Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 125 Shares189 Views

    in Music

    Has Scott Joplin’s ‘Thoroughly American’ Opera ‘Treemonisha’ Found Its Moment?

    “Treemonisha” — brilliant, flawed and unfinished — is ripe for creative reimagining at a time when opera houses are looking to diversify the canon.“He has created an entirely new phase of musical art and has produced a thoroughly American opera.”The anonymous critic who wrote these bold words didn’t have a performance of Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” to evaluate, or a recording. In June 1911, all the reviewer had to go on was Joplin’s 230-page piano-vocal score.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

  • 75 Shares179 Views

    in Music

    10 Essential Songs by Sinead O’Connor

    Her catalog is full of raw passion and raw nerve.Sinead O’Connor did not hold back. Not her voice, not her ideas, not her troubles, not her rage, not her sorrows, not her faith. From the moment her debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” appeared in 1987, O’Connor — whose death was announced on Wednesday — flaunted raw passion and raw nerve.She seemed equally startling, at first, for her keening voice and her shaven head. Her singing encompassed cathartic extremes: lullabies and imprecations, sighs and howls. She made bold, intemperate public statements, like famously tearing up a photograph of the pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992. Yet her songs also offered comfort, nurturing and righteousness; she was an idealist, not a provocateur. And she struggled openly: with the music business, with unforgiving journalists, with career pressures and with mental illness.O’Connor was emphatically Irish. The inflections of old Celtic music sharpened her voice, and she was shaped by her Catholic upbringing, if only to later reject it. Yet she was anything but provincial. She produced her own debut album when she was only 20, drawing already on punk, dance music, electronics and seething orchestral arrangements. She would go on to work with reggae, big-band music and more; her voice, even at its gentlest, could leap out.O’Connor’s first two albums were her most inspired ones. They were charged with youthful turbulence and unbridled ambition, as O’Connor sang about love, death, power and making her own place in the world. She went through some fallow patches afterward, but she never stopped striving to sing her own truth.‘Mandinka’ (1987)With a distorted, three-chord rock stomp, O’Connor brashly announces, “I don’t know no shame/I feel no pain,” landing hard on dissonant notes. The song seesaws between refusal and acceptance, with a final tease of “Soon I can give you my heart.” But O’Connor also flexes her high notes in nonsense syllables that are as defiant as any word she sings.‘Troy’ (1987)One side of a lover’s quarrel unfurls across an operatic six and a half minutes, backed by a string ensemble that underlines every churning emotion: memories, accusations, confessions, vows, pleas, warnings and the sheer desperation when O’Connor sings, “Does she hold you like I do?” followed by a howl of pain.‘I Want Your (Hands on Me)’ (1987)Chattering, percussive funk carries this call for physical pleasure, and as she bounces her voice against the syncopated beat, O’Connor summons unabashed rasps and moans.‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ (1990)O’Connor’s commercial peak — a No. 1 pop single — thoroughly commandeered a song Prince wrote for a 1985 album by the Family. She makes her voice small and bereft, then lashes out at consolations; she places Celtic turns at the ends of phrases. And she brings crucial changes to Prince’s melody, making upward leaps when the chorus gets to the line “Nothing compares to you.” Its video clip — almost entirely a close-up of O’Connor’s face against a black background — forged an indelible image of loneliness.‘I Am Stretched on Your Grave’ (1990)A hip-hop beat backs an old Irish poem that was translated into English and turned into a song. Its narrator mourns the death of his lover, wishing to join her. O’Connor’s voice, completely exposed over the stark rhythm track, is otherworldly. A fiddle arrives near the end, completing the mesh of traditional and contemporary.‘The Last Day of Our Acquaintance’ (1990)The formal mechanics of a divorce — “I will meet you later in somebody’s office” — can’t contain the bitterness of the situation. For most of the song, O’Connor sings over two calmly strummed acoustic guitar chords, but agitation rises in her voice, and when a band eventually kicks in behind her there’s no mistaking her fury.‘You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart’ (1994)This incantatory rocker was written by Bono, Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer for the film “In the Name of the Father.” If it sounds like O’Connor fronting 1990s U2 — with a pealing piano and an implacable beat — it draws the best from both, with U2’s echoey depths, O’Connor’s primal peaks and the high-stakes dynamics they both thrived on.‘This Is to Mother You’ (1997)O’Connor promises to “do what your own mother didn’t do” in a song that radiates kindliness and womanly strength. It’s a folky, Celtic-tinged lullaby that promises to end a dark back story, to release someone — perhaps a lover, as the video suggests — from “All the pain that you have known/All the violence in your soul.” It’s pure unselfish comfort.‘Jealous’ (2000)“I don’t deserve to be lonely just ’cause you say I do,” O’Connor insists in “Jealous,” a not-quite-breakup ballad she wrote with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. The beat is measured. But the singer’s partner is keeping her dangling, and she’s not sure what she wants either; she makes her harshest judgments in her most fragile voice.‘Dense Water Deeper Down’ (2014)The folk-rock jubilation of “Dense Water Deeper Down” — with muscular guitar strumming, layered harmonies, even some happy horns — celebrates a lover who “makes me forget everything my mother warned.” There’s just one catch: He’s only a memory. More

