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Why Sinéad O'Connor Matters
- Author: McCabe, Allyson
Released just two months prior to O’Connor’s death, this intimate and moving release from author Allyson McCabe reiterates the lasting impact she left behind. If you’re looking for creative...
Why Sinéad O'Connor Matters
- Author: McCabe, Allyson
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Released just two months prior to O’Connor’s death, this intimate and moving release from author Allyson McCabe reiterates the lasting impact she left behind. If you’re looking for creative...
About
A stirring defense of SinÉad O’Connor’s music and activism, and an indictment of the culture that cancelled her.
In 1990, SinÉad O’Connor’s video for “Nothing Compares 2 U” turned her into a superstar. Two years later, an appearance on Saturday Night Live turned her into a scandal. For many people-including, for years, the author-what they knew of O’Connor stopped there. Allyson McCabe believes it’s time to reassess our old judgments about SinÉad O’Connor and to expose the machinery that built her up and knocked her down.
Addressing triumph and struggle, sound and story, Why SinÉad O’Connor Matters argues that its subject has been repeatedly manipulated and misunderstood by a culture that is often hostile to women who speak their minds (in O’Connor’s case, by shaving her head, championing rappers, and tearing up a picture of the pope on live television). McCabe details O’Connor’s childhood abuse, her initial success, and the backlash against her radical politics without shying away from the difficult issues her career raises. She compares O’Connor to Madonna, another superstar who challenged the Catholic Church, and Prince, who wrote her biggest hit and allegedly assaulted her. A journalist herself, McCabe exposes how the media distorts not only how we see O’Connor but how we see ourselves, and she weighs the risks of telling a story that hits close to home.
In an era when popular understanding of mental health has improved and the public eagerly celebrates feminist struggles of the past, it can be easy to forget how O’Connor suffered for being herself. This is the book her admirers and defenders have been waiting for.
Contents
- Prologue
- Framing
- Take 1
- The Lion and the Cobra
- As Seen on MTV
- Rock-’n’-Roll Cassandra
- SPINning Sinéad
- She’ll Talk but You Won’t Listen
- The Takedown
- Is She Not Your Girl?
- This Means War
- We Do Not Want What She Has Got
- Wrecking Ball
- Things Need to Change
- We Need to Talk about Prince
- Hurt People Hurt
- Truthful Witness
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
Awards and reviews
Released just two months prior to O’Connor’s death, this intimate and moving release from author Allyson McCabe reiterates the lasting impact she left behind. If you’re looking for creative context and thoughtful criticism of the media’s role in O’Connor’s personal and creative well-being, Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters is an essential read
Part biography, part reflection on the meaning of O'Connor's artistry and actions, McCabe traces the achievements and media-generated scandals of O'Connor's career, and how she consistently sought to beat her own path in a culture that condemned women for veering off the course of sanctioned archetypes...What's most powerful is how McCabe draws on her own experience in parallel with O'Connor's. Perhaps this is O'Connor's most powerful asset as an artist: she opens up a space for people to see their struggles, their resistance and their trauma, in hers
A revealing reappraisal…McCabe skillfully renders the artist’s rise and ahead-of-her-time activism against the sociopolitical landscape of the 1980s and ’90s, persuasively rescuing O’Connor’s reputation from a mainstream media narrative that ‘all too often dismissed [her] as a slow-motion train wreck.’ Fans will be riveted
[A] very personal and thought-provoking account of the media’s role in [O'Connor's] stratospheric rise and ultimate implosion…A touching tribute. O’Connor has been the subject of recent and numerous articles, a documentary, and books (including her own), but McCabe’s take is unique in its critical analysis of the media and its attempts to silence and cancel O’Connor
Absolutely brilliant, heartbreaking, insightful, and personal. -- Margo Price
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