“Fight the Real Enemy”: Sinéad O’Connor’s Musical and Cultural Legacies
Chair(s): Emmalouise St. Amand (Colby College)
For many, Sinéad O’Connor is best remembered for her denunciation of clerical child abuse, aired on Saturday Night Live on 3 October 1992. By tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II, O’Connor turned her rendition of Bob Marley’s ‘War’ into a dramatic protest against the Catholic Church. The initial reception of this performance—an audience stunned into silence—was broken in the coming days by widespread media uproar. Since then, the act has come to be interpreted by many, including the singer herself in her autobiography (O’Connor 2021, 179), as the defining moment of O’Connor’s career, one rarely absent from newspaper features, magazine articles, recent obituaries, and (unsurprisingly) academic research. Yet while O’Connor’s SNL appearance serves as a useful catch-all for several important aspects of her work (protest, social justice, religious faith, media vilification, belated vindication), it can also serve to obscure the deep roots to her activism, the huge amount of often subversive music that she went on to produce, and the less sensational (but crucial) ways in which she challenged the patriarchal status quo.
Drawing variously on social history, close analysis and cultural critique, this panel pays homage to O’Connor’s life and work by departing from the October 1992 protest while at the same time drawing upon its themes. Each paper deepens our understanding of O’Connor’s relationship with Catholicism, her subtle musical subversiveness, and the impact of her cancellation on the collective conscience in the 1990s, the formative period of her fame. The first paper explores O’Connor’s conditioning as an Irish Catholic woman within the context of recent historical and sociological work, and shows how her reception in the Irish media allowed her to voice a radical alternative to the kind of subjectivity typically extended to Irish women. The second paper analyses the manipulation of genre in O’Connor’s 1992 album, a record often overshadowed by the protest that accompanied its promotion. The final paper considers the broader social context of O’Connor’s cancellation. In a world in which young musicians are rarely allowed to do so, O’Connor resolutely claimed her own identity through both her music and her actions.
Presentations of the Symposium
Sinéad O’Connor, Catholicism, and Irish Society, 1990-1997
Adam Behan
Maynooth University
This paper investigates Sinéad O’Connor’s cultural reach and significance in Ireland in the 1990s, a decade that witnessed moments of profound social change, including the election of the country’s first woman president, Mary Robinson (1990), and the legalisation of homosexuality (1993) and divorce (1995). While much valuable work on O’Connor tends to take a broadly cultural studies approach (Negus 1997; McLaughlin and McLoone 2012; Dillane 2021), I take my point of departure from social history, examining O’Connor’s intervention into Irish social life through her heavily reported and mediatised presence.
I do this in two steps. First, I explore O’Connor’s relationship with Catholicism within the context of Irish cultural history. I explain O’Connor’s roots as a protest singer through the conditions of a changing, but still staunchly conservative, Catholic Ireland. To do this, I build on a growing body of research in sociology (Inglis 1987; Connolly 2003) and social history (Smith 2008; Haughton et al. 2021; McGettrick et al. 2021) on the Catholic Church and its institutions of oppression. This includes the Magdalene Laundries, asylums to which women deemed to have ‘fallen’ were committed, and in which O’Connor herself spent time as a teenager (O’Connor 2021).
With this historical backdrop in place, I proceed by drawing on archives of Irish newspapers (including national broadsheets, such as the Irish Times and the Irish Press, and local outlets such as the Cork Examiner and the Donegal Democrat), magazines (Hot Press) and television (RTÉ) in the years 1987–1997. My research shows not only that O’Connor was a frequently discussed figure in the Irish press in this period, but also that she (unsurprisingly) was routinely positioned as incommensurate with establishment values. While the media often cruelly framed O’Connor as a bête noire in this respect, I argue that this framing also enabled her to popularly voice a radically subversive kind of cultural identity to that associated with ‘traditional Ireland’ and its long-prized institutions of the family and domesticity. As such, I demonstrate that O’Connor’s presence in the Irish cultural landscape was a crucial part of a much larger unravelling of its conservative Catholic values.