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Music

    The Night Sinead O’Connor Took on the Pope on ‘SNL’

    Tearing up a photo was the moment nobody forgot. The performance that preceded it was just as powerful.What people remember about Sinead O’Connor’s Oct. 3, 1992, appearance on “Saturday Night Live” is this: At the end of her second performance of the show, a cover of Bob Marley’s “War,” O’Connor intoned gravely, “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil.” As she held tight to the word, stretching it like a castigation, she grabbed a photo of Pope John Paul II and held it up to camera. When she let the word go, she punctuated her exhale by tearing the photo three times, followed by an exhortation to “fight the real enemy.” She tossed the fragments to the ground, removed her in-ears, and stepped off the stage into culture-war infamy.Throughout her career, O’Connor — whose death, at 56, was announced on Wednesday — was a fervent moralist, an uncompromised voice of social progress and someone who found stardom, and its sandpapered and glossed boundaries, to be a kind of sickness. She was also a singer of ferocious gifts, able to channel anxious passion with vivacious power and move through a lyric with nimble acuity. She was something grander than a simple pop star — she became a stand-in for a sociopolitical discomfort that was beginning to take hold in the early 1990s, a rejection of the enthusiastic sheen and power-at-all-costs culture of the 1980s.And so, in an era where late-night television performances could still prompt monocultural mood shifts, her gesture was a volcanic eruption. She became a target instantly — of the religious right, of other celebrities, and, as she reported many years later in her memoir, of a couple of egg-tossing young men, as she exited the studio that same night.But none of that extinguished the power of her protest. And she was a savvy radical — reportedly she had done something slightly different in rehearsal, and saved the pope photo for the actual show. (The photo itself had hung on the bedroom wall of O’Connor’s mother, who O’Connor later said had physically and sexually abused her as a child.) Also, she was on live television, holding court for three minutes on the miseries of discrimination and abuses of power, under the guise of being a pop star performing a song. She was daring the cameras, and the viewers, to look away; no one did.The recriminations O’Connor faced recall the bankrupt culture wars of a different era — she was “banned” from appearing on “Saturday Night Live” again, and the show mocked her on subsequent episodes. The following week’s host, Joe Pesci, took direct aim at her. “I’ll tell you one thing: She’s very lucky it wasn’t my show. ’Cause if it was my show, I woulda gave her such a smack.” Cue laughing and clapping from the audience. He continued, “I woulda grabbed her by her … eyebrows.” More laughter. At one point, he triumphantly held up the taped-together pope photo, like a feckless politician stirring up his base. (Tellingly, footage of Pesci’s monologue is available on the official YouTube channel of “Saturday Night Live”; footage of O’Connor’s performance is not, though it can be found in various unofficial locations online.)Joe Pesci on “Saturday Night Live” the week after Sinead O’Connor’s performance, holding up the taped-together photo of Pope John Paul II that O’Connor had ripped.NBCOf course, she was correct — the scale of sexual abuse perpetrated within the Roman Catholic Church that came to light in later years was staggering. By then, O’Connor’s protest felt distant, but the damage it did to her career was permanent.At the time, O’Connor was only a couple of years past her American breakthrough — her piercing cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” written by Prince (and originally performed by his side project the Family). Subsequent to “S.N.L.,” she had a handful of hits, but mostly retreated from the pop spotlight. Or maybe the way to think about it is that she right-sized her career, away from the silly and grim expectations of complaisance that come with universal acclaim and toward a more earnest plane.Whichever the case, the pope brouhaha obscured something perhaps just as extraordinarily powerful — the song that O’Connor had been performing. Her “War” cover had lyrics slightly modified to allude to the abuses in the Catholic Church that she was protesting. (She also performed “Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home” that night.)She’s performing “War” a cappella, staring hard at a camera off to her left.Less singing than declaiming, she renders the song with a forceful clarity, landing every line with nervy syllables held just a microsecond past comfort, as if reminding the viewer of the need to gulp them down whole. Marley’s original — the lyrics are drawn from a speech given by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia before the United Nations General Assembly in 1963 — moves with a sly breeze. O’Connor’s, with its silence, turns the original plaint into a jolt.Her performance is anthemic, invigorating, a call to arms for the dispossessed and an elegant dissection of the authoritarian powers who hold them down. Her vocal is level and determined, but her howl is spiritual and undeniable:Until the ignoble and unhappy regimeWhich holds all of us throughChild abuse, yeah, child abuse, yeah,Subhuman bondage has been toppledUtterly destroyedEverywhere is warIf there is a moment of true singing here, it’s right before the grand gesture at the end. “Childrennnn! Childrennnn!” O’Connor sweetly chants, calling everyone to attention. Then, with everyone’s ears perked, she nods her head forcefully and jabs out a quick, urgent instruction: “Fight.” More

