Sinéad O'Connor is accustomed to shocking people. The Irish singer has been a natural-born attention getter since she first gained fame over 20 years ago, when she was as recognizable for her shorn head and fiercely outspoken opinions as she was for her haunting voice and arresting beauty. So when she turned up to perform at Ireland's Bray Music Festival over the weekend, it was inevitable that she'd create an uproar. The latest wild stunt from the woman who once defiantly ripped up a picture of the pope on "Saturday Night Live"? Getting older and gaining weight. The horror! 
 
 Sporting a short dark bob, eyeglasses, a belly-revealing mesh top and a more ample figure than fans remember from her "Nothing Compares 2 U" heyday, the 44-year-old dared to appear, as Inquisitr helpfully noted,"No Longer Bald or Skinny." ABC News asked, "Sinéad O'Connor, Is That You?" and ran the inevitable slide show of celebrity weight-loss ups and downs, while E! crowed that O'Connor went "from looking like Natalie Portman in 'V for Vendetta' to your dorky self in high school" and did its own slide show of "shocking transformations." 
 
 It's not entirely surprising that the image of a bald, white-clad waif would be so indelible in the public mind. O'Connor has lived largely out of the spotlight for several years now, and has not released any new music since 2005. Even her own website is conspicuously riddled with photos of her more familiar doe-eyed and pixie-ish image. Yet the Internet outpouring of astonishment mixed with glee over her changed appearance has been the truly unpleasant sight in all of this. On People.com alone, there are hundreds of comments -- many on the theme of what a "shameless blimpo" "pig" she's become, and many others flat out refusing to believe that the photographs are truly of O'Connor. 
 
 Anyone who is old enough to have had a moment of disbelief regarding the Facebook friend request of a long-lost pal knows that time does not march equally over everyone. The changes we barely notice on the people we're around all the time don't register as dramatically as those on the faces and bodies of those we don't see regularly. The urge to contrast then and now, to check off either the "still got it" or "let themselves go" boxes in our minds is powerful. It's the subtext that drives high school reunions and the Googling of ex-lovers, the reason former Clash guitarist Mick Jones once musically bragged that among his accomplishments, "Somehow I stayed thin while the other guys got fat." And for the legions of detractors O'Connor has amassed over her outspoken career, perhaps there's a strange satisfaction in seeing evidence that she's no longer the head-turner who could rock a chrome-dome and still be gorgeous. Bet you're not so high and mighty now, missy! 
 
 Yet as Carrie Fisher recently remarked of her long-ago golden bikini heyday, "I swear when I was shooting those films I never realized I was signing an invisible contract to stay looking the exact same way for the rest of my existence." So Sinéad is likewise no longer the woman she was in 1990. And yes, big shoulder pads and see-through tops are a sartorial misstep on almost everyone. But is any of that really a cause for such a conspicuous outpouring of schadenfreude? O'Connor is now a mother of four who has been open about her struggles with bipolar disorder. In 2007, she told Oprah Winfrey, "I actually kind of died and got born again as a result of taking the meds." And as some of O'Connor's more charitable online defenders have noted, many of the medications used to treat bipolarism also cause weight gain. 
 
 "Shocking" though O'Connor may continue to be to others, the singer, who claims she "really enjoyed" her recent Bray set, seems to have in recent years become far less scandalous to herself. In 2008, she genially told an Australian newspaper, "I am not a pop star as I was ... so I am not having to deal with that kind of attention. Then I was young and now I am old and ugly and a bit fat ... I'm entitled to have a belly." She's also entitled to change her hairstyle, haters. 
 
 As it happens, this morning on the way to a doctor's appointment, I passed by a neighbor I hadn't seen in a while. I almost didn't recognize her, because she too has transformed of late. She was thinner and paler, and on her head she wore the telltale headscarf of a woman going through chemo. So in case anybody out there needs a reminder, here it is: To be able to grow older is a gift. To be on medication that can save your life is a blessing. A little thickening around the middle seems like a small price to pay. Though much has changed in the more than two decades since Sinéad O'Connor was that volatile, beautiful rock star, many things have improved with time. The once-suicidal girl now admits that "It doesn't matter if things aren't perfect." And tempered by life and experience, that clear, achingly lovely voice has only become more poignantly astonishing. ||||| LONDON -- In 1990, Sinead O’Connor’s cover of a near-forgotten Prince single, “Nothing Compares 2U,” burst onto the global musical consciousness like an exploding firework. Combining soaring vocals with the shock of a shaven head that served only to make her expressive eyes more poignant, O’Connor’s performance was mesmerizing. 
 
 Fame followed -- and later imploded -- amid a slew of unpopular religious and political opinions from the singer, including an attack on the Roman Catholic Church for its cover-up of child sex abuse. 
 
 Despite the fall from grace the singer remained entrancing, combining gamine fragility with an appetite for hard politics. Her tight crew cut, consciously anti-feminine Doc Marten boots, baggy sweaters and old men’s overcoats remained her trademark look. And nothing she wore or didn’t wear could disguise the sheer power of her vocal and lyrical talent. 
 
 Earlier this week, more than two decades after her astonishing debut, pictures of a very different looking O’Connor surfaced online after a performance at the Bray Music Festival on the West Coast of Ireland. Showing a frumpier, bespectacled O’Connor under a mop of black hair and in black garb that would have been nun-like, but for the exposure of a generous segment of plump belly, the singer’s appearance has caused quite a stir -- even on our own website. 
 
