Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor, whose defiant personality and haunting vocal delivery made her a pop star of the 1990s, has died at age 56. A statement from her family confirming her passing did not reveal a cause of death.
“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad. Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time,” the statement shared with The Irish Times reads.
O’Connor released her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, in 1987 shortly after her 20th birthday. The song “Madinka” first introduced her to U.S. audiences and earned her a Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. It was her follow-up, 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, however, that made her an international pop icon with “Nothing Compares 2 U”, a song originally written by Prince for a side project, The Family.
Fame only made O’Connor more defiant and outspoken toward the entrapments of the music industry and the greater world around her. At the 1989 Grammys, she painted Public Enemy‘s logo on her forehead as a show of solidarity with the hip-hop group and other marginalized genres ignored by the Recording Academy. After I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got fetched four Grammy nods, O’Connor boycotted the ceremony, saying that the awards were based on “false and destructive materialistic values.”
She is perhaps best known for her October 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live. After delivering a chilling a cappella version of the Bob Marley protest anthem “War”, with lyrics altered to reference child abuse, she stared directly into the camera and silently tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II in protest of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. As audiences across the country sat, mouths agape, she told them to “fight the real enemy” and threw the scraps of paper.
In the aftermath, O’Connor became a pariah. Her records were destroyed in a manner not seen since The Beatles‘ “more popular than Jesus” controversy. Her songs disappeared from radio, and at an appearance two weeks later at Madison Square Garden for a Bob Dylan tribute concert, was met with a hail of boos. But throughout the rest of her life, O’Connor never wavered on whether she made the right decision.
“I’m not sorry I did it. It was brilliant,” she told The New York Times in 2021. “But it was very traumatizing. It was open season on treating me like a crazy bitch.”
O’Connor never regained her public profile following the SNL incident (other than being a pop culture punching bag) which is something she seemed to desire. While her commercial appeal never recovered, she released seven more albums following the controversy, with the last two—How About I Be Me (And You Be You)? (2012) and I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss (2014)—received positively by critics.
“I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career,” she wrote in her 2021 memoir, Rememberings, “and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.”
In more recent years, O’Connor’s personal life became tabloid fodder. She penned an open letter to Miley Cyrus in 2013, warning her that “The message you keep sending is that it’s somehow cool to be prostituted… it’s so not cool Miley… it’s dangerous.” She converted to Islam in 2018 and changed her name to Shuhada’ Sadaqat, though still performed under the stage name Sinéad O’Connor.
O’Connor had four children and was married and divorced four times. She was open about her struggles with mental health, something she attributes to a 2015 hysterectomy which resulted in a hormonal imbalance that kept her in and out of mental treatment centers for the rest of her life. She lost custody of her son Shane in 2013 and revealed in a 12-minute Facebook video that she suffered from suicidal thoughts in the aftermath.
Last January, two days after her 17-year-old Shane was reported missing, she tweeted that Shane had “ended his earthly struggle” after he was found dead of an apparent suicide. A week later, O’Connor was hospitalized after a series of tweets threatening to kill herself.
“I’m just a troubled soul who needs to scream into mikes now and then,” she wrote in Rememberings.
This is a developing story…