  • 88 Shares129 Views

    in Movies

    Bo Goldman, Oscar-Winning Screenwriter, Dies at 90

    He was a struggling writer when he won an Academy Award for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He won another for “Melvin and Howard.”Bo Goldman, one of Hollywood’s most admired screenwriters, who took home Oscars for his work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) and “Melvin and Howard” (1980), died on Tuesday in Helendale, Calif. He was 90.A son-in-law, the director Todd Field, confirmed the death. He did not specify a cause.Mr. Goldman was struggling to make a living as a writer until the director Milos Forman saw the script he had written for a project called “Shoot the Moon” — his first screenplay — and, impressed, invited him to take a crack at adapting Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” for the screen.The resulting movie, which starred Jack Nicholson as a rebellious new patient who disrupts a psychiatric ward, came out in 1975 and was a career maker. Mr. Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, who shared screenwriting credit, won the Oscar for best screenplay adapted from other material; the movie was also named best picture and earned Oscars for Mr. Forman, Mr. Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, who played the fierce Nurse Ratched.“Even then I hung my head,” Mr. Goldman wrote in a 1981 essay for The New York Times about the insecurities of a writer’s life. “After all, I had adapted somebody else’s work; was it really mine?”It may not have helped that Mr. Kesey denounced the adaptation.If that doubt had nagged him, it had certainly been dispelled when his original screenplay for “Melvin and Howard” (1980) won him his second Oscar, this time for best screenplay written directly for the screen. That movie was based on the story of Melvin Dummar, a Utah gas station owner who claimed that Howard Hughes, in a handwritten will, had left him a share of his vast fortune.Vincent Canby, writing in The Times, called it “a satiric expression of the American Dream in the closing years of the 20th century.” The New York Film Critics Circle named it the best movie of the year and gave Mr. Goldman its best-screenplay award.Mr. Goldman’s screenplay for “Melvin and Howard,” with Jason Robards, left, as Howard Hughes, and Paul Le Mat as Melvin Dummar, earned him his second Oscar.UniversalMr. Goldman worked with the director Martin Brest on two films, “Scent of a Woman” (1992) and “Meet Joe Black” (1998).“People call him the screenwriter’s screenwriter,” Mr. Brest said in a phone interview. “I called him the man with the X-ray ears, because he had a pitch-perfect recall of the nuances of a comment that someone made to someone 50 years prior — he could reproduce the tone, and the reason he remembered it is because the tone told the whole story.”Mr. Goldman would draw on those memories to shape characters, as he did for “Scent of a Woman,” the story of a blind retired Army officer and the prep-school student hired to take care of him, for which he received another Oscar nomination. Al Pacino played the blind man; Mr. Goldman told The Times that he borrowed aspects of his father, one of his brothers and his Army first sergeant in writing the part.Mr. Brest said that Mr. Goldman was an adept collaborator, not only with other screenwriters but also with directors and others involved in the moviemaking process.“He thought of himself as a filmmaker rather than a writer,” he said. “He was part of the creation of a film.”Mr. Brest recalled that for “Scent of a Woman,” which was based on an Italian movie, “Profumo di Donna,” he and Mr. Goldman began by just having long, meandering chats.“Finally I said to him, ‘We’ve been talking for two weeks and having the greatest time, but shouldn’t we get to work?’” Mr. Brest recalled. “And he said that Mike Nichols told him, ‘The digressions are the work, or part of the work.’”Sure enough, much of what they had talked about — childhood memories, people they’d known — ended up being reflected in the script.