Getty Images/Frazer Harrison/WireImageSinéad O'Connor is not pouring any more gasoline on the fire that's her feud with Miley Cyrus. But she did elaborate on the whole point of the brouhaha, especially since it dovetails with her views on mental health.
In an interview with Time, the 46-year-old Irish crooner was asked whether she herself ever experienced the kind of exploitation she wrote about in letters she sent the pop star when she asserted that the music business prostitutes young female artists.
And her answer?
"Every single day. The music business is corrupt…It's full of nothing but vampires and pimps," O'Connor said in reply. "What was more important that came out of the Miley thing was being able to conversate about mental health and human rights. I think she was actually very helpful. The two of us, without meaning to, did quite a good job in terms of creating conversation about something really, really important."
The Grammy winner has made headlines in recent years for her personal struggles, which included a hospital stay in January 2012 where she was treated for depression.
During the sit-down, she slammed the "dreadful practice" of what she called a "paparazzi lynching," which she defined as photographers trying to take pictures of "young female celebrities perceived to have a mental illness…looking like they're having breakdowns."
O'Connor claimed such incidents are a "breach of human and civil rights" and that she has faced a similar situation in her own life.
"What's important is that I'm standing for getting some respect," she told the magazine. "As it happens, I don't suffer from bipolar disorder. I was a victim of the thing we're talking about. I was told by a doctor who never met me that, from reading the newspaper, he would say I had bipolar disorder."
As for how the music industry's evolved since Sinead first shot to fame with her 1990 hit, "Nothing Compares 2 U," the songstress observed that music is no longer at the forefront.
"The sounds of the records and the videos and how artists look has all been taken over by the industry. In a way, music's all been silenced. That's why I feel strongly about the oversexualizing of young women. As long as you're visually distracted, you're not really listening," she said. "Male artists too. Justin Bieber, he's being sold on his sexuality, but he's too young to even understand what's going on."
To read more of O'Connor's interview, check out this week's issue of Time.