Sophia Michaels
At the end of Nothing Compares, an exploration of the heyday and downfall of Sinéad O’Connor, director Kathryn Ferguson rolls out a montage of the troubled Irish singer, songwriter and provocateur’s legacy. The clips includes female activists in pop from the last decade — Pussy Riot, Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish, Megan Thee Stallion — as well as abortion-rights and #MeToo rallies and footage of the newly disgraced Catholic Church.
As heavy-handed as that may sound, it’s easy to see why such a roundup is necessary. It doesn’t feel that long ago that O’Connor, at the peak of her fame, ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live and effectively torched her career. But as of next week, that event will have taken place 30 friggin’ years ago. An entire generation has grown up with little or no idea who O’Connor is, why she (and her shaved head and proudly upfront politics) mattered, and what molds she broke, musically and culturally. Whether you’ve forgotten the details or didn’t know about them to begin with, Nothing Compares is here to remind us of what it really meant to have no fucks left to give in pop culture — and the price at least one person paid for it. (The documentary premieres on Showtime on September 30th after a brief theatrical run.)
The 100-minute doc eschews some of the trademarks of traditional documentaries: no talking heads, no storytelling narrator. O’Connor herself is heard reflecting on her career, but with the exception of a movie-closing recent performance piece, she’s seen only in vintage clips. And as many such docs do, it starts with a difficult or traumatic childhood. In O’Connor’s case, she grew up “stupidly religious,” in her words, in a rigid, sexist Irish culture, and with a mother who abused her. She relates how she was sent away to school at 14 because she was “unmanageable and they didn’t want me at home.”
As it has for many unsettled folks over the years, music became an outlet and escape — even if that meant tackling Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen,” from A Star Is Born, at a friend’s wedding. (And yes, that recording, sung by a young, tentative but clearly strong-voiced O’Connor, is heard here.) Her drive to make it in the music business is evident in clips of the teenage O’Connor singing with a local band in London; even at that young age, and with dark hair, she commanded small bars with a voice that could swoop effortlessly during one song or puncture the air the next.
What a friend in the movie calls O’Connor’s “fascinating contradictions” rise up soon enough. On one hand, she was a traditionalist who listed Dylan, Springsteen and Van Morrison as influences in an ad she placed in the Irish music magazine Hot Press. But she also was an innate contrarian who (in one of the film’s several re-enactments) shaved off all her hair when a music bizzer suggested she needed to look and dress more traditionally feminine. As Nothing Compares also explores, she became pregnant during the making of her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, and went ahead with the delivery despite intense pressure from unnamed industry types to have an abortion. (As the movie implies, she was fighting the patriarchy early on.) The angry-siren wail she unleashed in her voice, combined with a look that made some people wrongly think she was a skinhead, now makes her seem like the last real gasp of punk, rattling people in a way that the likes of Green Day never did. Still, contradictions abound: That voice was in stark contrast to the bashful and charming demeanor we see in interviews from the same period, as if she was constantly alternating been primal rage and obeisance.
The Lion and the Cobra put her on the map, but it was the follow-up, 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, that made O’Connor an all-formats star. We’re informed that the late Nigel Grainge, the head of her label, had reservations about releasing the album, feeling it was too personal for mass consumption. O’Connor ignored him, too, to her benefit. Starting with the instantaneous impact of her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” — complete with that close-up, tear-stained music video — O’Connor became omnipresent. (She admits in the movie that she was toking up during the shoot.) The documentary charts the period of mania that followed, complete with talk show appearances, awards-show performances and awards, and an industry all too happy to fawn over her. In an interview, Peaches puts it out there that O’Connor may have been a non-binary pioneer. Whether that’s true or not, the public seemed to have almost zero problems embracing such a bundle of vocal, sexual and visual contradictions — another one of her important breakthroughs.
Of course, the love proved to be fleeting. Mere months after the release of that album, O’Connor demanded that the “Star-Spangled Banner” not be played before one of her shows in New Jersey, partly to protest the music censorship movement kicking in at the time. Starting with radio boycotts, all jingoistic hell broke loose. She pulled out of the 1991 Grammys, as a statement against what she saw as the commercial-minded aspect of the nominees. And then, the following year, the shredding of the Pope on live TV. Suddenly O’Connor was, as one headline declared, a “She-Devil.”
Watching that SNL clip now — and knowing what we’ve come to learn of the Catholic Church’s history of abuse — you think: Yes, that Pope was popular, but he wasn’t God. In her memoir released last year, Rememberings, O’Connor wrote that that act was a statement against child abuse (that photo was in her mother’s bedroom when she died), and it was also connected to the death of a friend who was hiring young kids as drug runners. Her comment, “Fight the real enemy,” was aimed at the people who’d just murdered her friend. But that messaging didn’t come through, to say the least, and Nothing Compares chronicles the onslaught of hate that followed: death threats, records being bulldozed, overheated page-one headlines, Madonna and Camille Paglia dissing her, and not one but two mocking SNL bits. Guest host Joe Pesci’s crack (“If it were my show, I woulda gave her such a smack”) is actually more startling than her original provocation, down to creepy laughs and applause from the audience.
And it only got worse, of course, with her appearance at the Bob Dylan 30th anniversary tribute show at Madison Square Garden in 1992. Introduced by Kris Kristofferson, O’Connor emerged in a stylish outfit — light-blue jacket, skirt, and pumps — that seemed like her way of paying respect to the occasion. As we experience anew in Nothing Compares, she was greeted as if every single one of the nearly 20,000 people in that arena decided to boo as one, for minute after minute. Unsure what to do and waiting for it all subside, O’Connor reverted to her rebel soul, ditching the Dylan song she was supposed to cover and launching into the Marley song again. She wasn’t going to go down without a fight. The full, rarely seen clip of that performance now takes its place as one of the most gripping pieces of pop-concert footage, right up there with Mick Jagger pleading with the crowd to calm down in Gimme Shelter.
Nothing Compares essentially ends in 1993, when O’Connor was effectively banished from mainstream culture. (Given how MIA her music still is, you wonder if that ban is still in effect, even if unofficially.) But as engrossing as the movie is, it’s still a shame that her life post-cancellation isn’t explored. There are no mentions of her recent breakdowns, overdose claims, suicide threats and very public mental-health issues. In her memoir, O’Connor wrote that her exile was ultimately all for the best, freeing her from the constraints of mainstream culture. But to what extent were her childhood-rooted bipolar and PTSD issues exacerbated by the meltdown of her career? How did she feel when worthy later albums like Universal Mother were ignored? Being booed by arena full of fans of her hero, Dylan, couldn’t have been all good. Yet even as it mostly focuses on her victimization, there’s no denying that O’Connor never backed down, and that her public crucifixion was way out of proportion. Jesus may have died for our sins, but so did her career.
