Sinéad O'Connor

Latest Release

Essential Albums

  • I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got
    I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got
    I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got

    The trouble with a song like “Nothing Compares 2 U”—the song that would turn Sinéad O’Connor’s 1990 album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got into a global smash—is that it threatens to outshine everything around it. That’s not the story here. But in turning what on paper was a conventional ballad into a font of both shame and rage, O’Connor reconciled the poise of soul with the messiness of punk in ways that felt surprising, maybe even unprecedented. A beautiful song, no doubt—and all the moreso for how traumatised it sounds. Originally written by Prince, and included on the mostly forgotten album by his affiliate band The Family, O’Connor sang it in memory of her abusive mother. “I didn’t take the news hap­pily,” she wrote of the song’s success. “In­stead, I cried like a child be­fore the gates of hell.” The follow-up to The Lion and the Cobra, O’Connor’s acclaimed 1987 debut, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got is a challenging listen. The songs are slower, the arrangements sparer and the writing more confrontational. She tackles miscarriage on “Three Babies” (“I have wrapped your cold bodies around me”). She examines nation and race on “Black Boys on Mopeds” (“England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses/It’s the home of police who kill Black boys on mopeds”). You get the sense she’s trying to drag listeners through these dark spaces, and that the polished contours of her sound—the New Age soul of “Nothing Compares”, the proto trip-hop of “I Am Stretched On Your Grave”—aren’t meant as shelter from the truth she so passionately seeks. None of this prevented I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got from topping the US charts for six weeks. Though O’Connor’s landmark sophomore album was, in many ways, too rough for adult contemporary audiences—and too sophisticated for “alternative” fans—she managed to conquer both, thanks to naked honesty and sheer force of will.

  • The Lion and the Cobra
    The Lion and the Cobra
    The Lion and the Cobra

    As a kid, Sinéad O’Connor’s biggest inspiration was the boxer-activist Muhammad Ali. It wasn’t his physical strength, she said—if anything, she found the image of Black men fighting for the entertainment and financial gain of mostly white men unsettling. But in Ali’s claim to be both the greatest and the prettiest, O’Connor—a victim of child abuse whose Catholic upbringing always invited her to think less of herself—realised that power could be beautiful, and that if a Black man in the Jim Crow South could transcend his station, then she might be able to, too. That confidence comes through on O’Connor’s 1987 debut, The Lion and the Cobra—an album whose calling card is its volatility. On The Lion and the Cobra, the rippers rip (“Mandinka”), the funk twitches (“I Want Your (Hands On Me)”) and even the album’s mellower tracks bristle with a weirdness that can’t quite be sanded down (“Jackie”, “Never Get Old”, “Troy”). O’Connor’s power lies not just in her shriek, but also in the way she controls it—a balance of punk primitivism and adult-contemporary sophistication that carried the torch of Patti Smith, and paved the way for Björk. A handful of the songs on The Lion and the Cobra—including the unsettling “Drink Before the War”—were written when O’Connor was as young as 15, and you can tell: Cobra doesn’t contain or describe feelings—it expresses them, and in all their ugly, lopsided glory. The resulting record is so raw and engaging, no one was quite sure what to make of it at the time. The Lion and the Cobra shifted currents within both underground circles and the mainstream, redefining pop and singer-songwriter conventions a time when the idea of “alternative” music was just coming into play. O’Connor was hard to categorise—but even harder not to admire, given her strength and outspokenness. At the 1989 Grammy Awards, she performed “Mandinka” with the Public Enemy logo dyed into her hair—proof that she’d forever carry herself as an outsider, no matter how high her profile might rise. And as for Ali? O’Connor wound up meeting her hero in 2003, at the Special Olympics in Dublin. The boxer’s Parkinson’s disease was by that time so advanced that he had trouble getting his jacket on. “He’s asking me for help,” O’Connor would later recall in her memoir, Rememberings. “This is my father. I’m helping my father to put his jacket on.” Pure, true, direct: That was her art.

Albums

Music Videos

Artist Playlists

Compilations

Appears On

More To Hear

About Sinéad O'Connor

Everything about Sinéad O’Connor was striking: her soul-piercing gaze, her siren of a voice, her outspoken politics. And, yes, her shaved head, which upended traditional pop-star models of femininity when the singer, born near Dublin in 1966, stormed alt-rock radio with her equally dreamy and edgy 1987 debut, The Lion and the Cobra. But with 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, O’Connor became a global phenomenon, thanks in large part to a devastating cover of a little-known Prince composition, “Nothing Compares 2 U”, which, with the help of its iconic video, became her calling card. O’Connor used her stardom as a pulpit to speak out on all manner of injustice, famously responding to the Catholic Church’s sexual-abuse scandals by ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II during a 1992 Saturday Night Live performance. But that fiery persona belies the spiritual longing that’s always coursed through her work, whether in her transformation of the Irish standard “He Moved Through the Fair” into ethereal gospel-soul or her elevation of Nirvana’s “All Apologies” into a modern folk hymn. O’Connor remained an artist driven by her passion and convictions, pursuing priesthood in the Irish Orthodox Catholic Church (before converting to Islam in 2018) and using her public struggles with bipolar disorder to encourage open discussions about mental health. O’Connor passed away in 2023 at age 56.

FROM
Glenageary, County Dublin, Ireland
BORN
8. Dezember 1966
GENRE
Pop

Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada
  翻译：