Sinead O’Connor’s Beef With Miley Cyrus Explained
The ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ singer set her sights on the ‘Wrecking Ball’ crooner back in 2014.
As we mourn Sinead O’Connor’s death Wednesday at 56, we’re reminded of the talented but controversial Irish singer’s well-documented conflicts with the Pope and Prince. What’s not as known is her beef with Miley Cyrus.
In the summer of 2014, when O’Connor was promoting her then-new 10th album, I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss, the “Nothing Compares 2 U” singer set her sights on Cyrus, who then was riding high with the hit “Wrecking Ball.”
On the cover for that album, O’Connor, famously known for her shaved head, sported a wig and form-fitting dress, but she had thoughts about how Cyrus was using Sєx to sell her songs and the two singers engaged in a war over Twitter.
O’Connor initially shaved her head early in her career to thwart attempts by her label to market her as a Sєx symbol but said at the time that she had no problem with women showing off their feminine side, as she did on the cover of I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss.
“I’ve never said that women shouldn’t dress like women; what I’ve said is that you don’t have to be naked on a wrecking ball and licking a sledgehammer,” she told me at the time. “You can be very, very Sєxy without actually taking any of your clothes off or twerking.
That’s what I’m interested in showing, and when you look at the sH๏τ, that’s what you see. There’s nothing in those pH๏τographs but a little leg showing, but here you have a H๏τ woman, which isn’t actually me — it is me, but I don’t really look like that. I’m not going to go around trying to look like that.”
Cyrus, however, had nothing but praise for O’Connor. “I think she’s an incredible artist, I think she’s an awesome songwriter, and I was really inspired by her for my ‘Wrecking Ball’ video, which was what started the whole thing,” Cyrus said in an interview with Today Show’s Matt Lauer.
“I don’t know how someone can start a fight with somebody who said, ‘Hey, I really respect you. And I really love what you did.’ ‘You know what? You suck! I don’t like you!’ That was kind of crazy. But as I said, I’m a big fan of hers, so it doesn’t really matter. It’s all good.”
O’Connor also sported a glammed-up look in the video for the 2014 album track “Take Me to Church,” but it was contrasted with footage of her own less-glam shaved-head look.
At the time, O’Connor also said she had plans for another video that would take aim at Cyrus. “Myself and my producer are going to make a video at some point that is kind of like a piss-take of the ‘Wrecking Ball’ video,” she said. “We’re going to get a granny suit, so it looks like a naked fat old granny. Me in a video as a fat granny crawling around with a sludge hammer. I’m not sure what song we’re going to do it for yet.”
Although it appears that video never materialized, there are plenty of clips inspired by the Sinead-Miley beef on YouTube, including the mashup “Nothing Compares to Wrecking Ball” and Cyrus performing her own song along with a cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the Prince-penned song that became O’Connor’s biggest hit.
