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Date: July 28, 2023 at 13:52:13
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: The day Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night |
URL: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/sinead-oconnor-snl-pope-photo-b2191296.html |
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‘She was deemed mad and unpredictable’: The day Sinead
O’Connor tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night
Live
Thirty years ago, a young Sinéad O’Connor shocked
America with her political protest on ‘Saturday Night
Live’. She was promptly banned for life by broadcaster
NBC, pelted with eggs in the street and booed during
live shows. Ed Power reflects on the impact of that
night and the contrasting reactions in the US and
Ireland
Monday 03 October 2022 06:55
28
This article is being reshared in light of Sinead
O’Connor’s death, aged 56
Her green eyes gleaming with determination, Sinéad
O’Connor stares into the cameras at the Saturday Night
Live studio – in the bowels of the Rockefeller Centre
in Manhattan – and holds a photograph in front of her
face.
Nobody blinks or says a word. Around her, the backstage
bustle continues uninterrupted. The picture is of a
Brazilian street child shot dead by police death
squads. It’s 3 October 1992 and O’Connor is rehearsing
her cover of Bob Marley’s “War” for her performance on
SNL that night. The child’s photo is a calculated
distraction. For her real appearance, she’ll proffer
another image entirely. And the response will be very
different. Thirty years on, it remains a defining
moment in the Irish singer’s life and career.
“I sing ‘War’ a cappella. No one suspects a thing,”
O’Connor recalled in her 2021 memoir, Rememberings.
“But at the end, I don’t hold up the child’s picture. I
hold up John Paul II’s photo and then rip it into
pieces. I yell, “Fight the real enemy!’” Her words hung
in the air as she blew out the candles set on a table
to one side. Darkness descended, in more ways than one.
NBC immediately banned O’Connor for life. Outside
the studio, on that warm Manhattan night, passers-by
pelted her with eggs. At a Bob Dylan tribute concert in
Madison Square Garden a fortnight later, she was booed
(the noise mingled with shouts of support). Putting an
arm around her, Kris Kristofferson told her not to “let
the bastards get her down”.
((my comments: apparently NBC is part of the Catholic
cult))
With jeers ringing out, she sang “War” again (the track
was the centrepiece from her just-released covers
record, Am I Not Your Girl?). “Until the colour of a
man’s skin is of no more significance than the colour
of his eyes/Me say war,” O’Connor intoned, her voice
cracking. The chorus of disapproval only grew louder.
Her plea for racial solidarity was received by New York
as a taunt. “Half [of] them are booing, half [of] them
are cheering. It’s the weirdest noise I’ve ever heard
in my life,” O’Connor explains in Nothing Compares,
Kathryn Ferguson’s new documentary about O’Connor’s
life and times (released 7 October). “It makes me want
to puke.”
Just two years earlier, O’Connor had received an
altogether different reception in America. She had
vaulted to the top of the US charts with “Nothing
Compares 2 U”, her unfiltered cover of an obscure
Prince track. In the video, she cried over the memory
of her late mother, who died in a car crash in 1985.
Marie O’Connor was also the “inspiration” for her
daughter’s Saturday Night Live protest. The two had a
difficult relationship: O’Connor accused her mother of
traumatising her physically and emotionally during her
childhood. After Marie’s death, O’Connor took down a
portrait of the Pope from the wall of her house in
Dublin. This was the image she smuggled into the SNL
studios. Was the “real enemy” her abusive parent,
rather than the Bishop of Rome?
Whatever her motives, America was scandalised. “Holy
Terror!” ran the front-page headline of the New York
Daily News. Joe Pesci, a devout Catholic, said he would
“have given her such a smack” when he hosted SNL the
following week. Even Madonna – the mother superior of
scandalous pop stars – criticised O’Connor. “I think
there is a better way to present her ideas rather than
ripping up an image that means a lot to other people,”
she said. When you’ve outraged Madonna, you know you’ve
touched a nerve.
Back in Ireland, the response was more muted. One
reason was that the footage of O’Connor was not widely
seen. Saturday Night Live had a negligible cultural
imprint (to this day, its groaning, immature humour
remains lost in cultural translation). And it wasn’t as
if you could seek out the clip on YouTube. The scandal
came and went largely unnoticed. There was a second
factor, however. Public opinion in Ireland was slowly
yet inexorably turning against the Catholic Church. The
floodgates were straining. Within a few years, they
would burst, the country swamped in clerical abuse
scandals.
