The death of Sinead O’Connor, singer of despair and revolt

2023-07-27 03:55:59
Sinead O’Connor, in Vancouver (Canada), in the 1980s. MANDEL NGAN / AFP

With her repeated brilliance, she will have occupied an incomparable place on the musical scene, from which she had announced twice to withdraw – in 2003, then in 2021 –, before changing her mind. Performer of Nothing Compares 2 U, a song composed by Prince, which became with her the biggest hit of the year 1990, the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor died Wednesday July 26, at the age of 56. Neither the place nor the circumstances of his death were specified in the press release from his family requesting “Intimacy at this very difficult moment”relayed by the Dublin daily The Irish Times.

Sinead O’Connor’s existence has been pain since her son’s suicide at the age of 17 in January 2022. She had to be hospitalized at her request after posting tweets indicating that she was not no longer wanted to live. The drama had ended a tour project and postponed indefinitely the release of an eleventh studio album, No Veteran Dies Alone.

Even at the time of her splendor, the pain seemed consubstantial with this woman of a frankness as disarming as uneasy. The world had therefore discovered his magnificent green eyes and his close-cropped skinhead hair, his powerful and heartbreaking voice, with the clip of Nothing Compares 2 U. She was filmed there in a static shot, when she was not walking alone in the park of Saint-Cloud. “The most desperate are the most beautiful songs”, wrote Musset, and this is a pure sob that she lets flow in the last verse. Her love left her and “all the flowers you planted in the garden died when you left”. This sentence was addressed to his mother, victim of a car accident five years earlier.

This tear ballad was written by Prince for his side project The Family. Nobody but her seemed to have noticed her in 1985. The single ensured the success of Sinead O’Connor’s second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, sold seven million copies, in which, always cheerful, she resumed I Am Stretched on Your Grave (“I am lying on your grave”), translation of a 17th century Irish poem, on a rhythmic loop built from the Funky Drummer by James Brown, probably the most sampled piece in history. She had become a star and she would now work to break this new status.

Religion is one of his favorite themes

Born on December 8, 1966, in Dublin, Sinead O’Connor will claim to have been abused by her parents in her childhood. At the age of 15, his school absenteeism and his kleptomania sent him directly to a “Madeleine laundry”, these sinister Irish establishments aimed at putting “lost girls” back on the right track. She will keep a horrified memory of it.

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