The New York Times
November 1, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Why Sinead O'Connor Hit a Nerve

By Jon Pareles

   You think it's easy to get booed at Madison Square Garden? Maybe it is for a
visiting hockey team, but at a rock concert, drawing boos qualifies as a
perverse kind of achievement. Sinead O'Connor, who was booed (as well as
cheered) at the Bob Dylan tribute on Oct. 16, once again showed that she has a
gift that's increasingly rare.: the ability to stir full-fledged outrage.  She
has stumbled onto the new 1990's taboo: taking on an authority figure.

   O'Connor was booed because, 13 days earlier, she had torn up a photograph of
Pope John Paul II on NBC's "Saturday Night Live," saying, "Fight the real
enemy." Compounding her impropriety, she dropped her scheduled Dylan song and
reprised "War," the anti-racism song by Bob Marley and Haile Selassie. Her
expression was timorous, defiant, martyred, and she made all the late-edition
newspapers and television news.

    Meanwhile, the tabloids happily reported, Madonna (no stranger to
recontextualized Christian symbols) told The Irish Times: "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 added, "If she is against the Roman Catholic Church and
she has a problem with them, I think she should talk about it."

   She did: last week, O'Connor released an open letter, linking her being
abused as a child to "the history of my people" and charging, "The Catholic
church has controlled us by controlling education, through their teachings on
sexuality, marriage, birth control and abortion, and most spectacularly through
the lies they taught us with their history books." The letter concluded, "My
story is the story of countless millions of children whose families and nations
were torn apart for money in the name of Jesus Christ." Proselytizing as
imperialism as child abuse -- quite a leap.

   Madonna's reaction may have been professional jealousy. After Madonna had
herself gowned, harnessed, strapped down and fully stripped to promote her album
"Erotica" and her book "Sex," O'Connor stole the spotlight with one photograph
of a fully-clothed man. But the other vilification that descended on O'Connor
showed she had struck a nerve.

   Sex, which used to be a guaranteed shocker, has become a popular
entertainment, with triple-X tapes on home VCR's and lubricious innuendo in
every sitcom. Visual and telephone sex, sex as commercial spectacle, may have
moved in where fear of AIDS has made physical sex far less casual. Looking is
safe; touching is not.

   But as public standards of viewable sexual behavior have changed, a new kind
of taboo is gaining force: challenging authority and its religious version,
blasphemy. (Another button-pusher, sexual harassment, has more to do with power
and authority than with titillation.) In an American culture that used to prize
the loner, the wiseguy, the maverick, defense of authority is on the rise,
whether it's a backlash against permissiveness or fear of impending anarchy.

   Anti-authority sentiments raise hackles highest when the challenge comes from
insubordinate blacks (like Ice-T with "Cop Killer") or women, like O'Connor. If
a heavy-metal band took a picture of the Pope, hung it on an upside-down cross
and burned it, the act would likely be greeted with yawns -- that old bit again?
But waifish female 25-year-olds like O'Connor don't have the same prerogative.
While bullies like Axl Rose are lionized as rock-and-roll rebels simply for
lashing out at the press -- like so many losing political candidates -- O'Connor
draws real outrage because she doesn't know her place.

   Not that O'Connor isn't a loose cannon. She has a penchant for the
impassioned but mis-targeted gesture: boycotting the Grammy Awards, refusing to
perform on a "Saturday Night Live" show featuring Andrew Dice Clay, refusing to
let "The Star-Spangled Banner" be played before a concert, singing a Bob Marley
song at a Bob Dylan tribute. Tearing up the Pope's photograph may have been the
best way she could envision to condemn Catholicism, but she surely would have
thought twice about tearing up a photograph of Louis Farrakhan or the
Lubavitcher Rebbe.

   She baffles the likes of Madonna by making her gestures without game plans or
tie-ins. "War" doesn't appear on her new album, "Am I Not Your Girl?" -- a
collection of standards accompanied by orchestra and sung in the voice of a
terrified child who believes every unhappy word.

   Yet for all O'Connor's sincerity -- and I don't doubt that she means
everything she blurts -- she also has superb opportunistic reflexes; she hits
nerves almost despite herself. She has achieved wide recognition, though
notoriety doesn't seem likely to pay off for her. Even her most ardent fans are
likely to be disgusted by some of her statements in the current issue of Rolling
Stone, like her contention that Mike Tyson was used by the woman he raped.

   Still, O'Connor does have, as Joan Baez said, "the courage to screw up."
After all, isn't it time that somebody actually did something on live television
that would never be sanctioned in advance? She burned her bridges with
television executives -- those faceless authorities -- when she tore up the
Pope's photograph.

   From O'Connor's follow-up letter, it's clear that she has the attitude that
afflicts all post-Romantic artists: the conviction that her private problems are
the world's concern. From the unwillingness or inability to distinguish between
private torments and public affairs come great statements and petty ones, raw
nuttiness and carefully honed masterpieces. It's easy to disagree with
O'Connor's latest outbursts. But better the occasional passionate, off-the-wall
eruption -- taking the chance that might stir up outrage -- than a culture of
safety and calculation.