Sinead O'Connor

[cremetangerine82]

The rage machine didn't pay attention to the context, that's true. It took decades for far too many people to find out how extensive the abuse was.

Haven't heard enough love about this song!

[royalwave]

I was only 10 when she ripped up that picture, and I just thought she hated organized religion.

Celebrity Memoir Book club covered her memoir back in April and did a pretty nice job with it. I'm not a Sinead follower, so I came away with much more of an appreciation for her and all that she's been through after this episode. This was one of the books the girls actually recommended picking up and reading for yourself.

[jynni]

I vaguely remember the SNL incident, mainly just from headlines of magazine covers & newspapers in the grocery store checkout. My dad was an early Rush Limbaugh listener so possibly overheard him ranting about it. Or maybe just from it being burned into the timeline of pop culture, getting brought up every now and then on "Top SNL Moments" lists.

Sadly, that's really all I knew about her. I think as I grew older and became disillusioned with religion (grew up in a fundamentalist type environment) I could appreciate what she was wanting to say and admired she had the resolve to do it and not back down when everyone lost their shit on her.

Side note,
I don't think most people under the age of 40 can really grasp just how limited access to, and subsequently discussion of information, not just news but any type of information - recipes, historical accounts, music, movies, most recent edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, etc, was in the pre-internet days. Even those of us over 40 I think sometimes forget just how much has advanced in the last 30 years.

In 1992, the Internet as we know it barely existed. AOL hadn't even started mass mailing its free access disks yet. It wasn't even until '95-'98 that the Internet started becoming widely accessed from home computers. In 1992 if you didn't watch SNL live, you didn't watch it at all unless you or someone you knew had the VCR setup to record it (and it actually worked).

[Ginger]

Mar 21, 2005 11:05:04 GMT -4 jynni said:

In 1992, the Internet as we know it barely existed. AOL hadn't even started mass mailing its free access disks yet

I remember the incoming Clinton administration being ridiculed in 1993 for introducing email to the White House for the first time. Those flashy youngsters with their high-tech gadgets who refused to behave like grown-up professionals and have the secretaries type up memos for them.

Email.

[OnyxRose]

Aug 1, 2023 13:32:43 GMT -4 jynni said:

I vaguely remember the SNL incident, mainly just from headlines of magazine covers & newspapers in the grocery store checkout. My dad was an early Rush Limbaugh listener so possibly overheard him ranting about it. Or maybe just from it being burned into the timeline of pop culture, getting brought up every now and then on "Top SNL Moments" lists.

Sadly, that's really all I knew about her. I think as I grew older and became disillusioned with religion (grew up in a fundamentalist type environment) I could appreciate what she was wanting to say and admired she had the resolve to do it and not back down when everyone lost their shit on her.

Side note,
I don't think most people under the age of 40 can really grasp just how limited access to, and subsequently discussion of information, not just news but any type of information - recipes, historical accounts, music, movies, most recent edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, etc, was in the pre-internet days. Even those of us over 40 I think sometimes forget just how much has advanced in the last 30 years.

In 1992, the Internet as we know it barely existed. AOL hadn't even started mass mailing its free access disks yet. It wasn't even until '95-'98 that the Internet started becoming widely accessed from home computers. In 1992 if you didn't watch SNL live, you didn't watch it at all unless you or someone you knew had the VCR setup to record it (and it actually worked).

My high school didn’t get Internet until 1998. A lot of people can’t wrap their heads around the lack of readily available information that most of the general public was privy to.

[cremetangerine82]

I'm glad she did what she did, and the subsequent Vatican admission of the child sex abuse was long-standing and incredibly damning. That's why I mourn her, along with her phenomenal voice.

[royalwave]

I was on my high school's debate team in the late 90s and remember having to scour books, journals and whatever databases our library subscribed to in order to get evidence to clip, and then we carried it all around in gigantic plastic tubs from tournanent to tournament, organized in manilla and accordion folders. I'm not even sure how kids do it nowadays, but I imagine it's a hell of a lot easier having access to pretty much any argument you could ever want all at your fingertips. All I used the internet for back then was AOL chat rooms and looking at the random personal fan pages on Geocities and Angelfire that various people made for various subjects. It wasn't really a tool for research yet, at least not for me. That didn't happen until I entered college in 2000.

And now I really feel like an old timer.

My initial reaction to Sinead's protest on SNL was simply that she was incredibly disrespectful to an entire religion. I definitely wasn't supportive at that point. I didn't really "get it" until probably a decade or more later, actually, when mainstream news was more prominent on the internet and I stumbled across more information on her (I'm sure I wasn't actively seeking it). Every once in a while she popped up in the news for various personal problems, and I would see the stories. She was sort of a curiosity to me, with a haunting voice and ethereal beauty. But also, really only a couple hit songs. She was more on the radar for what happened on SNL than anything else because she didn't spend much time on the top of the charts. Some of the retrospectives are making her out now to be a bigger deal than I think she really was at the time.

[cremetangerine82]

Sinéad was a very well-known star; any woman who turned down JFK Jr. IS famous by 1990s standards. The SNL performance was talked about and went "viral" before the Internet was prevalent. If people "didn't get" what her protest was about in 1992, it was re-evaluated years or decades later after more widespread knowledge of the cover-up of the Roman Catholic Church's child sexual abuse epidemic. She didn't protest ALL religion - she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II (as a Protestant, he represents Catholicism than all Christianity to me), the one who inflicted abuse on her and countless other young people. Singing the phrase "child abuse" while deeming the actions of the then-Pope's inaction/neglect on preventing said abuse. Her message struck for me and many others who were shut down and silenced.

[Ginger]

Oct 24, 2019 13:25:06 GMT -4 royalwave said:

She was more on the radar for what happened on SNL than anything else because she didn't spend much time on the top of the charts.

There's a quote from Sinead going around in which she says that SNL did not ruin her career, it put her career exactly where it belonged. She wasn't the type of artist who was meant to be a perennial chart topper, and I think most of the people who loved her music are the ones who stuck with her after Nothing Compares 2 U.

[batmom]

Sexual abuse by Canadian Catholic priests was in the news by 92 so I (raised Catholic) was very aware, and supportive, of what she did. Also Pope JP II was not well liked by my very devout grandmother for his policies in South America (my grandparents worked aid missions and she saw first hand how they impacted the people of South America) so I'd learned to separate the man from the faith.