The news of the death of Sinead O’Connor, a 56-year-old singer from Dublin, has arrived on a summer afternoon, for the second time after the false alarm in 2017, and has left with her two alternatives, two ways of approaching her story: from beauty or from pain. The path of pain is cumbersome: O’Connor has been for the last three decades a person shaken by a very complex psychiatric picture that has led her to fight with those who loved her, to expose herself to public ridicule, to enter wars that she could never win and to witness absurd tragedies such as the suicide of her son.
It is dangerous to try to synthesize from the outside what Sinéad O’Connor’s problem has been. Borderline personality disorder taken to the extreme? Her accounts of her childhood and adolescence fit that mold: they were portraits of a very intimate pain that poisoned her entry into adulthood. O’Connor’s parents separated when she was eight years old and Sinéad went to live with her father, who seemed a more solid presence than her mother. The singer remembered her mother in those years crying inconsolably, unable to rebuild her life, but also inclined to terrifying forms of cruelty. In her other house, however, her father started over and married a second time to a woman named Viola, loving and believing, and whose company Sinéad enjoyed. But every moment of her joy turned into a stab of guilt afterward. As a teenager, O’Connor managed that conflict the way lost children often do: she caused trouble, she sought out pain, she collided with the world, she shoplifted… He listened to Dylan and Pink Floyd, he read Yeats, he collided with his father, whom, despite everything, he viewed with compassion, he began sexuality on the path of despair. and they were looking for them to be expelled from school…
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Is there beauty in stories like this? The world has idealized adolescent angst since romanticism and how can we not see Sinéad O’Connor as a romantic character, directed towards self-destruction and loneliness for being a person? too pure for the world? In this romantic Bildungsroman script, art always appears as a hope for redemption. O’Connor was born with the gift of singing well and a teacher encouraged her to follow the path of music to straighten her path. She began to sing at weddings, and thus, putting her voice Evergreen by Barbra Streisand, caught the attention of the drummer of In Tua Nua, a band that in those years passed for being U2’s protégé. With her tutelage, the erratic teenager began a kind of opposition to the career of a pop singer between 1983 and 1985. They were the years of innocence.
In 1985, O’Connor’s mother died. The news was part black hole and part release. O’Connor went to live in London and got a contract to record his first album, The Lion and the Cobra, whose title came from a psalm from the Bible and is now acclaimed. That music sounded more or less alternative to the style of the time: danceable, full of synths and open doors to black music and old pop. At that time, O’Connor was already determined to build a chaotic and self-destructive public figure: defended in interviews the attacks of the Real IRAshe made fun of U2 and called attention to herself as a clown, when, in reality, she was a person facing the abyss.
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