With her bald head and breathtaking vocal style, Sinéad O’Connor attracted plenty of attention with her searing 1988 debut album, The Lion and the Cobra. But it was her 1990 follow-up, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, that propelled the Irish singer-songwriter, then 23, to pop-culture ubiquity. Driven by the Prince-written single “Nothing Compares 2 U” and a music video in which she shed real tears, her sophomore set topped the Billboard 200 on April 28 and remained there for six weeks. (The song had begun a four-week reign atop the Billboard Hot 100 a week earlier.)
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O’Connor found her mass appeal an ill fit. She refused to perform in concert if the U.S. national anthem was played beforehand — prompting Frank Sinatra to threaten to “kick her ass” — and, most famously, on the Oct. 3, 1992 episode of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, she ripped up an image of Pope John Paul II to protest child abuse by the church. Although the controversy put a chill on her radio play stateside, she charted eight more albums on the Billboard 200, including her most recent, 2014’s I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss.
In March, O’Connor announced on Facebook that she would stop performing “Nothing Compares 2 U” live because she no longer connects to it. “My job is to be emotionally available,” she wrote, adding: “If I were to sing it just to please people, I wouldn’t be doing my job right.”