The Alternative Number Ones: Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

How would I write about this song again? When I agreed to start writing The Alternative Number Ones, it was the first question that I asked myself. Only a few songs have ever reached #1 on both Billboard's Hot 100 and its Modern Rock Songs chart. One of those songs is Sinéad O'Connor's epochal reading of "Nothing Compares 2 U," a song first written by Prince in 1984.

In its moment, "Nothing Compares 2 U" was a runaway cultural freight train -- a single so powerful that it took Sinéad O'Connor from college-radio/critical-favorite status to full-on mainstream celebrity, thus affecting O'Connor's life in some terrible and unforeseen ways. But I already wrote about "Nothing Compares 2 U" in The Number Ones. I put my foot in that motherfucker, too. I'm prouder of that column than almost any of the other thousand-plus that I've written while working on the column these past six years. And now I was going to write about it again? How?