“I Never Said I Had a Problem with America”: Genre Trouble in Sinéad O’Connor’s Am I Not Your Girl?
Áine Palmer
Yale University
Sinéad O’Connor’s dramatic SNL protest was the apotheosis of a much larger media storm. In quick succession, O’Connor snubbed invitations to SNL, the Grammy’s, and the BRITs, and refused to play the national anthem before her New Jersey show. Amidst all of this, O’Connor insisted that she ‘never said (she) had a problem with America’ (Light, 1992). This claim is best understood through her music; while it might surprise some, Am I Not Your Girl? (1992) was dedicated to the city of New York. An anthology of pop and jazz standards accompanied by a full orchestra, O’Connor’s third album was a radical deviation from her earlier punk-rock infused sound,and seemed to pay homage to the very cultural institutions she had spent the previous two years aggravating.
This paper addresses this seeming contradiction and situates O’Connor’s music as an essential part of her activism. The album’s lead single ‘Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home’, sung just minutes before O’Connor’s now infamous rendition of ‘War’, lyrically foreshadowed her firm rejection of the international spotlight, yet did so in an ostensibly conservative musical idiom. Originally sung by the country star Loretta Lynn, O’Connor reinterpreted the ballad in a big- band style. Following a career built on an anti-establishment sound and attitude, the incongruity of Am I Not Your Girl? can itself be read as an act of protest against the values of the contemporary cultural marketplace.
O’Connor’s role as an outspoken public figure has inspired insightful commentary on her politics and identity (Mahew 2006; Brady 2016). Here, I draw attention to how O’Connor’s values were manifested in her music. Drawing on queer theory and performance studies (Butler 1993; Muñoz 1999), I frame Am I Not Your Girl? as an album that seeks to rehabilitate the radical potential of pop. Through her manipulation of genre, O’Connor rejected the global music industry even as she produced the most self-consciously American album in her oeuvre. By retracing the history of ‘Success’ and analyzing its generic transformation in O’Connor’s hands, I situate her re-articulative performance as an act of protest in itself.
The Ceaseless Twilight of ‘Pop Time’
Julian Day
Yale University
As Michel Foucault warned in 1979, ‘visibility is a trap.’ Sinéad O’Connor learned this first hand after her SNL appearance; the backlash, following earlier condemnation over her not airing the US anthem before concerts, was so severe that recent critics have anointed her ‘cancel culture’s patient zero’ (Downey 2023). Yet over-prioritizing O’Connor’s 1992 action both short-changes her sustained political and artistic work and, conversely, overlooks the wider and persistent social dynamics that led to her public dismissal. She later asserted that “the day I ripped up the picture of the pope was the best day of my life because then I became me" (Hattenstone 2010) and she went on to release eight more albums, become an Independent Catholic priest, and author a best-selling autobiography.
Building principally on Kalvek’s analysis of O’Connor’s fall from grace through the idea of “institutional rejection” (2018) and drawing similarly on writings by Girard (2001), Butler (2000), and Levinas (1974), this paper highlights the wider cultural sociologies that arise from O'Connor's 'cancellation’. It views her life and work as operating within a complex intersection of social phenomena including communal sacrifice, contradictory demands for authenticity, and what I call the “cocked weapon of the stage.” Central to this investigation is the observation that time appears to unfold differently for those in the public glare, which I articulate by merging three temporalities: queer temporality, William S Burroughs’ ‘junkie time’, and my own concept of ‘pop time’, in which artists who experience fame at a young age must continually correspond and contend with the public’s view of their past identity even as it continually recedes in relevance.
The paper compares O’Connor’s three-decade SNL afterlife with those of other pop musicians of Irish citizenship or heritage, including Kevin Rowland of Dexys Midnight Runners, who was reprimanded for his apparent coming out at the tail end of Britpop, and Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries, who, like O’Connor, endured sustained press opprobrium ahead of her unexpected death aged 46. While industry and social structures minimize the chances of any artist succeeding on their own terms, O’Connor nevertheless emerged as a rare victor.
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