's hardly evidence of mental illness, even among Catholics.

By contrast, in the 1990s, I was ready to burn the church to the ground entirely, though I was still struggling with some theological issues in the early part of the decade. Institutionally, I found it completely unsalvageable, even if there were a God, even if Jesus really said and did all that stuff. As the child sexual abuse scandals emerged in one country after another, I only felt a growing sense of disgust, mixed with an unpleasant feeling of vindication.

When she tore up that photo on TV, it felt like she was waving at me personally, but at the same time, it came so out of left field and seemed so lacking in context that the kind of burning anger she was so clearly communicating -- an anger that I could 100% relate to -- was actually kind of alienating. I wasn’t only angry, but also scared and trying to keep my head down in a bad situation. What she had done seemed like such an open provocation that it was sure to make a target out of people who, like me, weren’t exactly the ideal type. (In point of fact, I was wrong about this. Where I lived, she had gone so far beyond the pale that it wasn’t even worth discussing. Also, in an immigrant family, it’s often hard to rail against someone from the old country who becomes an international success story. So it mostly became one more thing that no one talked about.)

In the backlash that followed, I think it was that fear that led me to sympathize with her detractors more than I would have thought. Many of them weren't Catholic at all -- just misogynists. Having been raised among anti-abortion fanatics, it was hard for me to see that at the time. Fish don't know they're wet, and humans generally don't recognize their own ideological assumptions. The entire world seemed to turn completely against her all at once, and it's hard to swim against the tide.

Ultimately, there are three characters in this story: Sinéad, me, and the Greek chorus of her haters. As in any decent Greek tragedy, no one is entirely unblemished by the end. The haters, of course, were just terrible -- cruel, bootlicking misogynists (fuck you, Joe Pesci) -- and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of redemptive qualities in their actions. I was a naif who just wasn't ready for the kind of dramatic, unapologetic statement that she made on TV that night, which is disappointing in retrospect, but not surprising. Still, if a message is that confusing even to people who agree with you, you might want to reconsider how you're saying it. I say this not as a critic, but as someone who by now has a few decades of activist experience, and who has at times failed to communicate my own actions and goals clearly, losing would-be allies in the process. That Stockholm syndrome part is no bullshit, and I definitely wasn't the only person who was on her side, but didn’t feel I could publicly back her up.

Sinéad is clearly the hero in all of this. Whatever nits I might pick about her messaging, she was ahead of her time and far more clear-sighted than I was back in the day. Ireland was still a country so deeply in thrall to the church that you couldn't even get legally divorced until 1995, three years after the Saturday Night Live incident. The horror of the Magdeline laundries for "fallen women" wasn't publicly recognized for what it was until a secret mass grave was dug up in 1993; no formal apology for literally centuries of systematic abuse was issued until 2013. And, of course, when she appeared on US television that night, the child sexual abuse scandals hadn't yet erupted in Ireland. That would blow up about two years later. So in 1992, a very public, all-out assault on a popular Pope was still largely unheard of both in Ireland and among Irish Catholics in the US.

More recently, the Republic of Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize marriage equality by popular referendum in 2015. Three years later, another referendum established a constitutional amendment legalizing abortion. It would be a crass understatement to say that the changes in the country’s relationship with the church have been dramatic. The scandals over sexual, physical, and emotional violence have been the primary reason for that, and they never would have gotten the attention they did without people who dared to raise the alarm. Sinéad O’Connor wasn’t the only person who did that, but she was one of the most prominent. She deserves massive credit for taking those risks and enduring the consequences.

To call her a canary in a coal mine would do her a disservice. In that metaphor, the canary issues a warning by dying. Sinéad lived for another few decades and kept making demands throughout. I feel guilty now for not having paid more attention while she was alive. I didn't hear her music on the radio nearly as much after Saturday Night Live, and I never pursued it (to be fair, that kind of pop music isn’t really my thing). But now I find myself wondering how much I was influenced in my late teens and early 20s by the people I should have trusted the least -- how much I took to heart the idea that she was just "crazy" and resentful, rather than a person with a valid, well considered critique. In retrospect, her tearing up that photo made a new crack in the facade of the church. I just wasn’t able to see who deep it went at the time.

Working through this stuff is, as I mentioned, often a lifelong process, and I'm sorry now that I didn't appreciate her more during her lifetime. My theological difficulties of 30 years ago have long since been resolved, and I don't believe in an afterlife. All I can do is try to do better for other survivors whose signals I can’t quite read at first. Working on it.

#sinead #sineadoconnor #catholicchurch #snl #childabuse #pope #rcc

Donal Fallon’s Three Castles Burning pays tribute to Sinéad O’Connor via the history of just one song, the Foggy Dew. #Sinéad #SinéadOConnor #FoggyDew #TheChieftains #CharlesONeill #ClancyBrothers #LukeKelly #Odetta #IrishMusic #ThreeCastlesBurning #DonalFallon #Podcast #Dublin #Mastodaoine
https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/three-castles-burning/id1488547315?i=1000622964946

🥀 https://youtu.be/rnxqeuE1aIg #Sinead #SlyAndRobbie #JamaicanAllStarBand #Reggae

Gen-X is getting its ass kicked. Two legends gone. #Sinead #PeeWee

💔 #Sinead

"Okay, I want to talk about Ireland
Specifically I want to talk about the "famine"
About the fact that there never really was one
There was no "famine"
See Irish people were only allowed to eat potatoes
All of the other food
Meat fish vegetables
Were stipped out of the country under armed guard
To England while the Irish people starved
And then on the middle of all this
They gave us money not to teach our children Irish
And so we lost our history
And this is what I think is still hurting me
See we're like a child that's been battered
Has to drive itself out of it's head because it's fightened
Still feels all the painful feelings
But they lose contact with the memory
And this leads to massive self-destruction
Alcoholism drug addiction
All desperate attempts at running
And in it's worst form
Becomes actual killing
And if there ever is gonna be healing
There has to be remembering
And then grieving
So that there then can be forgiving
There has to be knowledge and understanding
An American army regulation
Says you mustn't kill more than 10% of a nation
'Cause to do so causes permanent "psychological damage"
It's not permanent but they didn't know that
Anyway during the supposed "famine"
We lost a lot more than 10% of a nation
Through deaths on land or on ships of emigration
But what finally broke us was not starvation
But it's use in the controlling of our education
School go on about "Black 47"
On and on about "The terrible "famine""
But what they don't say is in truth
There really never was one
So let's take a look shall we
The highest statistics of child abuse in the EEC
And we say we're a Christian country
But we've lost contact with our history
See we used to worship God as a mother
We're sufferin from post traumatic stress disorder
Look at all our old men in the pubs
Look at all our young people on drugs
We used to worship God as a mother
Now look at what we're doing to each other
We've even made killers of ourselves
The most child-like trusting people in the Universe
And this is what's wrong with us
Our history books the parent figure lied to us
I see the Irish
As a race like a child
That got itself basned in the face
And if there ever is gonna be healing
There has to be remembering
And then grieving
So that there then can be forgiving
There has to be knowledge and understanding"
#SineadOConnor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZIB6MslCAo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FggiWO_kOn4 #Sinead #Reggae

https://youtu.be/iq1135c1vJQ LOVE THIS 💖💖🎶🎶#Sinead #FooFighters #AlanisMorissette

Now on #BBC6Music: Tom Robinson presents a 2-hour programme of listener song requests and tributes to #Sinéad.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001p26l

#MastoDaoine

‘I never made sense to anyone, even myself, unless I was singing.

But I hope this book makes sense.
If not, maybe try singing it and see if that helps.’

#sineadoconnor

@bookstodon #books #book #Sinead #quotes #art #life #SilentSunday