Ten years after the late Irish singer Sinead O’Connor said that pop sensation Miley Cyrus was being “pimped” out by the music business, Cyrus has spoken out about their dispute.
“At the time when I made Wrecking Ball , I was expecting for there to be controversy and backlash, but I don’t think I expected other women to put me down or turn on me, especially women that had been in my position before,” the 30-year-old recalled the scathing letter O’Connor wrote to her in her new ABC documentary Endless Summer Vacation: Continued (Backyard Sessions) , per Independent .
The letter that Cyrus is referring to touched upon issues of female objectification and sexualization by the music business, written in response to the music video for Cyrus’s popular song Wrecking Ball .
O’Connor responded to the then-20-year-old Miley “in the spirit of motherliness and with love” after Cyrus said that the music video for her song Nothing Compares 2 U by O’Connor had inspired her. O’Connor remarked that it wasn’t “‘cool’ to be naked and licking sledgehammers in your videos.”
“Nothing but harm will come in the long run, from allowing yourself to be exploited, and it is absolutely NOT in ANY way an empowerment of yourself or any other young women, for you to send across the message that you are to be valued (even by you) more for your sexual appeal than your obvious talent,” she wrote at the time.
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At the time, Cyrus retaliated by mocking O’Connor’s tweets she had posted while dealing with a mental health condition. Addressing these incidents 10 years later, Cyrus opened up about how she felt after receiving the controversial letter. “So this is when I received an open letter from Sinéad O’Connor, and I had no idea about the fragile mental state that she was in.”
The former Disney Channel actress, who was visibly upset as she spoke in the documentary, continued, “I was also only 20 years old. So I could really only wrap my head around mental illness so much and all that I saw was that another woman had told me that this idea was not my idea. Even if I was convinced that it was, it was still just men in power’s idea of me and they had manipulated me to believe that it was my own idea when it never really was. And it was. And it is. And I still love it.”
“God bless Sinéad O’Connor for real, in all seriousness.” Miley Cyrus dedicated a song to the late Sinead O’Connor 10 years after their public “Wrecking Ball” feud: https://t.co/AZCM2qSa5X pic.twitter.com/CuXmLU087A
— Decider (@decider) August 27, 2023
With Wrecking Ball , Cyrus felt she was finally making “my own choices and my own decisions” after having “been judged for so long for my own choices that I was just exhausted.” She concluded, “To have that taken away from me deeply upset me.”
The star then went on to dedicate a song to the Irish music sensation, with the words: “God bless Sinéad O’Connor for real, in all seriousness.”
In 1990, Sinéad O’Connor released one of the most iconic songs to date Nothing Compares To You focusing on her face through different stages of emotions while singing the lyrics. In 2023, Miley Cyrus released Used To Be Young with the same concept. pic.twitter.com/fdOcMZtv1c
— coy (@coycyrus) August 25, 2023