“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” won the Academy Award for best picture, and Jack Nicholson was named best actor. Its other Oscars included one for Mr. Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, for best screenplay adapted from other material.United ArtistsRobert Spencer Goldman was born on Sept. 10, 1932, in New York City. His mother, Lillian (Levy) Goldman, was a millinery model, and his father, Julian, operated Julian Goldman Stores, a clothing chain that had 42 stores in 11 states at one point but was derailed by the Depression. Four months before Mr. Goldman was born, the company filed for bankruptcy.“I was the son of this kind of displaced merchant prince,” Mr. Goldman told The Times in 1993.Though the family fell on hard times, Mr. Goldman was able to attend Phillips Exeter Academy and then Princeton, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1953.At Princeton, he participated in shows of the Princeton Triangle Club, a college theater troupe. “I learned how to write there,” he said in an oral history recorded in 2000 for the Writers Guild Foundation.While writing for the college newspaper as Bob Goldman, a typesetter accidentally left off the second “b” in his name. Mr. Goldman liked it and later legally changed his name to Bo.After three years in the Army — he was stationed in the Marshall Islands, where tests of nuclear bombs were being conducted — he became an assistant to Jule Styne, the composer. He also wrote introductory patter and other tidbits for live television programs.He aspired to a playwriting career and earned a Broadway credit in 1959 as one of the lyricists for “First Impressions,” a musical based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” that Mr. Styne’s company produced. The show had a starry cast that included Farley Granger, Polly Bergen and Hermione Gingold, but it lasted only 92 performances.Mr. Goldman continued working in television, including as a script editor and associate producer on the anthology series “Playhouse 90.” But success as a writer proved elusive.He had married Mabel Rathbun Ashforth in 1954, and they eventually had six children. He credited her with keeping the family afloat in the lean years by opening a nursery school in their home and then running a food store called Loaves and Fishes in Sagaponack, N.Y., on Long Island.He said that in this period — the late 1960s and early ’70s — he saw families of his contemporaries falling apart and was moved to write his first screenplay, “Shoot the Moon,” about a marriage in crisis because of the husband’s affair. It won many admirers — including Mr. Forman — but no producers wanted to make it because, Mr. Goldman often said, the story struck too close to home for them.After his success with “Cuckoo’s Nest,” “The Rose” (1979) and “Melvin and Howard,” however, “Shoot the Moon” finally did get made, by the director Alan Parker in 1982. Diane Keaton and Albert Finney, as the struggling couple, were both nominated for Golden Globe Awards.Mr. Goldman’s other screenwriting credits include “The Flamingo Kid” (1984), “Little Nikita” (1988) and “City Hall” (1996).In 2017, when New York magazine asked working screenwriters to discuss the best screenwriters of all time, Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”) singled out Mr. Goldman’s “audacious originality, his understanding of social mores, his ironic sense of humor, and his outright anger at being human, and all with his soft-spoken grace and eloquent simplicity.”Mr. Goldman lived in Rockport, Maine. His wife died in 2017. A son, Jesse, died in 1981. He is survived by another son, Justin Ashforth; four daughters, Mia Goldman, Amy Goldman, Diana Rathbun and Serena Rathbun; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.Mr. Brest said Mr. Goldman was able to create memorable characters through small details.“His remembrance of nuances, things that people don’t know they’re revealing but that reveal volumes — that was his art form,” he said.He also said he has often repeated something Mr. Goldman once told him: “Your life,” Mr. Goldman said, “is what’s not in the obituary.” More

