[ This review of "Nothing Compares", a documentary on the life of
the courageous Irish singer/songwriter, who died yesterday at age 56,
appeared in the LA Times last October.]
[[link removed]]

MAKING THE RADICAL CASE FOR SINÉAD O’CONNOR: SHE WAS RIGHT ALL
ALONG  
[[link removed]]


 

Meredith Blake
October 7, 2022
LA Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ This review of "Nothing Compares", a documentary on the life of the
courageous Irish singer/songwriter, who died yesterday at age 56,
appeared in the LA Times last October. _

Sinead O’Connor and the moment that changed her career.Credit...,
NBC

 

Thirty years ago this week, Sinéad O’Connor
[[link removed]] tore
up a picture of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live
[[link removed]],”
effectively destroying her mainstream career with a single act of
protest against the Catholic Church.

Then 25, the Grammy-winning Irish singer was an unlikely pop star.
Known for the raw, emotive power of her voice and her equally fierce
resistance to industry pressure — most famously, by shaving her head
— O’Connor had risen to international fame with her transcendent
cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” and her vulnerable,
tear-streaked performance in its accompanying video
[[link removed]].

A sharp critic of racism and misogyny in the music business
who refused to play the national anthem before her concerts
[[link removed]],
O’Connor was already a controversial figure. But the “SNL”
incident [[link removed]] — in which
O’Connor sang Bob Marley’s “War” before tearing up the photo
to protest, she later said, the Catholic Church’s enablement of
child abuse — turned her into a full-blown pariah. Two weeks later,
O’Connor was booed off the stage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at
Madison Square Garden and fled, crying, into the arms of Kris
Kristofferson.

She has been in pop culture purgatory ever since, continuing to write
and perform music for three decades but never coming close to the
levels of acclaim or visibility she achieved in the early ’90s.

The ugly incident at the Dylan concert opens “Nothing Compares,” a
new documentary that offers a sympathetic reappraisal of O’Connor as
an iconoclastic artist whose provocations were decades ahead of their
time.

“It made this huge mark on me as a young Irish woman to witness this
hero of mine being treated the way she was,” said Kathryn Ferguson,
director of “Nothing Compares,” which premiered this week on
Showtime. “The seeds for this film were really planted at that
moment. It was a story that stuck with me throughout my adult life. I
couldn’t understand why there hadn’t been a cinematic feature made
about her.”

Ferguson, who grew up in Belfast, recalls her father playing “The
Lion and the Cobra,” O’Connor’s debut album, on repeat in the
car “as we drove around really gray, Troubles-ridden Northern
Ireland in the late ’80s,” she said during a recent Zoom
conversation from London. “It became the soundtrack to my
childhood.”

When Ferguson was a young teenager, she and her friends discovered
O’Connor on their own terms and swiftly fell in love: “We just
felt like we needed her.”

As a graduate student many years later, Ferguson contacted
O’Connor’s management team about using some of her music in her
thesis film, a connection that eventually led to Ferguson directing
the video for O’Connor’s song “Fourth and Vine
[[link removed]]” in 2013.

“I remembered all of this passion I’d had as a young teenager,”
Ferguson said, “and I just really wanted to try and work out how to
make this film.”

She spent much of the next five years “talking incessantly” about
the project before it finally started to come together in early 2018.
The timing was right: The #MeToo movement was surging in the U.S. and
elsewhere. In Ireland, same-sex marriage had recently become legal and
abortion was about to follow. “The world was on fire with women
speaking out,” Ferguson said. “It felt a wee bit mad that this
incredible figure wasn’t being mentioned in any of this — someone
who has inspired so many of the young activists that were directly
changing the country.”

Using extensive archival video — including footage from a wedding at
which a teenage O’Connor sang “Evergreen” — brief, stylized
re-creations and interviews with O’Connor’s friends, collaborators
and contemporaries, “Nothing Compares” traces O’Connor’s
meteoric rise from troubled teenager to Rolling Stone cover girl, and
her even more precipitous fall from grace. A theme throughout the film
is the lingering effect of her traumatic childhood: O’Connor endured
physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her mother and was sent
to live in a church-run Magdalene home as a teenager.

