Breathe
By Valeria Villa
When we describe someone we think of what is unique about them, knowing that whatever we say will only be our perception, incomplete, biased, the product of a value judgment.
The first thing we would say when talking about Sinead O'Connor is a relevant choice, because of the chiaroscuros that crossed all her life.
I hadn't thought of her in years nor was her music on my lists. It seems I had forgotten her but death is usually a reminder of how spectacular someone's work was. It's sad but that's the way it happens and the tributes in life are far fewer than the ones the dead receive.
Sinead, the one who left me speechless the first time I saw her singing Mandinka with that impossible voice, with those controlled screams and that way of singing rock. The image was that of a beautiful and very angry young woman who used music as therapy. Her past was stormy: the child abused by her mother who became a problem pupil in every school she went to and who was obsessed with Bob Dylan from the age of 11, thanks to her mother's music collection, who listened to everything from opera to John Lennon.
Sinead, the one who denounced the control exercised by the church on all the women in her family. Church oppression in Ireland was one of many against which she rebelled. The 14 year old teenager who was sent to a boarding school for nuns because she was uncontrollable. The guitar teacher there discovered the young girl's talent and invited her to sing at her wedding mass.
He soon joined a band and started singing at The badass cafe. Then he went to London. Her voice went from a whisper to a howl in a second. Her talent was overflowing, her lyrics a catharsis on her innermost pains. Her band was a family to her and in those years she felt much less lonely.
Sinead became pregnant at the age of 19 shortly before releasing her first album: The lion and the cobra. They suggest her to have an abortion but she decides to have Jake, her first child.
Sinead, the imposing rocker but shy in interviews, the non-binary woman advanced more than 30 years. The pregnant woman with a shaved head, who participated in demonstrations in Dublin to defend women's reproductive rights. Aggressive but beautiful, always crossed by contradiction, who infuriated her interviewers who did not stop harassing her for the way she was and who won the love of the gay community.
Sinead, who sang Testament, about the cruelty and death of her mother. The one who denounced the discrimination suffered by Rap and Hip-hop singers in the eighties, when they were not considered musicians worthy of the Grammys. How she was picked on for shaving her head, for denouncing the warlike vocation of the United States and the racism against the black community. Sinead, one of the first to be cancelled for breaking a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live, for denouncing pederasty within the Catholic Church, which cost her death threats, the prohibition to play her songs on the radio or to sell her records.
The next thing I will say to describe Sinead, is that she struggled for years with mental illness, a consequence of the abuse she received throughout her childhood. Sinead spoke several times of her depression, of having a diagnosis of bipolar, of constantly thinking about suicide and of having tried to kill herself several times without success, confessing that she was only alive thanks to her doctors. Sinead, mother of 4 children, unable to raise them because of her emotional instability, devastated by the recent suicide of the youngest, seems to have ended her days on Earth.
We are left with Nothing compares to you, The emperor's new clothes, all her albums. Also her courage to raise her voice, her transparency to talk about her suffering, and never stop being what she always was: disruptive.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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