Imagine if Marlon Brando had responded to “What are you rebelling against?” with an itemized list of grievances. Instead generations of snotty kids who’ve never seen The Wild One know the correct not-quite-answer is “Whaddya got?” because that’s how we like our rebels—cool and ironic and vague, not staking a position but personifying unbowed individual defiance. That’s a role Sinead O’Connor, Jah bless her, was incapable of playing. Kathryn Ferguson’s new look at O’Connor’s brief moment of fame, Nothing Compares, reminds us the Irish pop star could indeed be pretentious, self-righteous, and prickly—all those unforgivable sins a perpetually snide entertainment culture could never forgive, not in a woman, at least. Oh, and also it reminds us she was a near-genius we were stupid to scorn, as a musician and as a public presence.
O’Connor’s demeanor shifts sometime after stardom arrives. She puts all her cultural capital on the table and spins the wheel. Nowadays she says she never wanted to be a pop star, and maybe she never did—history sure provides many examples of why one should avoid fame, and O’Connor’s is one of them. Regardless, she had the misfortune of making it big at one of those moments when the always fractious people of the United States were particularly insufferable. So her refusal in the summer of 1990 to allow the Garden State Art Center to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” prior to her concert was received much like the invasion of Kuwait. Frank Sinatra even took time out from his slow crawl toward the grave to threaten to “kick her ass.”
An even bigger fire raged, of course, in 1992 when O’Connor finished a performance of Bob Marley’s “War” on Saturday Night Live, with lyrics altered to address child abuse, and tore apart a photo of Pope John Paul II, saying “Fight the real enemy.” The silence that follows remains an amazing television moment. The next week SNL host Joe Pesci “joked” about slapping her; the show itself mocked her in several sketches (a reminder of just how culturally conservative its satire can be.) We also get to see unrelentingly terrible person Camille Paglia saying “In the case of Sinead O’Connor, child abuse was justified.” The only person who comes off as decent here is Kris Kristofferson, who introduces her with praise at a Bob Dylan tribute concert where she steadfastly endures mass booing.
Nothing Compares ends with one of those “times have changed” montages so popular with documentarians who don’t want to bum us out. And it’s true, O’Connor was proven right about the extent of rot in the Catholic Church. Ireland did legalize abortion. (SNL, alas, remains on the air.) The danger, as we saw with the response to Framing Britney Spears, is that we feel that we, the enlightened people of today, have smugly triumphed over sexism, that we have learned our lessons. But celebrity journalism is a meat-grinder, reactionaries never rest, another star will be brought down by easy mockery tomorrow. Better to simply recall the O’Connor lyric that serves as the perfect epitaph to her career: “They laugh because they’re untouchable/Not because what I said was wrong.”
Stars! They’re Nothing Like Us at All!
Two new films about David Bowie and Sinead O’Connor highlight the inescapable weirdness of fame
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