Music Monday: Sinead Forever

I haven’t stopped feeling sad about Sinead O’Connor. She was at once the fiercest and the most vulnerable of superstars. She survived her abusive childhood. She made it out of the toxic 90s. She kept changing, searching, fighting to understand it all. She spent, by her own admission, about six years in and out of a psychiatric hospitals and struggled mightily with her mental health over the years (including multiple suicide attempts). But, as she told the Guardian in 2021:

“Clearly God thinks I’m such a pain in the arse that he doesn’t want me either. I’m a strong little fucker. I wasn’t meant to die.”

No, she wasn’t. But, alas, she has. And I will miss her brilliance, and all the messiness that followed along with it, forever.

But what lives on for all of us, I hope, is her brilliance. Not her perfection, because no one is perfect and she was obviously no exception. But how alive and how aware she was. How smart. How talented. How funny. How charismatic. And, yes, how freaking hot she was. Hey, we all mourn in our own ways. And one of the ways I am doing that is by sharing her stylish, cheeky and endlessly sultry version of Cole Porter’s “You Do Something To Me.” She sure did that voodoo that she did so well. She surely did. Happy Monday, kittens.

p.s. Also, did you clock the queer couples in that video? That’s no accident, as the song was recorded as part of one of the first major music benefits for AIDS. And it’s important to remember, this was 1990. This was before Ellen, Melissa, heck before k.d. came out. She’s been fighting the real enemy since the very beginning.