There’s a candid moment in Nothing Compares, the 2022 documentary by Kathryn Ferguson about the life and career of Sinéad O’Connor, when the singer says, “It was such a shock for me to become a pop star. It’s not what I wanted. I just wanted to scream.” O’Connor, who died yesterday at the age of 56, became famous in the late ’80s, when she was barely out of her teens. In 1990, her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” became not only her signature song, but also a chart-topper in numerous countries—a sweep that thrust a shy Irish kid under the hot sun of international scrutiny.

Rather than moderate her voice, she kept screaming. And over the years, her many controversial protests and statements tended to overshadow her breathtaking body of work. When people vow to murder you (as they did when she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live) and Frank Sinatra publicly threatens to assault you (as he did when she refused to have the American national anthem played at a New Jersey concert in 1990), it’s hard to direct attention back to the thing that actually made you famous: your music.

The fact that she became a pop star—and not just any pop star, but one of the most distinct, most outspoken, and most influential of all time—may have been a surprise to her. But it couldn’t have been a surprise to her fans. Few things made that clearer than her first hit, “Mandinka.” The song, which became a Top 20 hit in the United Kingdom, was the standout single and obvious earworm from her superb 1987 debut LP, The Lion and the Cobra. It was an ambitious album, collecting dark accounts of childhood trauma (“Troy”) and layered explorations of lust and consent (“I Want Your (Hands on Me)”). Amid these deeper, more demanding singles, The Lion and the Cobra needed an upbeat invitation. “Mandinka” was it.

Written when she was still a teenager struggling to make her way as an aspiring expat in London, “Mandinka” is a propulsive anthem that straddles pop and the loosely knit genre of alternative rock, which wouldn’t see its full commercial triumph until the ’90s. The lyrics don’t convey a narrative as such, but like so many of O’Connor’s songs, “Mandinka” synthesizes and projects a string of images, recriminations, and mantras. What coalesces in her words is a barrage of beefs with the patriarchy that refuses to sacrifice poetry for purpose. The title comes from Alex Haley’s Roots, which mentions the Gambian ethnic group of Mandinka. “Mandinka” was slightly ahead of its time, but it’s also very much in the same camp as contemporaneous songs such as Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance” and Enya’s “Orinoco Flow.” (Unsurprisingly, her fellow Irish artist Enya made a guest appearance on The Lion and the Cobra.)

“Mandinka,” at its core, is a song of defiance. O’Connor threw every bit of texture and range—snarling, chanting, cooing, and, yes, screaming—she could into the song, and the result was a smack in the face of conventionality. Hurt is part of the DNA of “Mandinka,” even as O’Connor exults in her power to withstand it: “I don’t know no shame / I feel no pain / I can’t see the flame,” she sings with venom. Again, defiance. But it’s not a denial or some bluff—instead, it’s an acknowledgement of how she’s proudly used her scar tissue as raw material.

[Read: How “Nothing Compares 2 U” endured]

“Soon I can give you my heart,” O’Connor chants at the end of “Mandinka.” That’s exactly what she did: The lushly romantic “Nothing Compares 2 U” came out three years later, becoming the song that most people immediately think of when they hear O’Connor’s name. But the power of “Nothing Compares 2 U” partly stemmed from the fact that O’Connor had already proved herself capable of far greater force on The Lion and the Cobra, and in “Mandinka” in particular. Her first appearance on U.S. television was on Late Night With David Letterman, and her performance of the single is telling. She wears a spiked denim jacket like punk-rock armor, holding her arms in front of her and twisting back and forth like she’s dodging blows in a boxing ring.

Perhaps the most succinct tribute to the impact of “Mandinka” is a video of Fiona Apple, posted to YouTube in 2017. In it, Apple lies in bed with her laptop while singing and air-punching along to O’Connor’s 1989 Grammy performance. It was a historic one: Nominated that year for Best Female Rock Vocal, O’Connor infamously drew Public Enemy’s bull’s-eye logo on her head to protest the fact that the newly minted Grammy for Best Rap Performance was awarded off camera. (On Twitter yesterday, the group’s Chuck D and Flavor Flav both remembered the protest.)

When the chorus hits, Apple ups the volume and kisses the screen. It’s a gesture of joyous release and empowerment that mirrors the song itself. “I didn’t mean to be strong,” O’Connor says at the start of Ferguson’s documentary. “I wasn’t thinking to myself, I must be strong. I didn’t know I was strong.” All it takes is one listen to “Mandinka,” though, for anyone else to know, feel, and find themselves strengthened by her strength.

In recent days, Tony Bennett—who died Friday at the age of 96—reportedly sang one last song while sitting at his piano. It was “Because of You,” his first hit, released in 1951, and the single that propelled him to more than seven decades of fame, fortune, and legend. But it was always more than a stepping stone. Where many artists downplay their early work, Bennett kept “Because of You” close to his heart. There is much to remember Bennett for, from his civil-rights activism to his stewardship of classic American pop songs. Without “Because of You,” none of it might have happened.

