Album covers used to be mythically important — they could etch the image of a musician forever in your mind’s eye. In “Nothing Compares,” Kathryn Ferguson’s incisive and poignant docume…
Album covers used to be mythically important — they could etch the image of a musician forever in your mind’s eye. In “,” Kathryn Ferguson’s incisive and poignant documentary about the life and career of Sinéad O’Connor, we see the image that was chosen in 1987 for the cover of O’Connor’s first album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” made when she was 20 years old and pregnant: an extraordinary photograph of Sinéad in mid-scream.
Yet her vision of it is large. From a young age, O’Connor had the perception to link the domestic abuse she suffered to the backdrop that had helped shape it: the stern punitive force with which the Catholic Church held Ireland in its grip, the oppression that she says shaped her mother, her mother’s mother, and so on, going back for generations. The first rock ‘n’ rollers were throwing off the sexual shackles of Victorianism.
If O’Connor, who was born in 1966, had been born 10 years earlier, or in Manchester, England, she might havea punk. But she forged her own sound: caterwauling dance pop with a glint of Enya. For someone as furious as she was, and as subversive of conventional gender images, she allowed a breath of romance into the equation — it’s there in the raw erotic hunger with which she sings “I Want Your .