Sinéad O’Connor, remember her? The “Nothing Compares 2 U” singer has said nobody wants females running the world. The world famous singer was on the Irish Times Women’s Podcast promoting her memoir “Rememberings”.
The music industry sexualises women artists as a way to silence them, Sinéad O’Connor said on the latest episode of the Irish Times Women’s Podcast, the Irish Times reported.
O’Connor, who also goes by the name Shuhada Sadaqat since converting to Islam, discusses how women are treated in the music industry. “The industry is frightened of music,” she said. “That’s why they have been engaged in the business, for the last 15 years, of silencing and grooming potential songwriters, by having the artists sexualise themselves.”
“The industry has managed to completely pervert the idea of female liberation … They’re giving little girls the idea that all they are worth is how they look.”
In a wide-ranging conversation, she also speaks about abuse in her childhood, escaping Ireland, a terrifying visit to Prince’s house and how tearing up the pope photograph “rerailed” as opposed to “derailed” her careers.
She also explored a reference in the book to her mother, who died in a car crash when the singer was just 18. “I couldn’t admit I was angry with my mother,” O’Connor writes. “So I took it out on the world and burned nearly every bridge I ever crossed.”
She looks back on the two years she spent in An Grianán, a Dublin residential school for girls with behavioural problems. She was sent there as a teenager after being caught shoplifting a pair of gold shoes for a friend to wear at a Pretenders concert.
She recalls too the kindness of a nun in the home “who really loved me”. That nun bought the singer her first guitar and Bob Dylan sheet music, in the hope that music would stop teenage O’Connor thieving.
“She somehow deduced that I should be doing music … that the only way we’re going to stop this f**ker ending up in Mountjoy is to get her a guitar and some music, and it worked.”
