John Heilemann

John Heilemann Instagram – More than 48 hours after hearing the news, I still can’t find any words to say that make even vauge or remote sense of, let alone do justice to, Sinead and the art she made and the depth of the tragedy that was her story … how irreducibly great (“one of the greatest musical artists of my lifetime, if we judge by the apex of an artist’s creative output,” as my pal @briankoppelman wrote, 100% correctly) and exquisitely fierce and supremely rad she was (go find the video of her at the 1989 Grammy awards, all alone onstage, belting out Mandinka in her black Docs, the @publicenemy logo painted on the side of her shaved head, I mean, 🤯) to all of us of a certain age and go-fuck-yourself temperament; how empowering and liberating and exhilarating to every female rock fan I’ve ever known; how self-possessed, brave, unyielding, and *right* she turned out to be when it came to pretty much every heresy she uttered that got her exiled not just from polite society but rock & roll itself. On Koppelman’s page, @fly_vulpes_fly wrote the truest thing I’ve read in the gusher of commentary that’s flowed the past two days: “It just feels like we all failed her … like a wronging we’ll never right. We couldn’t save the unicorn; sadly, we couldn’t be bothered to try.” And yet, even so, I can say this: clear though it is that we didn’t deserve her, I’m still grateful beyond words that those of us who loved her got to share the planet with her — and hear that voice of hers blow the roofs off of buildings, punch holes in the nighttime sky, and cut through everything and anything that stood between her and her truth — even for a little while. #rip #nothingcompares 🖤🤲🎶 | Posted on 29/Jul/2023 02:57:23