The Toronto Star February 20, 1991, Wednesday, FINAL EDITION O'Connor says she didn't anticipate Grammy storm By Tom Moon Special to The Star (Knight-Ridder Newspapers) NEW YORK - Sinead O'Connor, the Irish singer whose knack for controversy has outdistanced even Madonna's this year, did not anticipate the firestorm that accompanied her announcement that she would not participate in tonight's Grammy awards. "All I wanted to do was make a personal statement about the basic greed that runs throughout the music business, and by extension through the human race," she said Monday in a telephone interview from her Los Angeles home. "And I've had to deal with a lot of venom and hatred just for this one statement," the 24-year-old singer continued, saying she's been the target of attacks from Herb Alpert and M.C. Hammer, among others. "It's pretty shocking that this is enough to cause some huge controversy." O'Connor's album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got,and its No. 1 single, "Nothing Compares 2 U", were nominated for four awards: record of the year, song of the year, female pop vocal and alternative music. The artist withdrew from the awards ceremony with a letter to National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences president Michael Greene dated Feb. 1, just days after appearing at the American Music Awards. At the same time, she pulled out of similar awards programs in England and Ireland. In her letter to Greene, O'Connor said she would decline any awards she might win because of the academy's emphasis on commercial success, "values which I think are destroying our work." O'Connor, who was to have performed at the televised Grammy ceremony, said that no specific event triggered her decision. She acknowledged, however, that the intensity of her feelings were heightened by events in the Persian Gulf. "The reasons for the war are exactly the same as the things I'm talking about," she said this week. "As a race, we are driven by greed, driven by the desire for material things. We're not driven by any particular love for each other." O'Connor said that her opinions represented "the accumulation of observations from years in the music business. I just felt that somebody had to say something about the level of manipulation and greed dominating the industry. About the things that happen when you become famous, how isolated you become, how you're treated like a product, how you're not supposed to ruffle anyone's feathers, how you're just supposed to shut up and sing and be grateful for the opportunity." She believes that many artists feel the same way, but are afraid to say anything. "I'm not surprised people are afraid. Saying something like this could jeopardize a career, because artists are made to feel that the labels are doing us some sort of favor. Which is absurd, when you consider that they earn 90 per cent of what your ability to write a song earns." KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS