Why Susan Boyle Doesn’t Matter
I finally broke down over the weekend and watched the Susan Boyle performance that everyone's been plotzing over. For those of you that don't know, Boyle is the, as my grandmother would generously say, "plain-looking" 47-year-old Scottish spinster whose lovely performance on April 11th of "I Dreamed A Dream" on Britain's Got Talent has turned her into an international sensation, garnering tens of millions of YouTube views and generating all manner of pontificating on the meaning of her popularity. We're dealing with an ugly duckling tale. That's it. Susan Boyle is by conventional pop standards, unattractive, but sings like an angel, and her notoriety, as the thinking goes, is thus a heartwarming rebuke to an entertainment culture that far too often values looks rather than skill. If this episode sounds familiar, it's because it is--Britain's Got Talent spawned the exact same story two years ago when Paul Potts, a stocky cell-phone store manager, won the competition on the strength of his renditions of tenor arias like "Nessun Dorma." Your mother may have emailed you about him.
Of course, fairy tales are fiction. Potts' success did not result in a radical restructuring of show business norms (though his debut album, One Chance, did go double platinum in the U.K.)--extremely attractive entertainers are still more likely to get the good gigs. Susan Boyle's moment will have a similarly unremarkable effect. For all the back patting (see, we're not superficial!) her moment has allowed us to indulge in, the fact remains that popular entertainment is largely about helping us escape the mundane, whether it's for two hours or the length of a YouTube clip. And it's a lot easier to do that when the person doing the entertaining doesn't look like a crazy cat lady who lives next door. Right now Susan Boyle is an exception. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking she's going to be the rule.
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#8 - It seems many do this year, doesn't it? Interesting.
In any event, your obvious desire to dislike her, as evidenced by your "Oh God, do I have to???" approach to watching her video, overly informed your story, which is nothing but a cynical take on people by, in part, projecting your own obsession with entertainment/celebrity BS.
Yeah, people are unhealthily focused on looks. Apparently your answer to that is to tell Susan Boyle to F off, and for us all to get back to being complete scumbags 24 hours a day.
"The sound of a kiss is not as loud as a canon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer." Something like that.
I'll always remember the first time I heard Susan Boyle. So will millions of other people. It made that tiny little impact, but considering how few things make any impact at all... I'd say that she's very important after all.
I feel a little betrayed that Susan wasnt the loser we thought she was. She lied about not being kissed, which was also a part of her charm.
Her rendition of 'cry me a river' was sensual kinda hinted that she is a tiger as Simon said she was. Best of Luck ol' girl.