Sinéad O’Connor possesses a voice powerful and rare, one that emerges from someplace completely out of time. Her music cuts to the emotional core of her personal experience while carrying the beauty and rage of centuries of Irish women. When O’Connor rose to stardom, her songwriting and public activism reached far into the future. She was truly revolutionary and the machinery of mainstream culture simply couldn’t handle it. The new documentary, Nothing Compares, speaks from that place, with O’Connor herself providing narration along with a cavalcade of admirers and friends. The film focuses on the trauma the singer suffered from her abusive mother and moves through the first six years of her meteoric career.
Seamlessly directed by Kathryn Ferguson, Nothing Compares contains dreamlike reenactments of moments in O’Connor’s childhood to drive the narrative. Archival footage of punks in Dublin, rastas on Portobello Road and historical news events from the ‘80s help set the scene. Clips of O’Connor often pause on her expressions, allowing her face to carry the moment to stirring effect. She was just 20 years old when she released her first record, The Lion and the Cobra, in 1987 to widespread acclaim. The stunning centerpiece of that album, “Troy,” was written for the mother who used to lock her outside in the back garden for days. The lyrics to “Troy” reference W.B. Yeats’ poem ‘No Second Troy’ and the film places O’Connor squarely in the tradition of other great Irish poets and activist artists. As O’Connor says, “I come from a country where there used to be riots in the streets over plays. That’s what art is for.”
Both her sophomore album, I Do Not What What I Haven’t Got (1990) and the single “Nothing Compares 2 U” went number one and made O’Connor a bonafide global superstar. The ensuing dramas of her tearing up the picture of the Pope on SNL, and then being booed at Bob Dylan’s tribute show in New York are well known but it’s jarring to see the footage again. The irony of being jeered for speaking truth to power at a Dylan birthday concert is staggering, even more so since not a single one of the artists who followed her said a thing on stage in her defense.
Lost in all the public conflagration was the point she was trying to make. It was about the widespread sexual abuse within the Catholic church that was systematically and willfully covered up. It was about the fight for the rights of women against patriarchal moralists the world over, and the horrifying history of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland. O’Connor’s activism for the right to abortion access, candid discussion of child abuse and support for the LGBTQ+ community are now commonplace for modern pop stars but at the time she was seen as a petulant troublemaker who had somehow been allowed into the rarefied ranks of celebrity. Other pop stars, actors, late night hosts and comedians trashed her repeatedly in the aftermath. Yet as more information has come to light on the abuses of the priesthood, the documentary draws on the reporting of these scandals to show how very right she was.
In Nothing Compares we hear from an array of voices clearly picked for their relevance as opposed to notoriety. There are interviews with people close to O’Connor like her longtime musical collaborator and first husband, John Reynolds, and her childhood best friend, Clodagh Latimer. Chuck D of Public Enemy weighs in, as do Peaches, Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and the songwriter John Grant (O’Connor covers his song “Queen of Denmark” on 2012 record How About I Be Me (And You Be You?). They all provide insight into how inspiring she was to so many outsider artists at the very same time the mainstream culture was eviscerating her.
Nothing Compares effectively goes up to 1993 when O’Connor’s pop star era ended and only at the closing titles do we hear a contemporary performance from Shuhada Sadaqat (her current name) singing “Thank You for Hearing Me.” But her career was hardly over. In 1994, she followed with the album Universal Mother and its ferocious single “Fire on Babylon.” She has toured extensively ever since and released six fantastic records – the trad Irish one, the reggae one, the one of adapted psalms. My only quibble with this compelling documentary is that it leaves out these 25 years of excellent music, but for that there is O’Connor’s excellent 2021 memoir, Rememberings, to fill in the gaps. Sadly, O’Connor has been in the news more lately for health reasons and the tragic death of her son, Shane, than her music. Nothing Compares thankfully doesn’t include her more recent struggles. After the pop world spit O’Connor out, what she had left was what she had painstakingly earned – a more reasonably scaled global audience that would listen to every recording and come to see her in the tradition of the traveling singer she always wanted to be.
Today in Ireland, there is marriage equality regardless of who you love and abortion is legal in the Republic. While one of the most historically conservative countries moves closer to an era of inclusion and freedom, the very same puritanical forces that once boycotted Sinéad are taking away women’s autonomy over their own bodies in the United States. Nothing Compares connects these threads and is never anything short of riveting. It does an excellent job providing context for O’Connor’s actions while never losing sight of the brilliant, sensitive and truly prescient artist at the center. As O’Connor herself says, “They tried to bury me. They didn’t realize I was a seed.”
Photo courtesy of Showtime Documentary Films
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