Nothing Compares to a Wrecking Ball

I’d always filed Sinead O’Connor somewhere under one-hit-wonder and left her there—"Nothing Compares 2 U," that video, those eyes—and then nothing, as far as I was concerned. Turns out she’d been having opinions the whole time, and in 2013 she directed a long open letter’s worth of them at Miley Cyrus, who was swinging naked on a demolition ball and daring the world to comment. Sinead commented. Miley responded. It became the kind of feud that ends in mutual lawsuits and leaves everyone looking slightly worse than when they started.

In a better world they would have just recorded something together. A mashup producer named Robin Skouteris did the next best thing—"Nothing Compares to Wrecking Ball," which turned out to be one of those combinations that sounds inevitable in hindsight, both songs occupying the same emotional frequency without either knowing it. The kind of thing that works before you’ve had time to decide if it should.