  • 63 Shares99 Views

    in Music

    Sinead O’Connor’s Life in Pictures

    With her short hair and wide eyes, the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor, who has died at the age of 56, cast a powerful silhouette onstage during her music career. The height of her power came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including a divisive 1992 appearance on “Saturday Night Live” in which she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II to protest sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.O’Connor told Rolling Stone in 1991 that her record company, Ensign, wanted her to wear high-heel boots and tight jeans and grow her hair out. “I decided that they were so pathetic,” she said, “that I shaved my head.”O’Connor at the Olympic Ballroom in Dublin in 1988.Independent News and Media/Getty ImagesO’Connor performing at the Rock Torhout festival in Belgium in 1990.Paul Bergen/Redferns, via Getty ImagesO’Connor ripping up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992.NBCO’Connor at the MTV Video Music Awards in Universal City, Calif., in 1993.Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesO’Connor with Peter Gabriel at a fund-raising concert in the Netherlands in 1991.Michel Linssen/Redferns, via Getty ImagesO’Connor in Lourdes, France, in 1999.Michael Crabtree/PA Images, via Getty ImagesO’Connor at a protest in Dublin in 1989.Independent News and Media/Getty ImagesO’Connor holding her daughter, Roisin, in Dublin in 2000.ReutersO’Connor on Gay Byrne’s final episode of “The Late Late Show” in 1999.David Conachy/Independent News and Media, via Getty ImagesO’Connor and Courtney Love at the Old Vic theater in London in 2005.Dave Benett/Getty ImagesO’Connor in Bray, Ireland, in 2012.David Corio for The New York TimesO’Connor at Lincoln Center in New York in 2013.Ruby Washington/The New York TimesO’Connor at her home in Wicklow, Ireland, in 2021.Ellius Grace for The New York Times More

