Honestly, We All Were The “Real Enemy” Sinéad O’Connor Had To Fight

On October 2, 1992, I was sleeping over at my friend Beth’s house. At some point Beth has fallen asleep on the couch but I, 13-year-old comedy nerd that I was, was committed to watching Saturday Night Live in its entirety. Tim Robbins was the host, but no one remembers that. Some of the most iconic bits from the show, “Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey” and Stuart Smalley, were a part of that night’s episode. But the only thing anyone remembers about that night was the moment that Sinéad O’Connor sang Bob Marley’s “War” and then spoke the words, “Fight the real enemy,” as she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II. As the story goes, Sinéad reportedly ripped up a photo of a child during the dress rehearsal, but swapped in the photo of the Pope during the broadcast, unbeknownst to Lorne Michaels or anyone else.

The show’s director chose not to light the applause sign after the performance, so it’s hard to know whether the stunned silence of the audience would have occurred naturally, but all I know is that while I was lying on Beth’s recliner, I witnessed something uncomfortable, shocking, and brave. I had no context for “War” at 13, so I had no idea that O’Connor had changed some of the lyrics to call out child abuse, but you can see the conviction on her face as she sang it. She knew she was taking a risk, that’s why she didn’t tell anyone what she was going to do beforehand, but you can bet she had no idea the size of the backlash she’d face in the aftermath. Many wished her dead. The very next week on SNL, host Joe Pesci said if he was hosting that night he “would have given her such a smack,” and the audience hollered, laughed and cheered at this threat of violence.

Sinéad, who died this week at age 56, was always transparent about the child abuse that she suffered at the hands of her mother, a woman whose emotional and physical abuse was committed in the name of Catholicism. She spoke about it often. She was vocal about all of her beliefs – against religion, against racism in music, against toxic masculinity (before we defined it as such), she stood against all of those things very publicly. To think that she might tone down her message when she had a public platform like SNL? I mean, by this point, this is a woman whose lyrics laid bare her grievances against the church and Margaret Thatcher, calling them out by name. She was a protest singer who unwittingly became a pop star, but no one at SNL or in the media acknowledged that, so her outspokenness was a betrayal of everything we expected from a mainstream musician.

And so, we cheered when someone threatened violence against her.

SNL was hardly the first time she would wear her beliefs on her sleeve. Or on her head. In 1989, in solidarity with hip-hop artists whose genre was not recognized with a category at the Grammys, she painted Public Enemy’s logo – a Black man in rifle crosshairs – on her head during her televised performance at the awards.

She had previously refused to appear on SNL in 1990 when she learned that misogynistic comedian Andrew Dice Clay would be the host. She refused to allow the National Anthem to be played before one of her concerts. (This marked another instance when a bombastic, powerful man, Frank Sinatra, would threaten violence against her for expressing her beliefs.) When her biggest single, “Nothing Compares 2 U” came out, she openly spoke about her tumultuous, even abusive, relationship with Prince, who wrote the song. (Her comments about him would resurface when Prince died in 2016, but she had been speaking about it as early as 1991.)

Sinéad’s death was announced the day after I saw Barbie and, I swear I’m not trying to be funny when I say this, I hope heaven, for Sinéad, is some version of Barbie Land, a place where she finds solidarity and comfort, where she is celebrated for being the strong woman she was. Where she can sleep in peace. In a lot of ways, at age 13 your brain is still mush, malleable and impressionable. Watching a woman only 12 years older than I was publicly denounce the Catholic church and stand up for victims of child abuse was not a common sight, and it stuck with me for thirty years because we don’t get a lot of public figures modeling that sort of behavior in such dramatic ways in the Real World. No, in the Real World, we laughed when she told us she was a victim. We threatened her when she stood up for others. She didn’t seek our approval, she never asked for a global audience, but the one that she got treated her like garbage. Honestly, it’s classic ’90s shit: the victim-blaming, the misogyny, the way we laughed at her pain. The way we laughed at her haircut. It’s actually impossible to justify why we did this, but in hindsight, it’s a terrible look for the media, and for America.

It’s ironic that we fought so hard to silence the woman with the voice of an angel. When she told us to “fight the real enemy,” it turned out that the real enemy was not just hiding in a pulpit, it was everywhere: in a lot of ways, we were the enemy.

It’s ironic that we fought so hard to silence the woman with the voice of an angel. When she told us to “fight the real enemy,” it turned out that the real enemy was not just hiding in a pulpit, it was everywhere: in a lot of ways, we were the enemy. Alas, her battle was fought long before any sort of reckoning in Hollywood, so she wouldn’t get her due until her 2022 documentary Nothing Compares, but even that didn’t afford her the public justice she deserved, it was a Band-Aid on her publicly tarnished persona. But plenty of us heard her battle cry that night, and I hope she knows that for every person who dismissed her, there was an army of people who heard her message loud and clear.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.