Sinead,
First of all, know that I’m saying this with a motherly love, and that however biting the sarcasm/satire might get in the next few paragraphs, I genuinely do not wish you any negativity or duress.
Much and more has been made of the open letter that you recently wrote to Miley Cyrus, advising her on her twerking, her increasingly weird public persona, her perceived exploitation at the hands of the music/media industries, and her overall downward spiral from sanity.
“Much and more” is an expression I stole from the Game of Thrones series of books, I started using it as a subtle way to find out if people have read them. Like a verbal secret handshake. If you don’t get the reference, that’s okay, it just means you haven’t spent thousands of pages reading overly detailed descriptions of surcoats and morning meals.
Sinead (for some reason I always read that for a nanosecond as Sinbad, which, not as a diss to you, would be significantly cooler in terms of name badassery. Sinbad makes me think of a garish pirate adventurer and scoundrel, Sinead makes me think of those animal commercials where they do slow zooms on cute puppy pics and play sad music until you promise to adopt an entire wagon of dogs), in true glutton-for-punishment form, you couldn’t be happy with one open letter, so after Miley blew off your original writing with a couple snarky tweets, you wrote her THREE MORE sort of half-sane, increasingly defensive open letters and now the media is calling it a “feud” and Miley’s legions of disciples are dousing you with barrels full of haterade like you’re a coach that just won the Super Bowl. You feel hurt, attacked, betrayed…and you were only trying to help! Woe is you! …Well, not exactly.
You see, Sinead, it’s not that people hate you, it’s not that people love you. It’s that people don’t care about you. I don’t mean that in a mean way, like that nobody cares about you or that you don’t have value enough to be worth caring about, I mean People, the masses of asses (I just came up with that but you can use it if you want), generally do not have a stake or an interest in you or your life. Does that sound harsh? Well it may be, in light of what you’re used to, but keep in mind that for the 99.9999% of us in the world that aren’t world famous singers, that’s pretty much the norm. We don’t care about ourselves. We don’t care about you. I don’t care about you (or Miley for that matter). And that’s okay.
Sinead, I know exactly two facts about you: 1) you tore a picture of the Pope in half on SNL in the 90s, which was pretty controversial back before the FCC said “f*** it” and decided to allow shit, the F word, and nudity on television, and 2) you’re Irish. And to be honest I’m not even 100% sure about that second one, I just know (think?) you’re not American and your name is Sinead O’Connor, so call it a high-probability guess (read: racist stereotype). And that’s all right, because you don’t need my love, opinion, or approval to continue to be a functioning human being, a good mother, and whatever else you’re in to. You don’t need to engage in a one-way PR rivalry with a pop product whose entire existence can be traced back to a line dancing country song for your own validity. It’s nice that you wanted to help, and I don’t know you so I won’t imply that there was any ulterior motive of using someone else’s hype as a way to get a little attention for yourself (though that would certainly be the case if it were me in your shoes…in fact this very blog is meant to at least partly cash in on some of that attention floating around), but that’s the bitch of advising: it’s up to the advisee to decide if they actually want to follow your advice or not. And if you’re surprised that Miley retorted in a childish, unintelligent, and mean sort of way, well then that’s on you for not doing any research on your subject. I mean, this is a girl whose entire public relations strategy can essentially be summed up with:
;-P
…does that strike you as the sort of person looking to take thoughtful counsel from her elders, no matter how well intentioned or well known?
So hey, you took your best shot at helping someone you felt was in need, you gave us some classic Sinead anti-establishment zingers, and you got media attention without having to rip up any 8×10 glossies of the blessed father (do Catholics call him that or is that blasphemy?). Ideal outcome? No. But your fans still love and support you, you got your message out to a ton of little girls who are undoubtedly in need of more “your value isn’t a byproduct of how willing you are to undress and how good you look while undressing” than they get from the rest of society, and that’s got to count for something. And hey, it could be worse, you could be Eli Manning, who doesn’t have the pressures and exploitations of being a teen pop princess to use an excuse for his poor performance/breakdown. So there’s that. In the meantime, I hope you’re well and that this whole thing doesn’t ruin your morning meal of potato soup or make it any harder to keep the kids from getting your Lucky Charms. Buck up kid, you’re just an O, E, and Y away from being related to Sean Connery, and that’s pretty cool. (That’s how relations work, right? You’re automatically related to anyone with the same last name as you? My ancestry.com free trial expired before I could find out).
Play on,
Dustin
Why can’t they kiss and make up like Miley kissed that sledgehammer?
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