Miley Cyrus has opened up about the public argument she had with Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor around the release of the ‘Wrecking Ball’ video. The infamous video, which turns 10 this month, was partly inspired by O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. “I wanted it to be tough but really pretty,” Cyrus told Rolling Stone in 2013. “That’s what Sinéad did with her hair and everything.”
O’Connor wasn’t too pleased, and wrote Cyrus an open letter saying she was “extremely concerned” for the popstar. “I am extremely concerned for you that those around you have led you to believe, or encouraged you in your own belief, that it is in any way ‘cool’ to be naked and licking sledgehammers in your videos,” O’Connor wrote. “It is in fact the case that you will obscure your talent by allowing yourself to be pimped, whether its the music business or yourself doing the pimping.”
Miley Cyrus: ‘Wrecking Ball’
Cyrus, who was 20 at the time, then mocked O’Connor’s mental health on Twitter, posting photos of O’Connor asking for psychiatric help and comparing her to Amanda Bynes.
In a new interview for Hulu special Endless Summer Vacation: Continued (Backyard Sessions), Cyrus said she was “expecting for there to be controversy and backlash” to the video. “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,” Cyrus said.
“So, this is when I had received an open letter from Sinead O’Connor, and I had no idea about the fragile mental state that she was in, and I was also only 20 years old, so I could really only wrap my head around mental illness so much,” Cyrus continued.
“And all that I saw was that another woman had told me that this idea was not my idea. And even if I was convinced that it was, it was still just, you know, 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.”
Cyrus went on to say that “younger childhood triggers and traumas come up in weird and odd ways”. “I think I had just been judged for so long for my own choices that I was just exhausted,” she said, “and I was in this place where I finally was making my own choices and my own decisions, and to have that taken away from me deeply upset me.”
She added, “God bless Sinéad O’Connor, for real, in all seriousness.”
Sinéad O’Connor died at the age of 56 in July.
