Painsong: A Tribute to Sinead O’Connor

Can music have an important impact even beyond controlled, clinical, settings? The life and work of Sinead O’Connor, who died on July 26, 2023, at age 56, pose that difficult question and suggest some possible answers—relevant to both our personal, and public, lives. O’Connor was 18 when her mother died in a car crash. Six years later, in her 1990 debut album, O’Connor sang her pain in her cover of Prince’s ballad “Nothing Compares 2 U.” While Prince wrote it about his romance, O’Connor had her mother in mind, wishing “she can hear me, and I can connect to her.”

I’m away from my home in Jerusalem. My mind wanders to Ethiopia Street, built by order of Ethiopian Emperors in the 19th century; it also hosted Haile Selassie I, the Emperor of Ethiopia. Selassie spoke before the League of Nations, urging action against fascism, and also addressed the United Nations, pledging to fight for tolerance and goodwill. While Selassie believed in God, Bob Marley believed that Selassie himself manifests God. In 1976, a year after he was murdered and deposed, Selassie’s UN speech turned into a song, and an anthem: Marley’s “War.”

It also became O’Connor’s War, when she recited it in a Saturday Night Live show in 1992, changing some words to speak of child abuse, pleading, “Children, children / Fight,” before concluding with Selassie’s pledge, “We know we will win / We have confidence in the victory of good over evil,” ripping up a picture of then-Pope John Paul II.

O’Connor’s cover of Prince’s ballad launched her career; her cover of Marley’s anthem devastated it. Many years will pass before the public would recognize her courageous stand against the Church culture of child abuse. And many years will pass before O’Connor will reveal, in her 2021 memoir, her personal story of abuse by her own mother, who used to pin her to the floor, pummeling her, while forcing her to say over and over again, “I am nothing,” and what she experienced and witnessed after she was sent, at the age of 14, to live at An Grianán Training Centre in Dublin, which was run by the Order of Our Lady of Charity. I can only try to imagine what O’Connor wished to have said to her mother as tears adorned her beautiful face when she sang “Nothing Compares 2 U.”

I hear O’Connor’s urge, “Children, children / Fight,” and listen to Nick Cave’s “O Children,” swirling oppression and innocence: the oppressors hold “the keys to the gulag,” and, they promise, to our troubles: “We have the answer to all your fears / It's short, it's simple, it's crystal clear / It's round-about and it's somewhere here / Lost amongst our winnings.” Cave, like O’Connor, sees one way to hold on to a future beyond the abyss: “O Children / Lift up your voice, lift up your voice.”

O’Connor lifted up her voice. I wish we had truly listened.

Can we, now? Like so many things in life, this, too, is a matter of attention and affection, and, perhaps, of practice. Recently I watched a clip of Robert Smith performing the opener to The Cure’s wonderous Disintegration. Smith, who recently lost his parents and brother was as he’s always been—completely covered, completely bare—as he sang, and smiled, through tears, Plainsong, named after the only type of music allowed in Christian churches early on, the sort of music that should make a listener receptive to spiritual thoughts and reflections:

I think I'm old and I'm feeling pain, you said
And it's all running out like it's the end of the world, you said
And it's so cold, it's like the cold if you were dead
And then you smiled for a second