  • 75 Shares129 Views

    in Music

    The Bald Power of Sinead O’Connor

    The Irish singer’s shaved head was as much a part of her identity and allure as her sound.It was the bald head that became the avatar of a million dreamy rebellions; the shaved pate that bridged the gap between the angry and the sublime. It is almost impossible to think about Sinead O’Connor, the Irish singer whose death was reported on July 26, or her work, without thinking about her hair. Or lack of it.Without thinking about the striking curve of her shorn skull on the cover of her 1987 debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” her face below caught mid-scream; the nakedness it seemed to convey in the 1990 video of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” as her blue eyes brimmed with tears; the purity of the line on the cover of her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings.” Which contains an entire chapter entitled “Shaving My Head.”It was effectively her signature — in a 2014 story in Billboard Ms. O’Connor, 56 when she died, identified herself as “the bald woman from Ireland” — along with her Dr. Martens and torn jeans, and it followed her throughout her life, just as much as her ripping up the photo of the Pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992 did. Even in the few periods when she grew her hair back, she was often referred to as the “formerly bald” Sinead O’Connor. And as such, she was an integral part of the renegotiation of old stereotypes of gender, sexuality, rebellion and liberation that is still going on today.“I just don’t feel like me when I have hair,” she told The New York Times in 2021.Now that female baldness has become more common, has become a badge of identity for women such as Ayanna Pressley, the representative from Massachusetts who went public with her alopecia in 2020, and X González, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student (then known as Emma) who became a campaigner for gun control, not to mention the Dora Milaje of “Black Panther,” it can be hard to remember how extraordinary it was when Ms. O’Connor emerged. “Shaving my head to me was never a conscious thing,” Ms. O’Connor told Spin in 1991. “I was never making a statement. I just was bored one day and I wanted to shave my head, and that was literally all there was to it.”Independent News and Media/Getty ImagesBut that seeming repudiation of her own porcelain beauty in the wake of a spate of teen pop queens, at a time when armoring yourself in a helmet of big hair was a big thing and shaving your head was still largely seen as a punishment, was as much of a statement of singularity as her sound. Perhaps, it was also the first sign of the controversial politics to come, including refusing to play the national anthem before her concerts and stenciling the logo of Public Enemy into the side of her head at the 1989 Grammys when the show’s organizers declined to televise the first-ever award for Best Rap Performance.She offered various explanations of the choice. All the stories come down to the same thing in any case, which was a refusal to cater to traditional definitions of “pretty” as established by the male gaze as long ago as Rapunzel and Lady Godiva.In shearing her head “she was literally shearing away a false narrative,” said Allyson McCabe, the author of “Why Sinead O’Connor Matters.” In 1991 Ms. O’Connor told Spin, “shaving my head to me was never a conscious thing. I was never making a statement. I just was bored one day and I wanted to shave my head, and that was literally all there was to it.” However, she also said, “The women who are admired are the ones that have blond hair and big lips and wear red lipstick and wear short skirts, because that’s an acceptable image of a woman.” And, “Because I have no hair, people think I’m angry.”In a 2017 TV interview she told Dr. Phil that it was because during her abusive childhood her mother had compared her with her sister, who had long red hair, unlike Sinead. “When I had long hair, she would introduce us as her pretty daughter and her ugly daughter,” Ms. O’Connor said in the interview. “And that’s why I cut my hair off. I didn’t want to be pretty.”The cover of Ms. O’Connor’s memoir.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, via Associated PressA still from her music video for “Nothing Compares 2 U.”In the interview she also said, “It’s dangerous to be pretty, too, because I kept getting raped and molested everywhere I went,” and “I did not want to dress like a girl. I did not want to be pretty.”In her memoir, she wrote that she was working on her first album in London, and had been told by a male music executive she should grow her (buzzed but not shorn) hair long and start to dress more like a girl. The next day she went to a barbershop and had it all shaved off.During the period after the “S.N.L.” appearance, when she was rejected by the music industry and revealed she had been diagnosed as bipolar, Ms. O’Connor’s bald head was taken as a sign of instability (just as it was later with Britney Spears). The fact that she continued shaving her skull for the rest of her life suggested it was, rather, a sign of selfhood.The first time she looked in the mirror after that visit to the barbershop, she wrote in the book, “I looked like an alien.” Another way to put it, however, is she looked like the woman she became. And in becoming that woman — in giving herself that permission — she helped extend it to us all. More