When Bennett first recorded the song, he was a 24-year-old kid from Queens whose slim discography had yielded little success. He had fought in World War II, participating in the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. As part of the postwar occupying force, he sang in Army bands. His career began in earnest at Columbia Records (then the home of Frank Sinatra), but almost stalled out before it began. He was on the verge of being dropped by the label when, in 1951, the orchestra leader Percy Faith randomly picked “Because of You” out of a pile of sheet music for Bennett to record.

“Because of You” has an interesting provenance. It was co-written by a Hammerstein—but not Oscar, the lyricist who famously collaborated with Richard Rodgers. Instead, it was written by Oscar’s far less notable uncle, Arthur, along with his creative partner Dudley Wilkinson. At first, the song went nowhere, Hammerstein brand notwithstanding. But Faith’s chance selection changed all that. His advice to Bennett: “Just relax. Use your natural voice and sing the song.” Better counsel was never given. Prior to that, Bennett, by his own admission, had been unsuccessfully trying out an overwrought style. “Then,” he said, “we decided I would just sing honestly and sincerely.”

[Photos: Remembering Tony Bennett]

Bennett brought an eventful young life—childhood hardship, the horrors of war—to bear on the heartbroken lull of “Because of You.” Faith’s orchestra curls around Bennett’s trembling voice and weightless cadence, informed by the singer’s lifelong adoration of jazz. There’s gravity to it, though. When he sings, “And I can smile because of you,” the subtext is simple but crushing: The object of his love is the only thing that can keep his spirit from collapsing. But the strength of that love is enough.

In his book The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song, Ben Yagoda calls Bennett “the most justly celebrated singer of standards”—yet “Because of You” was virtually unknown, as was Bennett, when he recorded it. That obscurity didn’t last long. The single sold more than a million copies. It floated for weeks from sandwich-shop jukeboxes and sitting-room radios across the country. Because of You became the title of Bennett’s debut album; it set the stage for his rise, and for the resurgence of a mature pop style whose appeal transcended teenybopper fads and reached a more world-weary audience.

Like many of his contemporaries, including his friend Sinatra, Bennett grudgingly capitulated to the commercial pressures of rock music—but only briefly. As he remarked in his memoir The Good Life, “I thought the world was losing its mind” when rock started conquering the pop charts in the ’60s. His two albums from 1970, Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today! and Tony Bennett’s “Something,” were bogged down by half-hearted interpretations of the Beatles and Stevie Wonder. From that low point, he decided to double down on his passion for jazz, even as the jazz world itself was pivoting away from dreamy crooners during the fusion-heavy ’70s. Likewise, he never gave up on “Because of You.” It remained a staple of his live sets and a fan favorite, a tender reminder of the delicate power and ageless warmth he possessed even in his youth.

Later decades grew kinder to Bennett; by the turn of the century, the world had fully embraced him once again. “Because of You” was, in part, responsible for the revival of his popularity; his rendition of this song with k. d. lang helped make his 2006 album, Duets: An American Classic, a platinum-selling triumph. It also paved the way for the final chapter of Bennett’s decorated career, in which he sang with younger artists such as Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga, ensuring his resonance for generations to come.

Bennett might not have realized that “Because of You” would be his swan song, but it couldn’t have served as a better bookend. If by some twist of fate it had been his only hit, it would still echo with ache. As history would have it, though, the song was both the opening of and the epitaph to his career. “Because of You” made Bennett a star—and largely because of him, popular music retains a body of song whose romance will forever make us swoon.

The singer described by Frank Sinatra as "the best in the business"

Late last year, when the streaming platform formerly known as HBO Max announced the abrupt cancellation of Minx a week before Season 2 finished filming, the news struck me as grimly ironic. Minx, created by Ellen Rapoport, is a buoyant, ’70s-set comedy about the first feminist porn magazine, loosely based on the real-life publications Playgirl and Viva. It’s a sweet, funny, shrewd show that also features plenty of full-frontal male nudity. The effect is hard to categorize; Minx isn’t “raunchy” or “smutty” or “filthy” or even “risqué.” Unlike Euphoria or The Idol, it’s not interested in hollow provocation. And the penises that proliferate on-screen aren’t there to titillate, exactly, although a montage in the first episode brings to mind what the French film theorist Jean-Louis Comolli once described as “the frenzy of the visible.” If anything, the show’s insistent focus on male nudity feels impertinent, as though we’re all participating in a ritual desanctification of dicks. The show’s clever inversion of subject and object makes erotica seem faintly absurd: Here are men’s bodies exposed for us to look at. Take away the novelty aspect, and what’s left? What does the act of looking actually make us feel?

