Jessica

Vozel

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April 20, 2009

Why Is It Surprising Susan Boyle Can Sing?

By now you’ve likely been acquainted with Susan Boyle, the unassuming Britain’s Got Talent contestant who wowed millions by having a beautiful singing voice housed within a body that is, at least by conventional standards, not.

The video of her performance has garnered almost 30 million views on YouTube, but she seems to be more than your standard Internet meme, confined to YouTube and a couple late-night talk show appearances before the inevitable fade-away. Not since the Beatles has Britain exported a phenom like Susan. Larry King, Oprah, The Early Show. A record deal with Simon Cowell’s label before Britain’s Got Talent even chooses its official winner. And all of this within a week of her first time ever performing in front of a large audience. Susan’s star doesn’t seem as though it will dim any time soon.

Which leads me to wonder why, exactly, this is. Susan’s voice is gorgeous but not so exceptional that no one has ever heard anything like it before. Part of it is probably her biography – Susan Boyle lives alone with her cat and, at the age of 47, has never been kissed and has never received any formal vocal training. Part of it, too, is her un-waxed eyebrows, soft chin, frizzy gray hair and a certain matronly roundness we’re unused to seeing on any stage, except for, of course, early-round auditions for American Idol and its ilk – where the conventionally unattractive are bound to be terrible singers with inflated egos. This sort of hilarious flubbing is exactly what was expected of Susan, and most likely the biggest reason for her overnight celebrity is the way she thwarted those expectations.

Susan sauntered onto the stage and wiggled her hips, causing eye-rolls and sideways looks among the judges (Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and Amanda Holden). When she said she wanted to be as famous as British musical theatre superstar Elaine Page, the camera panned to disbelieving audience members who scowled and shook their heads at her audacity. And then she proceeded to open her mouth and blow them away.

Watching Simon Cowell’s eyebrows raise and Amanda Holden’s perfect, made-up face dissolve into a look of genuine shock at Susan’s first note is sweet, sweet retribution for anyone who has ever been judged because of their appearance. And many of the 30 million who watched her likely have been. For every picture-perfect celebrity who “makes it,” there are thousands who are turned away for not looking the part. For every prom queen and high school hunk, there are cafeterias full of kids who can sing, dance, write, act, paint, tell jokes or solve complex mathematical equations like nobody’s business, but their talents aren’t worth squat because appearance is judged above all else. (OK, maybe the mathematician will do all right once he or she escapes high school, but that won’t make high school any easier.)

It’s sad, really, that our expectations have been so tailored by the media that we expect 47-year-old women without personal stylists to be flawed in ways that have nothing to do with their appearance. Vocal chords belonging to beautiful people, after all, do not produce sweeter sounds (although it could be argued that beautiful people receive more encouragement to pursue visible careers like singing and acting, which could explain why Susan Boyle never had formal vocal training). Never before, though, have such prejudices been so obviously revealed. And we delight in being witness to that revelation – we knew it was there all along, but Susan Boyle is proof of it. 

I argue, then, that it’s not the juxtaposition of a beautiful voice wrapped in an unexpected package that led to Susan’s stardom, but the moments when the audience erupted and Simon Cowell put his chin in his hands and sighed dreamily. In a better world, Susan would be judged the same as everyone else, but at least we can delight in her success, regardless of how it came to be.

For her audition, Susan chose to sing “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical Les Miserables, and the song’s lyrics are especially powerful in this context. When Susan ends her performance with the line “now life has killed the dream I dreamed” we see the ways in which that was almost true.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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