It was Oct. 3, 1992, when Sinead O'Connor sang a haunting a capella cover of Bob Marley's "War" on Saturday Night Live, in which she replaced the word "racism" with "child abuse" and tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II while singing about the victory of good over evil. She finished her performance by shouting, "Fight the real enemy." At the end of the clip you can practically feel the SNL audience lose its breath.
The freak-out was immediate and severe. O'Connor was pilloried tabloid to tabloid in perhaps the last collective utterance by ethnic outer-borough Catholic New York. The reaction was epitomized almost perfectly on the following week's show, when Joe Pesci held up a taped-together picture of the Pope and said he "would have gave her such a smack" to vigorous applause.
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