Miley Cyrus "plays" Sinead O'Connor

When mental mealth struggles get too real to monetise

At the SNL 50th anniversary concert this weekend, there were several charming moments: Cher, age 78, performing ‘If I could Turn Back Time’ in her original iconic video outfit. Pedro Pascal and Paul Rudd visibly transported to their own youths by Devo. Will Ferrell and Ana Gasteyer interpolating Kendrick Lamar. Amongst the joyful silliness, what captured attention in a far bleaker way was Miley Cyrus’ cover of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, written by Prince but popularised by Sinead O’Connor. The moment stung because of the appalling manner in which Saturday Night Live had treated O’Connor in her life time, long before her lonely 2023 death.

On October 3rd 1992 the then 26 year old O’Connor appeared on the show, culminating in her tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II whilst saying “Fight the real enemy”. This was nine years before The Pope acknowledged the child abuse scandal festering within the church, of which O’Connor was arguably a victim (her victimiser was her devoutly religious, extremely violent Mother). As O’Connor’s career imploded under a barrage of death threats and pulled radio play, SNL offered no pastoral care and, in fact, the following week, allowed host Joe Pesci to both condemn her and threaten her with physical violence were they to cross paths. The following week, at a Bob Dylan tribute concert, she was booed off stage in front of 18,000 people.

Sinead continued to make music (my favourite song of hers is actually ‘No Man’s Woman’ from 2000s ‘Faith and Courage’). But America was off the table. In 1993, they made stars of The Cranberries who, to my mind, became so huge in America because Dolores O’Riordan was the more palatable alternative to O’Connor: beautiful crop haired Irish waif with the voice of an angel but without the bothersome politics, trauma and rage (except, it seems, internally - O’Riordan also died young in dire circumstances).

Whatever O’Riordan was feeling inside, unlike Sinead she masked it enough to pass as appealingly vulnerable, which is more easily monetised by men than anger (this was the era of the films ‘Girl, Interrupted’ and ‘Crazy/Beautiful’. I have a lot of time for both, particularly the former, but they are both made by men and the lead women are never unattractive as they unravel, it is shot to heighten their erotic appeal. If you did a triple bill with ‘The Queens Gambit’ the tag line could be: “Troubled young women don’t wear bras and they also don’t need them”).

I guess I have been sold this way myself. I know the US cover of my 2012 mental health memoir, “Your Voice In My Head" has “her” ie: me, a young body angled on the couch of a psychiatrist - or are we to think, from her dishevelled blouse, that the anti-heroine was using the sofa for something else? I like that cover but I understand what it was doing and why it bothered my mother.

It was 22 years after the indelible clip of O’Connor crying to camera for ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ that Miley Cyrus made her smash video for ‘Wrecking Ball’. Only, this being 2012, she did the crying to camera naked as she straddled - yes - a wrecking ball. Having suffered a major psychiatric breakdown at the end of 2011, O’Connor was by then an active user of twitter, using social media as many people struggling with mental health do - to feel a sense of intimacy without needing to leave the house. She somewhat maternally, tweeted that Miley didn’t need to sing naked, that her talent should be enough. Cyrus, then and now a gigantic star compared the long fallen singer, responded by retweeting a selection of O’Connor’s desperate 2011 cries for help, introducing them with the line ‘BEFORE THERE WAS AMANDA BYNES THERE WAS…’

An important note: I loved Miley the moment I saw her. The incredibly powerful singing voice, the shock of the bass deep speaking voice on a teen girl, the star presence. I thought her cover of Tom Petty’s ‘Wildflowers’ was beautiful. I loved how she dressed. I appreciated, in promoting the release of Wrecking Ball with its tearstained video, that she discussed her mental health challenges as a young woman in the public eye.

So I found her weaponising O’Connor’s tweets so unfathomably cruel it made me gasp. Even within the cesspool that is Twitter, this remains one of the worst things I’ve seen there. That she brought in the former teen star Amanda Bynes, a talented actress who had everything and now lives a terribly diminished life, haunted by mental health/addiction issues, doubles the cruelty. You cannot market Amanda Bynes as sexily off balance and vulnerable the way Cyrus managed with Wrecking Ball. Amanda Bynes cannot do the career she loved anymore because of her illness.

The same went for Margot Kidder, the same for Shelly Duvall, none of them considered employable post-breakdown, none able to stay in the business they excelled in. Three women who were really and truly thrown away. Miley’s brilliant star continued - continues - to ascend. It’s a version of what they talk about in the Hollywood satire ‘Tropic Thunder’. In Tropic Thunder, Robert Downey’s character (a white method actor who has experimental pigmentation surgery to “become” black for a role) upbraids Ben Stiller’s character for having starred in a film called ‘Simple Jack’. In it, as Downey put it, “You went full retard! An actor can never go full retard!” He explains that ‘Forrest Gump’ and ‘I Am Sam’ had won awards because they’d both correctly calibrated what the public wants in terms of neurodiversity, measured exactly the amount they can take before they get revolted. In the female version, you can monetise mental health struggles if you still look “good” naked.