  • 125 Shares149 Views

    in Music

    Sinead O’Connor, Evocative and Outspoken Singer, Is Dead at 56

    She broke out with the single “Nothing Compares 2 U,” then caused an uproar a few years later by ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II on “S.N.L.”Sinead O’Connor, the outspoken Irish singer-songwriter known for her powerful, evocative voice, as showcased on her biggest hit, a breathtaking rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and for her political provocations onstage and off, has died. She was 56.Her longtime friend Bob Geldof, the Irish musician and activist, confirmed her death, as did her family in a statement, according to the BBC and the Irish public broadcaster RTE.“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinead,” the statement said. “Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.” No other details were provided.Recognizable by her shaved head and by wide eyes that could appear pained or full of rage, Ms. O’Connor released 10 studio albums, beginning with the alternative hit “The Lion and the Cobra” in 1987. She went on to sell millions of albums worldwide, breaking out with “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” in 1990.That album, featuring “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a No. 1 hit around the world and an MTV staple, won a Grammy Award in 1991 for best alternative music performance — although Ms. O’Connor boycotted the ceremony over what she called the show’s excessive commercialism.Ms. O’Connor rarely shrank from controversy, though it often came with consequences for her career.In 1990, she threatened to cancel a performance in New Jersey if “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played at the concert hall ahead of her appearance, drawing the ire of no less than Frank Sinatra. That same year, she backed out of an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” in protest of the misogyny she perceived in the comedy of Andrew Dice Clay, who was scheduled to host.But all of that paled in comparison to the uproar caused when Ms. O’Connor, appearing on “S.N.L.” in 1992 — shortly after the release of her third album, “Am I Not Your Girl?” — ended an a cappella performance of Bob Marley’s “War” by ripping a photo of Pope John Paul II into pieces as a stance against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. “Fight the real enemy,” she said.That incident immediately made her a target of criticism and scorn, from social conservatives and beyond. Two weeks after her “S.N.L.” appearance, she was loudly booed at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden. (She had planned to perform Mr. Dylan’s “I Believe in You,” but she sang “War” again, rushing off the stage before she had finished.)For a time, the vitriol directed at Ms. O’Connor was so pervasive that it became a kind of pop culture meme in itself. On “S.N.L.” in early 1993, Madonna mocked the controversy by tearing up a picture of Joey Buttafuoco, the Long Island auto mechanic who was a tabloid fixture at the time because of his affair with a 17-year-old girl.Once a rising star, Ms. O’Connor then stumbled. “Am I Not Your Girl?,” an album of jazz and pop standards like “Why Don’t You Do Right?” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” was stalled on the charts at No. 27. Her next album, “Universal Mother” (1994), went no higher than No. 36.Kris Kristofferson spoke to Ms. O’Connor after she was booed off the stage during a concert in tribute to Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden in 1992, shortly after her “Saturday Night Live” appearance.Ron Frehm/Associated PressThe British musician Tim Burgess, of the band Charlatans (known in the United States as the Charlatans UK), wrote on Twitter on Wednesday: “Sinead was the true embodiment of a punk spirit. She did not compromise and that made her life more of a struggle.”Ms. O’Connor never had another major hit in the United States after “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” from “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” although for a time she remained a staple on the British charts.But in her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings,” Ms. O’Connor portrayed ripping up the photo of the pope as a righteous act of protest — and therefore a success.“I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career,” she wrote, “and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.”She elaborated in an interview with The New York Times that same year, calling the incident an act of defiance against the constraints of pop stardom.“I’m not sorry I did it. It was brilliant,” Ms. O’Connor said. “But it was very traumatizing,” she added. “It was open season on treating me like a crazy bitch.”Sinead Marie Bernadette O’Connor was born in Glenageary, a suburb of Dublin, on Dec. 8, 1966. Her father, John, was an engineer, and her mother, Johanna, was a dressmaker.In interviews, and in her memoir, Ms. O’Connor spoke openly of having a traumatic childhood. She said that her mother physically abused her and that she had been deeply affected by her parents’ separation, which happened when she was 8. In her teens, she was arrested for shoplifting and sent to reform schools.Ms. O’Connor at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in Manhattan in 2013.Ruby Washington/The New York TimesWhen she was 15, Ms. O’Connor sang “Evergreen” — the love theme from “A Star Is Born,” made famous by Barbra Streisand — at a wedding, and was discovered by Paul Byrne, a drummer who had an affiliation with the Irish band U2. She left boarding school at 16 and began her career, supporting herself by waitressing and performing “kiss-o-grams” in a kinky French maid costume.