Just read a great WIRED Magazine article by Angela Watercutter about meeting Sinéad O’Connor in a Cracker Barrel parking lot in 1998. READ IT HERE

Her instincts challenged her about whether to include her experience in her column. “It felt wrong, like trading her kindness for clicks” she says.

Which is understandable if you were witness to the avalanche of “woe is me bullshit” from the wannabes who had no idea about who Sinéad O’Connor really was – but just had to have that ego boost clickbait.

Angela’s article was just the opposite of that, and awesome. And she proposed that committing memories to social media, or the internet broadly, is the best tool available for adding our influencers to public record.

Agreed.

Sinéad tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II during a 1992 Saturday Night Live performance.

SNL banned her…and to this day – you can’t find her performance on the SNL YouTube page. But you can find Joe Pesci saying he would have smacked her. (I predict she would have dropped his little ass on the spot)

And she is like – “whatever”. Now that’s a fuckin’ ROCK STAR!

I was also lucky enough to see Sinéad at the 1995 Gorge Amphitheatre Lollapalooza. (GREAT SHOW along with Sonic Youth, Hole, Cypress Hill, Pavement, Beck, and The Jesus Lizard…long before Lollapalooza turned into a corporate shill show.)

I didn’t need social media then…nor do I really need it now.

But I DO wish I had snuck in a camera in 1995.