Nothing compares 2 U

A voice crying out in the wilderness

Shuhada' Sadaqat, known better as the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor, died last week and she leaves in her wake more music and thoughts than we’ve been able to digest. We don’t know the details of her leave-taking, and we probably don’t need to. What we do know was that Sadaqat/O’Connor was unfailingly herself in an industry that does not welcome rough edges, and we know that she brooked no nonsense, and frankly, it didn’t seem to matter to her whether we understood her or not.

Most of us were introduced to the singer with a shaved head, a beautiful face and a keening voice that was so arresting radio could not contain it.

Oh, that keen.

Interviewers never quite knew what to do with her, and it was often easier to just label her mentally ill and move on. She was open about her mental health (radically so), but she was so much more than her struggles. She was a mother and an artist and a protest singer who was unfailingly vested in lifting the veil of superstardom (as when she told her kids to call her accountant before they called emergency, should she ever be found dead). She was one artist who would be herself and no other.

Years before the Boston Globe did some heavy lifting, the singer tried to warn us about the horrific abuse going on at the hands of certain of the Catholic hierarchy. She was a harbinger with news we didn’t want to hear, though you could not ignore her bona fides as a survivor of the Magdalene Laundries. When she tore up the picture of the pope on “Saturday Night Live,” some of her biggest detractors were clergy later found guilty of abusing the most vulnerable of their flock.

They are dead now and burning in hell, and she is dead and soaring — or so I want to think — above it all.

Let us let the singer — with help from U2’s The Edge — have the last word. Rest easy, heroine.