The turning of the tide had already begun by autumn
1992. In May of that year, the standing of the Irish
Catholic Church had been fatally undermined by the
revelation that Bishop Eamonn Casey – a familiar face
on the airwaves – had fathered a teenage son during an
affair with an American in the 1970s. Far from
provoking people back home, O’Connor had tapped into a
gathering storm of anger. Where she had gone – publicly
rejecting the Church and its hypocrisies – an entire
country would soon follow.
“There had been no dismantling of the power of the
Church in America. The Catholic Church there was still
very much revered,” Dr Finola Doyle O’Neill, a
broadcast and legal historian at University College
Cork, tells me. “It wouldn’t be [dismantled] until 10
years later, in 2002, with the Boston Globe revelations
[about the cover up of clerical abuse in New England].
We in Ireland were a decade ahead in terms of
dismantling the Church. In 1992 there would have been
the big revelation about Bishop Eamonn Casey. Slowly
but surely, there was a slow drip-drip of the release
of the hold of the Catholic Church.”
O’Connor on stage in 2012
O’Connor on stage in 2012
(Getty Images)
But if O’Connor would ultimately be vindicated, in
the short term the impact was devastating. She was
dismissed as unhinged, in the way that women who speak
out have been since the dawn of time.
“The fact that she was right to rip up the picture of
the Pope and expose the harsh realities of what was
going on behind closed doors was irrelevant. She was
deemed mad and unpredictable, causing the end of her
career,” says Linda Coogan Byrne, a music publicist who
has researched gender disparity in radio playlists in
Ireland and the UK. “O’Connor became an oft-parodied
figure in popular culture. Every time she spoke out,
which is what many artists do, she was at risk of being
cancelled. All we have to do is look at all the male
artists who have had a slap on the wrist and then go on
as normal. When it’s a woman, it’s utterly damning.
Women with something to say are always deemed a
dangerous thing.”
As alluded to above, O’Connor’s motivations for ripping
up the picture were complex and personal. Born in 1966,
she had grown up in an Ireland where, if the Church’s
days were numbered, women remained marginalised.
Catholic Ireland had reached its apotheosis in 1979,
when Pope John Paul II became the first pope in history
to visit Ireland. O’Connor, who was 13 at the time,
will have remembered the mass outpouring of emotion all
too well. The pope’s trip was Ireland’s equivalent of
Britain following the death of Diana. A mania descended
upon the country.
But, as pointed out already, Church misogyny wasn’t
O’Connor’s only target. She had a traumatic
relationship with her mother, who “stripped and kicked”
her as a child. “My mother was a very violent woman.
Not a healthy woman at all,” O’Connor said in Nothing
Compares. “The cause of my own abuse was the Church’s
effect on this country. Which had produced my mother. I
spent my entire childhood being beaten up because of
the social conditions under which my mother grew up. I
would compare Ireland to an abused child.”
Sinéad O'Connor has spoken in the past about her
traumatic relationship with her mother
(AFP via Getty Images)
Marie died when her car skidded on black ice and
collided with a bus in a suburb close to where her
daughter had grown up in south Dublin. She was 45 and
had been driving to mass. Afterwards, O’Connor removed
just two items from her house: a cookbook and that
portrait of John Paul II. “I took down from her bedroom
wall the only photo she ever had up there,” she wrote
in her book. “Pope John Paul II. It was taken when he
visited Ireland in 1979.”
On the night of the broadcast, O’Connor had arrived at
the Rockefeller Centre in a confused frame of mind.
She’d been living in New York on and off for several
months and had struck up a friendship with a
Rastafarian named Terry, whom she met at a juice bar.
But shortly before the rehearsals, he’d told her that
his real job was as a drug smuggler, and that he had
used children as “mules”. He also claimed that he had
been targeted for assassination by a rival dealer (he
would be shot dead soon afterwards).
O’Connor was upset. But she nonetheless went about
smuggling in the image of the pope with impressive
efficiency. “I bring the photo to the NBC studio and
hide it in the dressing room. At the rehearsal, when I
finish singing Bob Marley’s ‘War’, I hold up a photo of
a Brazilian street kid who was killed by cops,” she
wrote. “I ask the cameraman to zoom in on the photo
during the actual show. I don’t tell him what I have in
mind for later on. Everyone’s happy. A dead child far
away is no one’s problem.”
