Susan Boyle - Misplaced Pages

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Susan Boyle

Musical artist

Susan Boyle, 48, is a Scottish church volunteer and contestant on the third series of Britain's Got Talent. She has been dubbed as being "The Woman Who Shut Up Simon Cowell" as she surprised the judges and audience with a stirring rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Misérables in the competition's first round, aired on 11 April 2009. She received a standing ovation from the live audience, who before she sang had jeered incredulously at her plain appearance. Boyle elicited the "biggest yes vote in three seasons" from Piers Morgan and yes-votes from both Simon Cowell and Amanda Holden. Cowell is reported to be setting up a contract with Boyle with his SyCo Music company label, a subsidiary of Sony Music.

Her performance on the show gained her an immediate worldwide fame, which was due in part to the immense popularity of a YouTube video. Several reasons have been proposed as to why she has been able to make such a strong impact on people, including one that the show introduced her in a manner that deliberately enhanced preconceptions based on her looks. This then set up a dénouement, as these assumptions were dispelled when she began to sing.

Personal life

Boyle is the youngest of nine children and lives in Blackburn with her ten-year-old cat, Pebbles. Boyle suffered oxygen deprivation during birth, resulting in learning disabilities. Her classmates teased her because of this and her appearance. She stopped her pursuit of singing to look after her sick mother, who died in 2007 at the age of 91. Her performance on Britain’s Got Talent was the first time Boyle had sung after her mother's death. She is unmarried and presently unemployed. She aspires to become a musical theatre singer in the vein of Elaine Paige.

News media

The majority of British newspapers carried articles on Boyle's performance and subsequent internet coverage. The Sun writer Colin Robertson gave her the nickname "Paula Potts" in reference to the contest's previous opera-singing winner Paul Potts. In an interview with the Daily Mirror, Boyle confirmed she had a meeting with the Sony BMG record company but said "I can't say much about it. It's early days and I'm taking baby steps."

Many international news outlets also carried stories on her including the New York Daily News, Australia's Herald Sun, Germany's Der Spiegel, and China's Xinhua News Agency. In the U.S., ABC News coverage suggested that Boyle may be "...Britain's newest pop sensation...", and the Entertainment section ran the headline The Woman Who Shut Up Simon Cowell.

TV shows

Following her performance on Britain's Got Talent, Boyle was a guest on STV's The Five Thirty Show. She was interviewed via satellite on CBS's Early Show and ABC's Good Morning America, and via a telephone interview on FOX's America's Newsroom. In an interview, Simon Cowell said Boyle had received an invitation to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show and predicted that if she did appear "there's every chance Susan Boyle will have the number one album in America".

Social media

The most popular YouTube video submission of her audition garnered nearly 2.5 million views in the first 72 hours. As of April 16, 2009, the video had been viewed more than 15 million times. On the day following the performance, the YouTube video was the most popular article on Digg. The same video was also popular on Reddit, with enough clout to top this site's front page. The Los Angeles Times wrote that the popularity of this video may in part be due to the broad range of emotion packed into a short timeframe, noting that this makes it "perfect for the Internet, where short clips rule."

Susan Boyle's fame also spread by links posted on the Twitter website, including praise from celebrity couple Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. When told about this Boyle was said to not have heard of Kutcher and although recognised the name 'Demi Moore' knew little about her but thanked them for their support.

On 16 April 2009, the Scottish Daily Record newspaper published an online link to a recording of "Cry Me a River" which she made for a charity CD in 1999.

Social analysis

Boyle's sudden fame has drawn much commentary on what could explain why this story was so widely-reported and what the strength of her sudden popularity says about society. Others drew moral lessons from people's reaction to Boyle's performance. For instance, writing in Scotland's The Herald, Collette Douglas-Home described the story as a modern parable and a rebuke to the assumptions people make based on others' physical appearance. Similarly, Lisa Schwarzbaum, in an article in Entertainment Weekly, stated that Boyle's performance was particularly moving as it was a victory for talent and artistry in a culture obsessed with physical attractiveness and presentation. Commenting on the audience's reactions before she started singing, Boyle stated:

Modern society is too quick to judge people on their appearances. ... There is not much you can do about it; it is the way they think; it is the way they are. But maybe this could teach them a lesson, or set an example.
— Susan Boyle, The Washington Post

After Boyle's performance, Holden stated:

I am so thrilled because I know that everybody was against you. I honestly think that we were all being very cynical and I think that's the biggest wakeup call ever. And I just want to say that it was a complete privilege listening to that.
— Amanda Holden, Britain's Got Talent

Echoing these comments by Holden, Jeanne McManus wrote in The Washington Post that, in talent shows such as Britain's Got Talent, one of the main sources of drama is the collision between performers' sometimes exaggerated sense of self-worth and the opinions and reactions of their audience. In Boyle's case, McManus believed that her initial demeanour and homely appearance caused the judges and audience to be, "waiting for her to squawk like a duck". Indeed, New York's Daily News stated that it was this stark contrast between the audience's low expectations and the quality of her singing that made Boyle's performance such an engaging piece of television. This article also noted that the idea of an underdog being ridiculed or humiliated but then enjoying an unexpected triumph is a common trope in literature and that this is why, when this theme made its unscripted appearance in reality television, it created an enduring and powerful effect.

On the other hand, although this audience reaction was unscripted, it may have been anticipated. Writing in The Huffington Post, Mark Blankenship noted that the producers of the show would have been aware of the potential of this story arc, stating that the program seemed to deliberately present Boyle in a manner that would enhance this initial reaction. He does note, however, that "as fabricated as it is, her on-camera arc is undeniably moving." The fact that Boyle is in her forties has also been cited as contributing to this strong emotional impact. In another Huffington Post article, Letty Cottin Pogrebin wrote that people may have been "weeping for the years of wasted talent", since most of Boyle's life has been spent in obscurity and those wasted years can never be recovered. All the same, Pogrebin still classed Boyle's performance as a triumph for what she called "women of a certain age", as she sees it as representing a victory over a youth culture that often dismisses middle-aged women.

In a feminist analysis, a columnist in The Guardian pointed out what she perceived as a fundamental difference between Boyle's hostile reception and the more neutral response to Paul Potts in his first audition, which she saw as reflecting a societal expectation that women be both good-looking and talented, with no such expectations being made about men. However, while noting that Boyle's performance reminded people that "not all fortysomething women are sleek, Botoxed beauties", a columnist on Salon.com wrote that Boyle's sudden fame came from her ability to remind her audience that, like them, she is a normal, flawed and vulnerable person, familiar with disappointment and mockery, but who nevertheless has the determination to fight for her dream.

Several British newspapers commented that Boyle's success seemed to have particular resonance in the United States. Writing in The Scotsman Craig Brown quoted a U.S. entertainment correspondent who compared Boyle's story to the American Dream, in that it represented talent overcoming adversity and poverty. The Associated Press described this as Boyle's "hardscrabble story", dwelling on her modest lifestyle and what they saw as urban deprivation in her home town. Similarly, The Independent New York correspondent David Usborne wrote that America is a country that will always respond to "the fairy tale where the apparently unprepossessing suddenly becomes pretty, from Shrek to My Fair Lady." Piers Morgan, who is one of the judges in the show, also commented on the unusual power this story seemed to have in the US, stating that "Americans can be very moved by this sort of thing," he went on to compare Boyle's rise to fame from poverty and obscurity to that of the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa, who was the subject of a series of Hollywood films.