 Newspapers, online blogs and the social media sphere of Facebook and Twitter, have erupted with astonishment and shock at O’Connor’s transformation. 
 
 “The 44-year year-old singer was unrecognizable from her musical heyday as she took to the stage wearing a highly unflattering combination of a stomach-baring black net top, and an ill-fitting black trouser suit,” said the Daily Mail. 
 
 As if that weren’t damning enough, the singer’s self-absorbed air appears to have irked the paper further: “With her black hair in a messy crop, and wearing glasses and a gold crucifix necklace, Sinead appeared to be in a world of her own as she performed alongside [reggae singer Natty] Wailer.” 
 
 Closer to home, Us Weekly wrote that the singer had shocked her fans with a look that was “completely unrecognizable,” while ABC News put the “formerly slim” singer in a gallery of stars including Kirstie Alley and Jennifer Hudson who have had trouble with their yo-yo-ing weight. “Nothing compares…to what Sinead O’ Connor looks like now,” it captioned. 
 
 Hang on. Should a singer who used her window of fame to highlight discomfiting political opinions as well as bringing hauntingly personal songs like “Troy” and “Three Babies” into the musical canon really be judged by the same harsh standards that are common currency for actresses and reality TV stars? 
 
 Sinead O’Connor is no Kim Kardashian, whose every eyebrow pluck and forehead wax is the stuff of a celebrity interview or product endorsement. Nor is she a Natalie Portman or Renee Zellweger, whose morphing body shape is part of her artistic reach. 
 
 Instead, the Dublin-born singer, who has four children since achieving the heights of fame, has always turned her back on the conventions of beauty that are apparently necessary for media acceptance. The prickly distaste that she still manifests for a prototypical feminine style seems remarkably unchanged from the attitudes she held in her youth. 
 
 "What the voices expressing astonishment at her new look are really shocked by, is that Sinead O’Connor should care so little for the opinions by which so many in the entertainment industry are harshly judged." 
 
 Per the outrage that has followed the singer’s appearance at Bray, you could be forgiven for thinking that O’Connor has spent the last decade and a half under a rock, all the better to astonish her fans when she re-emerged several kilos heavier and without a bald head. In fact, she has an enjoyed a musical career that has continued, somewhat under the radar, and the singer has released a new album every two years or since 2000 as well as touring recently in Moscow and the UK. 
 
 What the voices expressing astonishment at her new look are really shocked by, is that Sinead O’Connor should care so little for the opinions by which so many in the entertainment industry are harshly judged. The astonishment at her weight gain is as much at her carelessness of what others think of her as it is about a singer succumbing to the ageing process over 20 years. In fact, it’s not overplaying it to suggest that her critics are actually uncomfortable with her refusal to hide herself away permanently now that the years where gamine skinniness was her trademark look are in the past. 
 
 It is just weeks since the music industry deified Amy Winehouse, a troubled singer whose addictions transfixed tabloid readers during the years that they also cruelly foreshortened a talented jazz diva’s life. 
 
 Like O’Connor, Winehouse’s talent was of the once-in-a-generation kind, a degree of difference away from even the commercial heights achieved by the likes of Adele, another British talent who for all her record-selling success, falls into a more conventional mold. Even as Winehouse’s failed romances and damaging addictions were lived out in the harsh glare of newspaper front pages, her emaciated thinness, hyper-sexualized outfits and suspiciously enhanced cleavage nonetheless less fell on the right side of the aesthetic the entertainment industry is prepared to accept. 
 
 Unlike Winehouse, Connor has managed to get through life, have a family and keep doing what her fans want her to do: perform and record music. Along the way her various admissions of suffering child abuse, a bipolar disorder and coming out as a lesbian suggest that the journey has not been without its demons. 
 
 But, far from criticizing the singer for her temerity to continue performing even when she does not fit the nostalgic memory of two decades past, O’Connor should congratulated for her ability to keep on going. Twenty years on, the lyrics of songs like “Feel So Different,” “I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got” and “Three Babies” have become even more poignant than they were the first time around. 
 
 And as this video of the singer performing “Nothing Compares 2U” in Moscow last month shows, her voice has lost none of its ability to astound and move.
– Catch those new photos of Sinead O'Connor performing in Ireland? (See the video in the gallery at left for a sample.) She is, gasp, no longer the slim, bald 20-something who captivated fans, and the Internet has not been kind in pointing this out. Lay off, write Mimi Turner at the Hollywood Reporter and Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon. O'Connor, now 44 and the mother of four, "has always turned her back on the conventions of beauty that are apparently necessary for media acceptance," writes Turner. "The prickly distaste that she still manifests for a prototypical feminine style seems remarkably unchanged from the attitudes she held in her youth." O'Connor also has battled bipolar disorder for years, and the antidepressants she takes can cause weight gain. "To be able to grow older is a gift," writes Williams. "To be on medication that can save your life is a blessing. A little thickening around the middle seems like a small price to pay." Besides, O'Connor still has that amazing gift that made her a once-in-a-generation talent: "Tempered by life and experience, that clear, achingly lovely voice has only become more poignantly astonishing," writes Williams.