- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: It's generally agreed these days that this is why the Saturday Night Live photo incident did so much damage to her career. It's not that she tore up a picture of the Pope, it's that she did it without warning or context. Had she instead said something like, "The Catholic Church has covered up hundreds of cases of child abuse for decades - fight the real enemy!" and then torn up the photo, it's quite likely she would have survived the blowback.
- Covered Up: Prince originally penned "Nothing Compares 2 U" for the Family, a band that he brought together and produced in-between his own projects, but their version flew under the radar outside of people who were incredibly devoted to Prince's associates. Sinéad's version in 1990, meanwhile, soared to the top of the Billboard charts in the U.S. The music video also received heavy rotation on MTV and has inspired pop artists such as Sia, Britney Spears, and even Beyoncé to perform in her style. However, Sinéad emphasized the fact that she never even conferred with Prince before or during the recording, and this led to a tumultuous relationship between them in later years.note
- Harsher in Hindsight: The perception of the Saturday Night Live incident as an attention-grabbing stunt at the time is certainly this, given than Sinéad was actually right about everything. In the next year or two, it became public knowledge that literally thousands of children had been abused by Irish clergy, and the Irish church had spent years organizing a massive cover-up. It later became apparent that the phenomenon wasn't just confined to Ireland. Spotlight winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2016 is a sign that mainstream culture now accepts that sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy isn't just something that Sinéad kept going on and on about. If anything, the release of Spotlight just made people realize that she was, tragically, only ahead of the rest of us by more than ten years, taking into account the child abuse she suffered. The music journalist Neil McCormick, reviewing O'Connor's memoir, noted that a few years after the extent of child abuse by the clergy had become a public scandal in Ireland, a mural appeared on a wall in Dublin saying ''Sorry, Sinéad, You Were Right All Along."
- Overshadowed by Controversy: She spent most of her life dogged by the bad press generated by tearing up a photo of the highly popular Pope John Paul II on-air to protest child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church when performing on Saturday Night Live in 1992, which analysts generally credit with ending her mainstream popularity. Even after O'Connor was vindicated by multiple revelations in the 21st century about the true extent of Catholic child sexual abuse, her reputation is still defined by the SNL performance and the reactions it spawned.
- Signature Song: "Nothing Compares 2 U" is still her most famous song.
- Vindicated by History: Though it hasn't restored her to her previous fame, she has a loyal fanbase and a lot of critics and fellow musicians who lionize her work and view her as a major influence. The SNL incident has also been seen in a different light over time due to the depth of horrific sexual abuse among the Catholic Church, both in the United States and her native Ireland, becoming much clearer.
- The Woobie: The protagonist in "Nothing Compares 2 U" (which isn't Sinéad herself, as it's a cover). She's had a really bad breakup, and is basically having a massive Heroic BSoD, and seems on the verge of passing the Despair Event Horizon.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/SineadOConnor
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