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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I wish her great fortune and happiness :=)
She won a round for everyone who got picked last on teams. She won a round for everyone who did not go to prom.
She won a round for everyone did not get on life's fast track.
Talentless, overpainted, overindulged princesses from the me generation. Susan Boyle thank God is none of the above, which is why we love her. Talented, witty and refreshing. Can't wait to buy her CD's. I'd love to hear her sing Danny Boy and a hundred others.
Your article was more insulting to the general public than it was to Miss Boyle. You called us shallow hard and calused without saying it outright. I dont think her looks matters when she sings and we enjoy it now does it.....