In light of Sinead O’Connor’s tragic passing, countless musicians and public figures have shared tributes honoring the Irish singer and her legacy. However, Morrissey is calling bullshit.

In a new statement posted to his website, Morrissey criticized certain members of the music industry and media who praised O’Connor “now ONLY because it is too late. You hadn’t the guts to support her when she was alive and she was looking for you.”

“She had only so much ‘self’ to give,” Morrissey said of O’Connor. “She was dropped by her label after selling 7 million albums for them. She became crazed, yes, but uninteresting, never. She had done nothing wrong. She had proud vulnerability … and there is a certain music industry hatred for singers who don’t ‘fit in’ (this I know only too well), and they are never praised until death – when, finally, they can’t answer back.”

“The press will label artists as pests because of what they withhold,” Morrissey continued, “and they would call Sinead sad, fat, shocking, insane … oh but not today! Music CEOs who had put on their most charming smile as they refused her for their roster are queuing-up to call her a ‘feminist icon’, and 15 minute celebrities and goblins from hell and record labels of artificially aroused diversity are squeezing onto Twitter to twitter their jibber-jabber … when it was YOU who talked Sinead into giving up … because she refused to be labelled, and she was degraded, as those few who move the world are always degraded.”

Ultimately, Morrissey concluded, O’Connor fell victim to the same fate as Judy Garland, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Marilyn Monroe, and Billie Holiday. “She was a challenge, and she couldn’t be boxed-up, and she had the courage to speak when everyone else stayed safely silent,” Morrissey said. “She was harassed simply for being herself. Her eyes finally closed in search of a soul she could call her own.”

“As always, the lamestreamers miss the ringing point, and with locked jaws they return to the insultingly stupid ‘icon’ and ‘legend’ when last week words far more cruel and dismissive would have done. Tomorrow the fawning fops flip back to their online shitposts and their cosy Cancer Culture and their moral superiority and their obituaries of parroted vomit,” he concluded, “all of which will catch you lying on days like today … when Sinead doesn’t need your sterile slop.”