Sinéad O’Connor, an Irish singer-songwriter who sold millions of records in the 1990s with her ethereal ballads and rebellious anthems, all while defying expectations of how a female pop star should behave, has died at 56.
for one of his side projects, the Family, the ballad topped the Billboard pop chart for four weeks, with Ms. O’Connor backed by an understated string arrangement.“It’s been seven hours and fifteen days since you took your love away,” she sang, evoking anger, anxiety and bitter heartache. The music video showed her in haunting close-up, turning her pale face and shaven head into one of the decade’s defining pop culture images.
“There is a searing frankness to Ms. O’Connor’s songs that, with other singers, could easily become self-indulgent ranting,”New York Times music critic Jon Pareles. “But one of her gifts, as important as her voice and her power of observation, is an underlying calm that is anything but placid.” Ms. O’Connor, who was raised Catholic, was protesting sexual abuse in the church, a decade before reporting byand other newspapers drew widespread attention to the scandal. Her performance was widely criticized by groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, and led Frank Sinatra to call her “one stupid broad.” The New York Daily News labeled her a “Holy Terror,” and protesters ran over a pile of her records with a steamroller.
Ms. O’Connor was 8 when her parents separated. For the next five years, she lived with her mother, whom she described as an alcoholic who regularly beat her. When her mother died in 1985, Ms. O’Connor took a photo of the pope off her wall, and carried it around until tearing it up on SNL., looking back on her childhood. “You only learn to live with it. Music is where I can manage it.”
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