In 1991, then-Executive Director of Amnesty International Jack Healey guest edited the November issue of SPIN Magazine. Appearing on its cover was Sinead O'Connor, who sat down for a "nine cigarette interview" with magazine founder Bob Guccione Jr.
Just shy of her 25th birthday, the Ireland-born O'Connor had by then earned a reputation as pop's rabble rouser. The year before, she was threatened with an ass kicking from Frank Sinatra after being misreported as anti-American; that February, she withdrew her name from GRAMMY consideration in protest of the Gulf War.
O'Connor would touch upon these topics, along with such sensitive ones as abortion, child abuse and racism, in her lengthy conversation with Guccione. Read in hindsight, the interview seems to foreshadow what would go down as
her most divisive moment-completing a chilling acapella performance of Bob Marley's "War" by declaring the Catholic Church "the real enemy" and tearing Pope John Paul II's photo to bits, on Saturday Night Live the following October.
• On abortion: "I just believe that if a child is meant to be born it will be born. It doesn't really matter whether you have an abortion or a miscarriage. The whole issue is pro-choice. I wouldn't lobby for or against abortion, but I would lobby very strongly for the right of women to have control over their own bodies and make decisions for themselves. Nobody has the right to tell anyone else what to think or believe. Especially the Catholic church with the amount of murdering and pillaging that it's done."
• On child abuse: "If a child is being abused it will react in any number of different ways. What I did was I went into myself. I couldn't communicate with anybody, I couldn't study. I could read and write but I had no interest in it, I couldn't get out of my own head.
"The cause of all of the world's problems, as far as I'm concerned, is child abuse... The basic problem of the whole world is child abuse."
• On sex in hip-hop: "Of course, there's sexism, but if you're going to give out about it in Black music then give the fuck out about it in white music, too. There are examples of it all over the place of appalling videos of women being abused. What about that 'Cherry Pie' record with the video with the girl being hosed down? I mean, what's that saying?
"It's alright for white men to be sexy. It's not alright for Black men to be sexy. The second we as white women started to become attracted to Black men, that's when the trouble started. The second we started thinking, 'Oh, these are nice people,' that's when the trouble started. They don't want us having Black men's babies. They don't want us understanding the Black man and the Black race."
• On men: "I don't dream about a man. I don't dream about the things I was brought up to dream about. That's all bullshit, too. That's child abuse, too. You are brought up to believe that a woman is not a complete woman unless she has found a man, et cetera, et cetera, and had children. That's bollocks.
"I want to be complete by myself. You can be incomplete with a man. What I'm aiming for is to be a complete person. And if that means a man is with me, great, but I'm not complete because he’s with me."
• On her (lack of) hair: "Shaving my head to me was never a conscious thing. I was never making a statement. I just was bored one day and I wanted to shave my head, and that was literally all there was to it. I already had it shaved on the sides and it was about as far as I could go... I suppose it is a subconscious rejection of conformity and of the family and everything that the word 'family' can mean."
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Shout out to Euphoria for making me obsessed with this Sinead deep cut and leading me down this rabbit hole!
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