Minx is about Joyce (played by Ophelia Lovibond), a buttoned-up Vassar grad toiling away at a teen magazine while dreaming of securing funding for her austere second-wave-feminist publication, The Matriarchy Awakens. Her side project is the antithesis of sexy. (“Why is she so angry?” a bewildered executive asks, looking at Joyce’s cover subject, a frizzled activist, mouth agape, raising a fist.) But at a pitch conference, Joyce meets Doug (Jake Johnson, pulling off genial scuzzbucket as only he can), the publisher of a stable of pornographic magazines with titles such as Milky Moms and Feet Feet Feet. Doug is venal but smart; he senses a sea change in the sexual landscape—and an opportunity. To get people to pay attention, he tells Joyce, “You gotta hide the medicine. It’s like, when you give a pill to a dog, you dip it in peanut butter first.” The medicine, in case it isn’t totally clear, is radical feminist ideas, housed within a magazine the pair name Minx. The peanut butter? Naked men.

The question the show asks isn’t whether the two creators will successfully collaborate—their odd-couple, non-romantic chemistry is far too good not to. It’s whether sex can be used to successfully sell anything other than sex itself. Minx is a sly analysis of the tension between creative vision and commercial compromise, which makes its graceless cancellation feel even more pointed, although the second season was rescued by Starz, and premieres this week. The joy of Season 1, for me, lay in the show’s unabashed championing of pleasure, its irreverent sense of humor, its allusions to fault lines in feminist history. But most interesting was how Minx, like the fictional magazine it was examining, wasn’t just sandwiching subversive ideas together with sexual imagery. It was creating a dialogue between the two. For her first photoshoot, Joyce places her centerfold model, an adorable dodo named Shane, in the middle of a construction site, wearing nothing but a toolbelt, while three snarling women in power suits heckle him from the street. “It’s the ability to look,” Joyce concludes. “It makes a woman feel powerful.”

[Read: How should feminists have sex now?]

But is feeling powerful enough? Stiffed, a recent podcast from the writer Jennifer Romolini, charts the history of Viva, the visionary feminist erotic magazine that helped inspire Minx, and that published Simone de Beauvoir, Lorraine O’Grady, and Erica Jong next to soft-focus images of naked men. At its best, Romolini argues, Viva managed to be a “bridge between feminism, activism, sexuality, and groundbreaking journalism.” And yet, as the fact that you may very well have never heard of Viva attests, the magazine failed. It failed because its publisher, the Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, presumed to know what women wanted to see without actually endeavoring to find out. It failed because sexual representation, for women, particularly straight women, has always been a bind—our desires are often informed by the same chauvinistic terrain we’re trying to transcend. Both Minx and Viva make one thing clear: Men have set the parameters of porn since the beginning.

Minx is set roughly around 1972, at the beginning of a moment that The New York Times crowned “porno chic,” noting the prominence in popular culture of a feature-length porn film titled Deep Throat. Early in the show’s new season, Joyce and Doug host the West Coast premiere of the movie, but keep hitting roadblocks: Feminist anti-porn campaigners are picketing outside, there’s a streaker on the red carpet, and someone has replaced the projectionist’s reel with the family film Bedknobs and Broomsticks. (Cue a joke about Angela Lansbury that I can’t repeat.) Joyce, edgy and uncertain about the whole thing, runs into Joan Didion in the bathroom, who helps Joyce contextualize her feelings about a hard-core movie being so ceremoniously vaulted into the mainstream. “Doesn’t it feel like people are longing for a way to be more open about sexuality without asking questions?” she asks Joan. She eventually pulls together an editor’s letter for Minx titled “Why I Hated Deep Throat—And Why It’s Good for America.”

The episode is indicative of my issues with Season 2: The show is glib where it used to be thoughtful, evasive about the exploitative edges of the business it’s portraying, and seemingly more interested in staging a quippy ’70s costume party than engaging with the mission of the magazine at its center. Because as an object lesson in sexual representation on film, nothing is more loaded, or more fascinating, than Deep Throat. For the first time, hard-core pornography came packaged in the recognizable narrative structure of a movie, with dialogue and a plot and a heroine’s journey. Not to mention that Deep Throat was funny, in a disarming, slapstick kind of way. It was sleazy, but not sinister. It made sex on-screen seem accessible to people who would never have been seen dead on 42nd Street.

