Along the way, she had fired the producer, scrapped their sessions, and
put herself in £100,000 of debt to make the record according to her
singular vision. The music, recorded when O’Connor was pregnant with her first
child, was often grating, and the lyrics were frequently if opaquely autobiographical.
The single “Mandinka,” which was more accessible and dance-ready than some of
the other tracks, with guitar riffs and drum rolls, was a college radio
favorite in the United States, and in 1988 she made her first U.S. television
appearance, singing it on Late Night With David Letterman. All and all,
it was a debut that set out to provoke rather than to please, down to the
cover, which featured O’Connor with a shaved head, her arms folded across her
chest, her hands making fists, and her face in a rictus of rage. She was 21
years old, and it was a harbinger of things to come.
In March 1990, her second studio album, I Do Not Want What I
Haven’t Got, was released to critical acclaim. It showed O’Connor as a
woman of all trades, demonstrating an impressive span of musical talent: As well
as playing acoustic and electric guitar and keyboards, she oversaw the string and
other arrangements and produced most of the album. Along with the breakout
number “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the disc included ethereal songs like the title
one, “I Feel So Different.” O’Connor’s
delicate delivery, which is set
against a lush background of strings that
sounds like the kind of arrangement George Martin did for the Beatles,
is reminiscent of Bjork and Enya. The song opens with O’Connor reciting the serenity
prayer (written by Reinhold Niebuhr, though best known for its use
in AA), which seems to hearken back to her abiding religious faith—an aspect of
her complex personality that never left her, through thick and thin, despite
the name changes (she took the name Magda Davitt in 2017 and, after she
converted to Islam in 2018, Shuhada Sadaqat).
There were some hard-rock, beat-heavy tracks like “Jump in the
River,” the political statement of “Black Boys on Mopeds,” and the gentle “The
Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” which included one of O’Connor’s signature
from-the-heart lines: “I’ll talk but you won’t listen.” Lastly, there was the
haunting title track, “I Don’t Want What I Can’t Have,” in which O’Connor,
relying only on her voice, sings about her mother. The album was nominated for four
Grammy awards and won the award for “Best Alternative Music Performance,” but
the singer refused to accept them, writing a letter to the Recording Academy
that the awards “acknowledge mostly the commercial side of art” and “respect
mostly material gain.”