Then came showtime. She went on in a lacy white dress
that once belonged to the singer Sade, which O’Connor
had acquired in a London flea market for £800. She
first performed “Success Has Made A Failure of Her
Home” (her take on Loretta Lynn’s Success). It went
down a storm. “I’m the flavour of the month. Everyone
wants to talk to me,” O’Connor wrote of that moment.
“Tell me how I’m a good girl. But I know I’m an
imposter.”
The infamous statement on Saturday Night Live in
1992
The infamous statement on Saturday Night Live in 1992
(Saturday Night Live)
Next, it was time for “War” – and the ripping of the
Pope’s image. “Total stunned silence in the audience,”
she said of the reaction. “And when I walk backstage,
literally not a human being is in sight. All doors have
closed. Everyone has vanished. Including my manager,
who locks himself in his room for three days and
unplugs his phone.”
In a way, America had been looking for an excuse to
turn on O’Connor. There had been an uproar in August
1990 when she refused to allow the US national anthem
to be played before her concert in New Jersey. She’d
gone on to boycott the 1991 Grammys in protest at
America’s wars in the Middle East and urged her fellow
artists to follow her example.
Pope-gate was the end of O’Connor as a commercial
force in America. She never again troubled the charts
or performed on primetime TV. But in Ireland, she
inspired a generation of female artists who finally had
someone to look up to – singers such as Dolores
O’Riordan of The Cranberries and Róisín Murphy who,
like O’Connor, refused to let the industry tell them
what they could or could not do.
O’Connor herself never wavered in her feelings about
the incident. She was proud of her actions. “A lot of
people say or think that tearing up the pope’s photo
derailed my career,” she wrote in her memoir. “That’s
not how I feel about it. I feel that having a No 1
record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put
me back on the right track… Far from the pope episode
destroying my career, it set me on a path that fit me
better.”
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Responses:
[11726] [11727] [11728] [11729] [11730] [11732] [11733] [11734] |
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11726 |
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Date: July 28, 2023 at 15:04:49
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The day Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday... |
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For me, this line holds within it, on many levels, the
condensed essence of her whole flaming activist lifetime,
personally and en masse:
“The cause of my own abuse was the Church’s
effect on this country. Which had produced my mother."
Whereas Sinead came from a Catholic family, and my
mother's family was Protestant, the evil seeds of God-
sanctioned misogyny (evil Eve!) thrive psychotically well
in both. They get passed down through the generations.
Many thousands of children, including Sinead and myself,
suffered enraged actings-out of women whose familial
religions literally drove them to unconscious abuse of
their children. Because that's how that religion
justified treating *they, themselves*. Passing on to them
the psychoemotional/PTSD damage done by that dogma's
divisive condemnation and dehumanization of women...and
anyone, for that matter, who dares to question the
misogynistic, exclusivistic toxic biblican dogma of
condescension & dehumanizing disrespect toward
women...and omg, especially, their right to control them.
Pretty sure anyone who's read my posts more than
occasionally over the years knows how
powerful this whole issue is for me. When I first
learned, very young, that healing from mom's unconscious
abuse was soley up to my own self, and my capacity for
opening the conscious conduit between myself and Infinite
Love (the understanding of God I was born with), it took
me a very long time to accept that my mom could never
come with me on that journey. My love could do nothing
for her love. Enduring the judgements of her family on
becoming pregnant with me out of wedlock, the little
self-esteem she ever had evaporated...and the enraged,
terrified and bewildered little girl within her became a
mother, literally, to the living sin she created of her
own "weakness for one sin of the flesh"...
She was so beautiful, my mom. ;) Naturally filled with
love, she spilled over with it into every room and onto
everyone she met. Until she was triggered by something
that reminded her of who she was. Even looking at a
mirror would do it. Literally because of her religion,
she was never able to overcome distrusting that
love...*her own love*...as God-given, valuable, life-
giving, powerful, incomparable and perfect.
She *couldn't trust love* -- for herself, for her child,
even her love for God! Because it had been taught to her
that God's love was conditional upon her toeing lines of
dogmatic behavior and control established by men in the
3rd century in Constantinople, creating a fusion of
governmental and sacred law that was so cleverly fused
(the first control mechanism of church and state as one)
that it would guarantee their power-over would hold...
Problem was, Mom lived for God's love. Her spiritual
calling was so pure, she didn't believe that acting
against the church's authority, which she trusted
implicitly, in such a flagrant way could ever be
forgiven...