More crucial, though, Deep Throat pulled off a confidence trick in plain sight: It disguised male fantasy as female empowerment. The movie’s premise is that its central character (played by Linda Lovelace) has never had an orgasm and is left unsatisfied by conventional sexual encounters. When she consults a doctor, he informs her that her clitoris is actually located in the very back of her throat, meaning that only extremely committed fellatio will satisfy her. “Though it was touted as a celebration of female sexuality, Deep Throat can be seen as a study in the male control of female sexuality,” a Wall Street Journal retrospective concluded in 2013. Lovelace later wrote in her memoir that she’d been violently coerced into performing in the movie. Before any of this, though, the movie was enshrined as one of the defining cultural spectacles of the sexual revolution. Martin Scorsese saw Deep Throat. So did Spiro Agnew—reportedly at Frank Sinatra’s house—and Jackie Kennedy. (In the show, Joyce name-checks the stars present at the premiere: “Warren Beatty, Alans Arkin and Alda.”)

If the “joke” of Deep Throat was that it told women they could be most gratified and most liberated while on their knees, the prevailing message of the era for men was that objectification could be damaging. That year, Burt Reynolds posed nude for Cosmopolitan, resplendently hirsute—with a strategically placed arm—on a bearskin rug. The caption accompanying the image stated frankly that women’s “visual appetites,” while equal to men’s, had long been neglected, and that Cosmo was trying to redress the balance. The magazine sold out (Minx’s first episode takes some pleasure in showing women reading it openly in the workplace). But Reynolds came to regret the shoot, calling it “a total fiasco” in his autobiography and lamenting that it prevented people from taking him seriously as an actor. Still, the image was trailblazing: Prior to the 1960s, as the author Nancy Friday writes in Women on Top, women weren’t even acknowledged to have sexual fantasies, let alone take pleasure in the sexualized image of a male body.

[Read: Don’t call them trash]

Viva’s mission, as Romolini explains on Stiffed, was to capitalize on this moment of flux. There was space for a magazine, everyone involved believed, that would acknowledge women as sexual beings (with high-quality erotic photography) while gratifying their political impulses with articles about the work-life balance, sexual liberation, and the case for not having children. The major hurdle, at least at first, was Guccione, who was progressive about sex and about promoting women in the workplace, but limited by his own sexual imagination: Viva’s first issue featured mostly images of naked women in the Penthouse mode, along with articles by exclusively male writers including Norman Mailer. “I don’t think [Bob] gave a moment’s thought to what women wanted or needed,” one former Viva staffer tells Romolini.

Later, when Guccione conceded to demands—including from the woman who would become his wife, Kathy Keeton, whom he hired as editor—and started publishing pictures of naked men, things somehow only got more confounding. Advertisers fled; writers balked at having their bylines next to hazy, Vaseline-clouded photos of male genitalia. Perhaps most complicated, though, was the question of how to conceive of erotic images that would appeal to women. “It wasn’t terribly nuanced—they could’ve done better with the male nudes, made them more attractive from a woman’s point of view,” the former Viva staffer Annie Gottlieb explained in an oral history of Viva from 2018. “I thought they were funny, actually. They [seemed like] a man’s attempt to imagine what a woman would like to look at. But, I mean, I’ve seen a penis before. If I turned the page and there was one, I would shrug and turn [to] the next page.”

Fifty years later, we still haven’t quite figured out how to honestly appraise female desire in mainstream culture—to cater to it in a way that isn’t blurred by what men want to see. The commodification of sex-as-porn is part of the problem—think of the proliferation of the term the money shot, with its presumed primacy of the male orgasm. Although plenty of visionary women are making feminist porn, their work is typically paywalled, limiting their influence compared with the tsunami of violent, misogynist content that anyone, anywhere, can see for free in a given day. “Flesh comes to us out of history; so does the repression and taboo that governs our experience of flesh,” Angela Carter writes in The Sadeian Woman. Sexuality, she concludes, “is never expressed in a vacuum.” In her TedX Talk, the feminist filmmaker Erika Lust recalls the moment that she realized what porn largely is—a discourse about sexuality where “the only ones participating in the discourse … are men.” It’s not enough, as Viva learned, to simply invert subject and object and assume straight women will respond. There is power in looking, it’s true. But there’s more in getting to decide for ourselves what we want to be revealed, and what we want to reveal in turn.

[Read: Where sex positivity falls short]

This is in no small part why Minx’s abandonment of the ideas that made Season 1 so distinctive—the way it interrogated how to sell feminism while honoring the amorphousness of female desire—feels so disappointing. Watching The Idol recently (for my sins), I was struck by how old-fashioned it felt; how in thrall to Deep Throat’s message that what women really crave, even if they don’t know it, is degradation. Is this what Max canceled Minx for? In the final episode of Stiffed, the media consultant and sexual-equality advocate Cindy Gallop tells Romolini that “any industry that is male-dominated at the top inevitably produces output that is objectifying and offensive and objectionable to women.” More frustrating, though, is what Gallop concludes about the landscape of pornography and erotica, half a century after Viva, Deep Throat, and Burt Reynolds on that bearskin rug: that women have never been allowed to explore human sexuality through their own lens, free of external influences or commercial pressures or repression. Where might we be if we had?

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