“The Lion and the Cobra” — the title is an allusion to Psalm 91 — marked her as a rising talent with a spiritual heart, an ear for offbeat melody and a fierce and combative style. Her music drew from 1980s-vintage alternative rock, hip-hop and flashes of Celtic folk that came through when her voice raised to high registers.She drew headlines for defending the Irish Republican Army and publicly jeered U2 — whose members had supported her — as “bombastic.” She also said she had rejected attempts by her record company, Ensign, to adopt a more conventional image.The leaders of the label “wanted me to wear high-heel boots and tight jeans and grow my hair,” Ms. O’Connor told Rolling Stone in 1991. “And I decided that they were so pathetic that I shaved my head so there couldn’t be any further discussion.”“Nothing Compares 2 U” — originally released by the Family, a Prince side project, in 1985 — became a phenomenon when Ms. O’Connor released it five years later. The video for the song, trained closely on her emotive face, was hypnotic, and Ms. O’Connor’s voice, as it raised from delicate, breathy notes to powerful cries, stopped listeners in their tracks. Singers like Alanis Morissette cited Ms. O’Connor’s work from this period as a key influence.Ms. O’Connor in 2021, the year she published a memoir, “Rememberings,” in which she spoke openly of a traumatic childhood. Ellius Grace for The New York TimesNot long after “Nothing Compares” became a hit, Ms. O’Connor accused Prince of physically threatening her. She elaborated on the story in her memoir, saying that Prince, at his Hollywood mansion, chastised her for swearing in interviews and suggested a pillow fight, only to hit her with something hard that was in his pillowcase. She escaped on foot in the middle of the night, she said, but Prince chased her around the highway.The effects of childhood trauma, and finding ways to fight and heal, became a central part of her work and her personal philosophy. “The cause of all the world’s problems, as far as I’m concerned, is child abuse,” Ms. O’Connor told Spin magazine in 1991.Her mother, whom Ms. O’Connor described as an alcoholic, died when she was 18. In her memoir, Ms. O’Connor said that on the day her mother died she took a picture of the pope from her mother’s wall; it was that photo that she destroyed on television.On later albums, she made warmly expansive pop-rock (“Faith and Courage,” 2000), played traditional Irish songs (“Sean-Nós Nua,” 2002) and revisited classic reggae songs (“Throw Down Your Arms,” 2005). Her last album was “I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss,” released in 2014.As her music career slowed, Ms. O’Connor, who had been open in the past about her mental health struggles, became an increasingly erratic public figure, often sharing unfiltered opinions and personal details on social media.In 2007, she revealed on Oprah Winfrey’s television show that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and that she had tried to kill herself on her 33rd birthday. Her son Shane died by suicide in 2022, at 17.Ms. O’Connor said in 2012 that she had been misdiagnosed and that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from a history of child abuse. “Recovery from child abuse is a life’s work,” she told People magazine.Several years ago she converted to Islam and started using the name Shuhada Sadaqat, though she continued to answer to O’Connor as well.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. Ms. O’Connor had two brothers, Joe and John, and one sister, Eimear, as well as three stepsisters and a stepbrother. She wrote in her memoir that she was married four times and that she had four children: three sons, Jake, Shane and Yeshua, and a daughter, Roisin.In discussing her memoir with The Times in 2021, Ms. O’Connor focused on her decision to tear up the photo of John Paul II as a signal moment in a life of protest and defiance.“The media was making me out to be crazy because I wasn’t acting like a pop star was supposed to act,” she said. “It seems to me that being a pop star is almost like being in a type of prison. You have to be a good girl.”Alex Traub More

  • 125 Shares109 Views

    in Music

    Popcast (Deluxe): ‘Barbie,’ Jason Aldean’s Culture War and Drake’s Tour

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” film, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, and the way in which even anti-corporate dissent has been fully absorbed into corporate brandingA conversation about the way the “Barbie” soundtrack uses contemporary pop stars, and its even more successful deployment of classic hits by Matchbox Twenty and the Indigo GirlsDrake’s current arena tour, his fan-like desire to enjoy Drake hits alongside his audience and his creative versatility, which includes U.K. rap and cringe comedy podcastsThe culture war push behind Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart after a week of controversyThe New York Times’ 50 Rappers, 50 Stories project and its inclusion of Violent J from Insane Clown PosseNew songs by Tanner Adell and Valee featuring Z MoneySnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. More