“Music has officially died,” Sinead O’Connor declared on Facebook earlier today. Granted, lots of people are declaring this moment the end of many things, but unlike, say, Dustin Hoffman’s recent statement about film’s decline, O’Connor only substantiated the statement with ire over the fact that Kim Kardashian is on the cover of Rolling Stone. This was, alas, no kind eulogy.
O’Connor found this Kardashian occurrence so repellent that she opened her post with, “What is this cunt doing on the cover of Rolling Stone?,” before going on to say, “Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh can no longer be expected to take all the blame [for the death of music]. Bob Dylan must be fucking horrified.”
Though Kim Kardashian is an undeniably — and understandably — a polarizing figure, the misogynist slur just reads as further evidence, after a series of absolutist “open letters” about Miley Cyrus’ sexuality, that the iconic singer (who was known in the ’90s for challenging gender norms) is very much at odds with the current state of progressive gender politics. Her ideas about the intersection of sexuality and celebrity now seem incompatible with the increasingly open (except to the envenomed public use of gendered epithets) times.
Bob Dylan, shockingly, has not yet weighed in on either Kardashian’s RS cover or O’Connor’s statement. But one can speculate that he’s doing perfectly fine, and is still likely relishing the acclaim of his last studio album, which somehow thrived within the allegedly post-apocalyptic musical landscape.