Don’t Let Them Turn Sinead Into Their Martyr

Big Music abandoned her. They shouldn't get to claim her now.

© rockarchive.com

Part 1: Prologue

The decrepit bus jounced from pothole to pothole, engine laboring, gears grinding, making me wonder if we would get where we were going. “Where” was a little village on the Italian coast famous for its ceramics. My girlfriend was sitting next to me, gazing out the window at the passing scenery — mostly little clusters of whitewashed, crooked stone houses and small plots of land planted with olives.

Across from us sat an elderly man, staring ahead with a vaguely sad expression on his face. Suddenly, he turned to look at us and smiled.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“The U.S.,” I replied. “And you?”

“Chicago. But I was actually born close to here.” If he had an accent, it was very slight.

I asked, “Do you come back here a lot?”

He shook his head. “It’s the first time I’ve been back since I moved to the States with my parents. Let me guess, you two just finished college.” He looked steadily at me, his eyes bright.

In the summer after we graduated from college, my girlfriend and I, like so many others, took a trip to Europe. Unlike many of our classmates who did so, we were dirt poor — we had to work 20–30 hours per week through college on top of the brutal academic workload. But we had survived, and there was no way we would miss this trip.

She was first-generation Italian-American, and she dreamed of seeing her parents’ ancestral home. Her great uncle, whom she had never met, was one of the well-known sculptors in the village we were headed for. That was the only reason we even knew the place existed. It was nice to be headed someplace off the usual tourist trail.

I had lived in Europe as a child (my dad was transferred around a lot) and was eager to revisit some of those places as a newly minted adult. I had some basic travel skills; she had never traveled before. We were pretty much novices. We had scraped together barely enough money to assure us we wouldn’t starve, and set off.

I told the old man our story in a couple of sentences and then asked what brought him back after all this time. He stared ahead for a while, then turned back to me.

“I found out a few months ago that I have cancer. No, no, don’t feel sorry for me! We all have to go. But I needed to see my hometown again before I died. I was even thinking about moving back here — I may still have a couple of years.”

“So what do you think? Will you move back?”

The sad expression returned to his face. I will never forget that look. He replied,

“No, I don’t think so. I was nostalgic for the place, but I also hoped some things had changed.” He shook his head. “They haven’t.”

“What hasn’t changed?”

“Most of the people are still poor. Their lives haven’t improved in all this time.” Then his face became harder, with a hint of anger.

“And the churches have only become bigger and fancier. The biggest building in every village is a church. I thought by now, people would have taken off the blindfolds. But the blindfolds are too thick and too tight.” His expression became wistful again, and he softly concluded,

“I’m afraid of what I will find in my village.”

Part 2: Gangs

I could not help thinking of this conversation over the years, as the Catholic Church spawned scandal after scandal, mostly involving sexual abuse of children. There were subsidiary scandals, like corruption and money laundering, mostly associated with the Church’s attempts to cover up the main crimes.

It became clear to me that the Church basically operates like an enormous gang, one that makes groups like the Crips look small and amateurish. The Church is richer than God. It has a standing army. It has agents worldwide to twist arms and pay bribes to corrupt governments so that it can operate with impunity. And it uses a lot of this power to escape accountability for its ongoing crimes against humanity.

I did not follow Sinead O’Connor’s career closely, but liked her voice and her political stances. I knew about her protest on SNL. That was the one when she tore up the Pope’s picture to call attention to the Church’s massive child abuse problem. I honestly did not realize how thorough and brutal the retribution was over the years.

Her career and livelihood were almost destroyed. She was ostracized and shamed by the church, Hollywood, and the television industry. Only after her recent death did I learn the extent of these institutions' revenge on her. Worst of all, Big Music joined in ganging up on her. The industry, once built in large part on protest music like rock and roll, cast her out.

The stream of tributes coming from recording industry executives now is nauseating. Where were they when Sinead was being vilified? I chalked this all up to hypocrisy, ass-covering, and a little opportunism. Then I realized that it was worse than that. Big Music thrives on martyrs. They continue to milk the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Amy Winehouse (to name just three — there are many more) for all they were worth.

What is particularly horrifying is that when those people were alive, the industry willingly trafficked in nastiness toward them. They were all slandered in the press as noisy, ugly, dangerous, or broken, and Big Music went along because messy stories sell. Then, the day they died, they were put on the fast track to sainthood.

Part 3: Grifters and Martyrs

Every good grift needs a martyr (or three). There are few institutions more aware of this fact than the Catholic Church. After all, it is entirely built on exploiting the uber-martyr, Jesus, to extract penance from its followers. But it doesn’t stop there. Many of the saints are martyrs. The Church itself originally murdered some of these before being rehabilitated — think Joan of Arc.

What makes for a good martyr? The most important criterion is that you can’t speak up for yourself. Usually, it’s because you are conveniently dead, but it can also be because you are too young, powerless, or naïve to be able to speak for yourself even while alive. That fit Joan to a T. Of course, she was only useful up to a point, and then she was sacrificed.

Big Music is one of the few institutions that rivals the Church in knowing instinctively how to exploit a potential martyr. Industries like banking and automobiles have other kinds of assets, but Big Music has only the artists and their stories. It has to figure out how to maximize its return on these assets.

At one time, Big Music decided Sinead was too much trouble to defend, so it discarded her. Seeing the emotional outpouring over her death, and now that she can’t speak for herself, its bosses are jumping to own her story. Especially now that she can’t speak for herself. They are trying to turn her into a martyr for their fun and profit.

Shame on them.