The following week’s host, Joe Pesci, took direct aim at her. “I’ll tell you one thing: She’s very lucky it wasn’t my show. ’Cause if it was my show, I woulda gave her such a smack.” Cue laughing and clapping from the audience.

He continued, “I woulda grabbed her by her … eyebrows.” More laughter. At one point, he triumphantly held up the taped-together pope photo, like a feckless politician stirring up his base. (Tellingly, footage of Pesci’s monologue is available on the official YouTube channel of SNL; footage of O’Connor’s performance is not, though it can be found in various unofficial locations online.)

Of course, she was correct – the scale of sexual abuse perpetrated within the Catholic Church that came to light in later years was staggering. By then, O’Connor’s protest felt distant, but the damage it did to her career was permanent.

At the time, O’Connor was only a couple of years past her American breakthrough – her piercing cover of Nothing Compares 2 U, written by Prince (and originally performed by his side project the Family). Subsequent to SNL, she had a handful of hits, but mostly retreated from the pop spotlight.

Or maybe the way to think about it is that she right-sized her career, away from the silly and grim expectations of complaisance that come with universal acclaim and toward a more earnest plane.

Whichever the case, the pope brouhaha obscured something perhaps just as extraordinarily powerful – the song that O’Connor had been performing. Her War cover had lyrics slightly modified to allude to the abuses in the Catholic Church that she was protesting. (She also performed Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home that night.)

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She’s performing War a cappella, staring hard at a camera off to her left. Less singing than declaiming, she renders the song with a forceful clarity, landing every line with nervy syllables held just a microsecond past comfort, as if reminding the viewer of the need to gulp them down whole.

Marley’s original – the lyrics are drawn from a speech given by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie before the United Nations General Assembly in 1963 – moves with a sly breeze. O’Connor’s, with its silence, turns the original plaint into a jolt.

Her performance is anthemic, invigorating, a call to arms for the dispossessed and an elegant dissection of the authoritarian powers who hold them down. Her vocal is level and determined, but her howl is spiritual and undeniable:

Until the ignoble and unhappy regime
Which holds all of us through
Child abuse, yeah, child abuse, yeah,
Subhuman bondage has been toppled
Utterly destroyed
Everywhere is war

If there is a moment of true singing here, it’s right before the grand gesture at the end. “Childrennnn! Childrennnn!” O’Connor sweetly chants, calling everyone to attention. Then, with everyone’s ears perked, she nods her head forcefully and jabs out a quick, urgent instruction: “Fight.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).