O’Connor could have appeased America by releasing another album in the vein of I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, but her next records were a jazz covers album, Am I Not Your Girl? (1992), and the grim Universal Mother (1994), which included a song about the 19th-century Irish famine and a track that had a beleaguered O’Connor pleading: “I’m fragile, I’m not no animal, though I am to you/ I’m not no crocodile like the one in Dublin Zoo.” Time proved her right about the church’s complicity in the abuse of children – in the early 1990s, however, she was perceived by many simply as an eccentric with an axe to grind.
“Her name has become synonymous with courage and integrity,” Kristofferson said that night, but O’Connor never had another hit record in the US. At a Bob Dylan tribute gig in New York soon after, she was booed throughout her performance – even the endorsement of the songwriter Kris Kristofferson, who told her, “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” failed to silence the hecklers.
During a 1992 appearance on the US variety show Saturday Night Live, she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II, inciting a storm of condemnation from America’s large Catholic population. Outraged by Catholic church corruption, she campaigned for the arrest of paedophile church officials, while also using the platform of her fame to denounce sexism in the music business and an array of other issues. Sinéad O’Connor singing Nothing Compares 2 U “I didn’t want to be a pop star, I wanted to be a protest singer,” she said. Nonetheless, it was her unswerving commitment to activism and truth-telling as she saw it that kept her in the headlines. Her bel canto-trained style and wide-ranging musical curiosity were her main assets, and she employed both prodigiously, switching from pop to Irish folk to jazz to reggae on the other nine albums she released. And, in doing so, to inspire other people to be themselves.”Ī passionate and highly engaged musician, she was one of her generation’s significant talents. Though unsought, the fame gave her a platform for expressing herself authentically in support of the causes she cared about: “ Our job as artists is to be ourselves.
If the global superstardom conferred by Nothing Compares 2 U was brief – she lacked the obsessive drive needed to keep a top-flight pop career aloft – O’Connor nonetheless remained a household name for the rest of her life. The life and career of Sinéad O’Connor: ‘I was really a protest singer’ - video obituary
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