Most important, “Nothing Compares” features an extensive interview
with O’Connor. Her now-gravelly voice can be heard throughout the
film, reflecting on aspects of her life and work, but her face appears
only in archival video — a conscious filmmaking choice, Ferguson
explained:

“Our observation was just how amazingly well the media has done in
reducing her voice by mocking and ridiculing her. The key takeaway I
wanted was that you heard her voice and it wouldn’t be interrupted.
Having her narrate her story on her own terms was of utmost
importance.” (The other interviews are also voiceover only.)

O’Connor shares insights into some of her most notable songs and
their connection to traumatic chapters in her life — particularly
her painful relationship with her mother, who died in a car crash in
1985, a few years before O’Connor burst onto the music scene. She
was thinking of her mother while she made the beautifully spare video
for “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which primarily consisted of a
close-up on O’Connor’s tear-streaked face against a black
background.

“Every time I sing the song I think of my mother. I never stopped
crying for my mother,” O’Connor says in the film. “I think
it’s funny the world fell in love with me because of crying and a
tear.”

Notably, the film doesn’t include the song, which was written by
Prince. A postscript explains that the musician’s estate denied use
of her recording in the documentary.

Ferguson said she was unsure of the exact reason for the refusal:
“At the end of the day, it’s their prerogative. We just had to
accept that that was the situation and do our best to creatively
overcome it.” (A representative for the estate did not respond to a
request for comment.)

She was, however, able to secure outtakes from the video, which, along
with commentary from director John Maybury and others involved in the
production, helps flesh out this vital chapter in O’Connor’s
biography.

The documentary intentionally focuses on a brief but formative era in
O’Connor’s life. Although it briefly considers the legacy she’s
had on other female artists and activists, it does not explore
her turbulent journey since 1992
[[link removed]],
which has included several marriages, a bitter custody battle, mental
health struggles and, in January, the death by suicide
[[link removed]] of
her teenage son.

“What went on in this era has had horrific reverberations throughout
the rest of her life,” Ferguson said. “But as she says in the
film, the positive thing is the commercial career that was annihilated
after her actions in 1992 wasn’t the career that she was seeking.”

It’s impossible to know how a Sinéad O’Connor might be received
today, given the way the culture wars of the ’90s have metastasized
and taken over contemporary political discourse in the United States.
But it’s clear that O’Connor was radically ahead of her time in
many ways, from her refusal to conform to prescribed gender roles to
her songs about police violence against Black people.
[[link removed]]

Most obviously, the church she criticized for perpetuating child abuse
and the exploitation of women has now apologized for wrongdoing in
Ireland
[[link removed]] and
around the world. Back in 1992, many people claimed they didn’t
understand O’Connor’s message, but as Ferguson noted, O’Connor
spoke about her experiences with abuse in many interviews before
“SNL” (including one with The Times
[[link removed]].)
“People just chose not to listen,” she said.

Like many other women who were shunned in the ’90s and dismissed as
“crazy,” O’Connor is receiving an overdue cultural
reconsideration — one she spearheaded by writing a memoir,
“Rememberings,” published to acclaim last year
[[link removed]].
Her music is finding new fans: “Drink Before the War” was recently
included in an episode of “Euphoria.” And “Nothing Compares,”
which debuted at Sundance, is bringing O’Connor’s story to a
generation of viewers who weren’t yet alive when she immolated her
career at 30 Rock.

Ferguson said that many of the screenings get rowdy and emotional.
Young people come up to her “with their eyes flashing, just incensed
and inspired” by O’Connor’s ordeal. “There’s audible gasps
when you get to that backlash moment, because it’s still very
shocking to see that this young singer from Dublin is causing this
much noise. [Her detractors] obviously saw her as a threat —
somebody that had to be silenced.”

Ferguson doesn’t know if O’Connor herself has seen the film, but,
she said, “I really hope she feels proud.”

_Meredith Blake is an entertainment reporter for the Los Angeles Times
based out of New York City, where she primarily covers television. A
native of Bethlehem, Pa., she graduated from Georgetown University and
holds a master’s degree from New York University._

* Sinéad O'Connor
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]