Opinion
We needed you, Sinead, the crazy-brave anti-Barbie
Michelle Griffin
Federal Bureau ChiefRest in peace, you brave, truth-seeking, demon-fighting, raw, funny, smart, difficult, gifted, glorious woman. Nobody meant more to me when I was young, stupid and figuring out how to be an adult, a woman, a mother. But as you sang then, how could I possibly know what I wanted when I was only 21?
You could always see through the emperor’s new clothes.
Sinead O’Connor performs at the East Coast Blues and Roots Festival in Byron Bay in 2008. Credit: AP/Marilia Ogayar
You were no people-pleasing Barbie. You were always crazy-brave, unfiltered, unapologetic. You sang your own wild songs of lust and politics and anger at the top of your lungs, and treated your beauty with a thrilling contempt.
Most of the time, when famous artists die, I am more interested than upset. Even when I loved their music, I know that I didn’t really know them, post a tribute and get on with my day. The news of your death this morning, Sinead O’Connor, had me weeping in bed, like all those times a troubled, brilliant friend is gone too soon.
But 56 is way, way too young to die. The millions who love you have been dreading this for, oh, three decades, even though you had a life force strong enough to power 50 lifetimes. I hovered for updates when you went missing in 2016; I read your aching, awful posts grieving your son Shane who died by suicide last year, only 17, the worst thing of all.
But you were so much more than the sum of your sorrows.
I loved your greedy dance club energy, the untamed terrain of your voice, your endless musical curiosity across genres and disciplines. You were never boring, although the endless controversies guaranteed the intelligent risks you took with your craft would remain underrated.
I played your second album, I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got, until the record fell apart. It spoke so directly to me of the confusion and emotion and, yes, anger of new womanhood. Nobody wrote better songs about the conflicting emotions of motherhood. You helped me work through some of the worst parts of my life on the dance floor, the best catharsis.
You always made people uncomfortable, but you didn’t care. You were brave when it was genuinely dangerous to be that raw. Men wanted you but they also wanted to attack you. People forget, when you tore up that photo of the pope, he was adored and you were reviled.
I think we already knew that you were raging against the demons of your own terrible childhood, beaten and terrorised. Looking back, your bravery in the face of almost universal condemnation – being howled off stage, a figure of hate in worldwide headlines – was astonishing. And you were right.
You were right.
For years I watched half in admiration and half in dread as you careered through genres, religions, opinions and relationships, never hiding your wild ride through your own mental health struggles, never backing away from a political fight.
Sinead O’Connor on set with Bert Newton for Good Morning Australia on Channel 10 in 2000.Credit: Fairfax
It’s pretty clear that, for those who cared for you, up close you were hard work. The good ones often are. But I also loved that you would not shut up, long after the point when a woman in the entertainment business should become invisible.
You were also tremendously funny, a bawdy, sweary presence on Twitter, with a keen sense of your own ridiculousness. Your memoir Rememberings made me laugh out loud many times, even as you told us terrible things.
We needed you: inventive, engaged, enraged, empowered. I leave the last word to you, from your memoir:
“I think you’ll see in this book a girl who does find herself, not by success in the music industry but by taking the opportunity to sensibly and truly lose her marbles. The thing being that after losing them, one finds them and plays the game better.”
Michelle Griffin is federal bureau chief for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Sinead O’Connor, as she appeared in Masterpiece: Adler on Gershwin, which screened on SBS in 1994.Credit: SBS