How many precious souls have been lost to suicide, how
many live lives feeling already hopelessly lost, already
condemned to hell, for having experienced life outside
the lines that a tiny group of human men drew centuries
ago..............
I was watching, the night she tore up that photo on SNL.
I was crying for her pain, and for mine and for my
mother's. She became one of my heroines that night.
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Responses:
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11727 |
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Date: July 28, 2023 at 16:07:43
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The day Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday... |
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Yes, I know. It was my dad the abuser. He went to prison
for his crimes against me and yes, tried to end my life
at 15. His was born out of mental imbalance learned from
his own family, 2 military stints, and his own choices.
I watched it too on snl her doing that. I was glad she
did it. Terrible she was judged by so many, in the
church and out of it.
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Responses:
[11728] [11729] [11730] [11732] [11733] [11734] |
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11728 |
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Date: July 28, 2023 at 16:34:08
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The day Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday... |
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Then we shared that moment on the same note.
All my mother's family, bless each of them, were all
deeply twisted in various different directions by their
indoctrinations, but they all unanimously agreed that I
shouldn't have existed in the first place. I won't detail
all the ways that got conveyed, with some trying to make
that happen in some incredibly creative, christianly-
sanctioned ways, to their perceptions... ;)
I'm sad to know what you endured, and celebrate that you
survived, healed and are thriving in the ways you are. I
can't help but wonder, pamela, how many others witnessed
that momentous expression on her part from the same
frequency of experience......
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Responses:
[11729] [11730] [11732] [11733] [11734] |
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11729 |
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Date: July 28, 2023 at 17:19:25
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The day Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday... |
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One is not a "survivor" but a transcender. To be
separate from or beyond (experience, the material
universe, etc.)
Webster's New World
My music was/is my healing.
Finding strong, courageous and kind role models.
And Andrew Vachss. A lawyer, writer in NY who took on
the whole child abuse system defending his clients who
were children, til his death in 2021.
Many if not all of humanity suffers this abuse from
many different levels; whether its religious,
political, military, social, dysfunctional families,
medical tyranny, neglect, etc.
Healing of these wrongs is often not dealt with within
this lifetime but goes with us into our next life.
I'm thinking not too many since she got so much
negative feedback; from the media, from the music
industry, so-called friends and the tv/movie industry
who are some of the worse offenders in abuse and
following backwards spiritual values propagated by
Churchianity cults in its many forms and ultimately
following money more than caring for people in general.
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Responses:
[11730] [11732] [11733] [11734] |
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11730 |
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Date: July 28, 2023 at 17:47:58
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The day Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday... |
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Um...
Okay. ;)
I just read this last post...then read our whole exchange
beginning with my first comment.
Y'know, I always love it when I feel some level of common
ground of experience, of any type, that arises in an
exchange of posts with someone here. That's the energy
I've been coming from in everything I've said.
After this review, and reading your last post, I'm
feeling perhaps we're not coming from the same energy of
focus on a shared resonance that I perhaps projected from
my end, thought was happening... Some kind of subtle
contentious edge arose here, and it surprises me.
It's fine, no worries at all, I'm just withdrawing and
leaving genuine appreciation for it all in the room... ;)
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11732 |
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Date: July 28, 2023 at 17:57:07
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The day Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday... |
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you wrote:
I
can't help but wonder, pamela, how many others witnessed
that momentous expression on her part from the same
frequency of experience......
--thats why I replied, Not too many witnessed or shared
that expression nor cared to, by giving her such
negative feedback, that is all I meant.
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Responses:
[11733] [11734] |
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11733 |
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Date: July 28, 2023 at 18:19:13
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The day Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday... |
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"--thats why I replied, Not too many witnessed or shared
that expression nor cared to, by giving her such
negative feedback, that is all I meant."
Okay then! Seems I'm correct that I've projected way too
much shared resonance between us in this conversation
than there ever was, even moreso than I realized...lol...
;)
Pamela, I wasn't referring to what you are, here --
publically expressed negative feedback from all sorts of
humans. I was referring to people like you and me, who've
been through and *transcended* similar levels of wounding
that Sinead experienced. Behind TV sets in their living
rooms. People for whom witnessing that changed their
lives, the stories of which we'll never know. Those
people. How many of them where there.
I'd bet my rent the numbers would be enormous, could we
know them.
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[11734] |
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11734 |
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Date: July 28, 2023 at 18:29:35
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: lol... Cxn: However many of them there were., not where there...(NT) |
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