The New York Times recently published a profile of Sinéad O’Connor by Amanda Hess that tries to declare vindication for O’Connor’s notorious 1992 protest on Saturday Night Live in which she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on live television while declaring, “Fight the real enemy!” You can watch that here:
According to Hall:
Few cultural castaways have been more vindicated by the passage of time: child sexual abuse, and its cover-up within the Catholic Church, is no longer an open secret. John Paul II finally acknowledged the church’s role in 2001, nearly a decade after O’Connor’s act of defiance. But the overreaction to O’Connor was not just about whether she was right or wrong; it was about the kinds of provocations we accept from women in music.
Now, if you read the profile of O’Connor, it comes through clearly that she is a badly broken person — beaten by her mother throughout childhood, with serious substance-abuse problems (“I can’t remember many details because I was constantly stoned”) — who never wanted to be a pop star, and is happier away from the spotlight, where she has changed her name and converted to Islam. If you view her SNL stunt as an effort to self-destruct her pop-music stardom as a means of saving her sanity and refocusing her art away from the demands of radio, then it does appear to have been successful. It was not the last time she did something like this; in 2018 she tweeted, “I’m terribly sorry. What I’m about to say is something so racist I never thought my soul could ever feel it. But truly I never wanna spend time with white people again (if that’s what non-muslims are called). Not for one moment, for any reason. They are disgusting.” She later claimed that she was just trying to get herself kicked off of Twitter by being racist.
If we are measuring by any yardstick other than deliberate self-sabotage, however, the problem with declaring O’Connor’s protest “vindicated” is that it fails to grapple with the fact that her protest was not only spectacularly unsuccessful and counterproductive, it was essentially designed to be so. Onstage, O’Connor did not even bother to explain what she was protesting the Church about. She instead took on the hugely popular Pope — who had been one of the defining figures in the great, winning cultural struggle against the evil and dehumanizing brutality of Communism over the previous decade and a half — and declared him, personally, to be “evil” and “the real enemy.” It was commonly understood as an attack on the Catholic Church and its billion-plus believers. In that sense, it was very much like attacking the American flag and the National Anthem precisely for their symbolic power — a protest designed to inflame rather than persuade, and one that is sure to turn people away from the topic of the protest. There is a strange romance, among people on the left half of the political spectrum, with the idea that it is noble to stage a protest that alienates rather than engages the audience, as a way of demonstrating the moral superiority of the protester over the common people.
Was O’Connor penalized more harshly for being a woman? An ironic question, given that one of the people who criticized her was Madonna, who has regularly used provocations to accentuate her career. There is no question that O’Connor suffered more for this kind of protest as a pop singer than a rock star would have. A male pop star would likely have suffered many of the same slings and arrows. But it is certainly true that, the occasional Madonna or Lady Gaga aside, women in pop music tend to be treated as unserious and uncontroversial — or if they do stir controversy, they are encouraged to do so by being hypersexualized or by being blandly conformist Democratic partisans, rather than by the kind of things we expect from punk rockers. That was even truer in 1992.