Susan Boyle (22 page)

Michael Russnow, a professional television screen-writer, wrote about the audience’s perception of Susan as a bit of an oddball who they were preparing to mock. ‘All this foreshadowed the commencement of her singing, which instantaneously evaporated the misperceptions we’d invented, causing most of us to respond with unmitigated shock - including the judges, assuming they, too, were in the dark - morphing instantaneously into collective joy,’ he wrote. ‘Joy’ was certainly one of the sentiments that Susan aroused: the spectacle of the underdog quite stupendously breaking through.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin, founding editor of
Ms.
magazine, identified three elements that made Susan’s story stand out. ‘Partly, I think it’s the age thing, the fact that a woman closing in on fifty had the courage to compete with the kids - and blew them out of the water,’ she wrote. ‘Then, too, we were weeping for the years of wasted talent, the career that wasn’t, the time lost - both for Susan Boyle and two generations of her putative fans. But I’d wager that most of our joyful tears were fueled by the moral implicit in Susan’s fairy-tale performance: “You can’t tell a book by its cover”. For such extraordinary artistry to emerge from a woman that plain-spoken, unglamorous, and unyoung was an intoxicating reminder of the wisdom in that corny old cliché.’

There were many more Susan-related blogs on the site: she had become an object of absolute fascination, with a story that would bear dissecting over and over again.

It was certainly the case that Susan had roundly disabused the prevalent notion in modern day life that success is entirely dependent on youth and looks.

‘Only the pretty are expected to achieve,’ wrote Colette Douglas Home. ‘Not only do you have to be physically appealing to deserve fame; it seems you now have to be good-looking to merit everyday common respect. If, like Susan (and like millions more), you are plump, middle-aged and too poor or too unworldly to follow fashion or have a good hairdresser, you are a non-person.’ Except that she wasn’t. She was a global phenomenon.

Although Susan herself continues to be as bemused as anyone by what has happened to her, she has not spent a great deal of time analysing it all. She, too, felt that she simply resonated with the global audience because of the world’s tendency to judge people on how they look. ‘Modern society is too quick to judge people on their appearances,’ she has said. ‘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.’ And when she did decide to smarten up, she didn’t go over the top - Susan is still definitely Susan.

To Lisa Schwarzbaum, writing on PopWatch, Susan was something more: a direct appeal to the spiritual in every one of us. ‘In our pop-minded culture so slavishly obsessed with packaging - the right face, the right clothes, the right attitudes, the right Facebook posts - the unpackaged artistic power of the unstyled, un-hip, un-kissed Ms. Boyle let me feel, for the duration of one blazing showstopping ballad, the meaning of human grace,’ she wrote. ‘She pierced my defenses. She reordered the measure of beauty. And I had no idea until tears sprang how desperately I need that corrective from time to time.’

And then there was the issue of self-belief. Susan had displayed that, too, encouraged by the mother she loved and missed so much, and that was also to be applauded. ‘In a world sometimes rife with bloated résumés, stage mothers, fawning friends, self-adulation, narcissism and bedroom shelves holding too many meaningless trophies from middle school, here is a woman who took an accurate measure of her worth and put it to the test in the white-hot crucible of reality TV,’ wrote Jeanne McManus in the
Washington Post
. Nor is it exaggerating to say that Susan’s tale is also about the redemptive power of love: in this case the love between a mother and daughter. Bridget loved Susan and therefore encouraged her to make something of herself; Susan loved Bridget and so took her life - or at least her dignity - in her hands by going out on that stage in Glasgow to audition.

Feminists, of course, were all over the story, with all it had to say about the nature of shallow appearances as opposed to fundamental true worth. But Susan wasn’t the first not obviously beautiful singer to make an impact, a point made by R.M. Campbell, a Seattle-based music critic, for the site The Gathering Note. ‘There’s no shortage of first-class voices out there, but Boyle has a unique story: she’s unattractive, ’ she wrote, a little harshly perhaps. ‘She’s a bit like Ella Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was overweight and wore glasses - everything a woman entertainer shouldn’t be. It’s really, really hard to make a career if a woman isn’t attractive. But Fitzgerald was a great singer and a great musician, and she rose above her physical circumstances. Her career lasted sixty years.’

It was probably a little late for Susan to clock up a comparable length music career, but even so, it was a notable comparison to one of the singing greats.

Susan’s story was also a comforting, and rare, example of the good guys coming first. In life, and especially in showbusiness, it tends to be the ruthless, the ones prepared to play hardball, who win through. Gentle, modest and self-effacing are not qualities often attributed to the most successful people in this world. This time, however, it was different.

‘People like Susan Boyle are the glue of our society and it’s nice when finally something good happens to them,’ wrote the
Star-Ledger
of New Jersey. ‘It is an honour to watch a middle-aged, rounded woman with little or no make-up and an old dress go up on stage and beat ridicule with an amazing voice. A story even Hans Christian Andersen couldn’t make up.’

The
Daily News
of New York was also keen to sum up Susan’s triumphant moment. ‘The audience was laughing at the notion that this totally undistinguished person would presume to dream that she could enter pop stardom, one of the most glamorous kingdoms in the world,’ it said. ‘Then when she soared, that all went away, and because she overcame this unspoken assumption that she was insignificant, she shone far more brightly than some polished and glamorous young performer from whom we would have expected a moment of brilliance.’ Again, it was a case of not judging a book by its cover.

It wasn’t unusual for journalists and bloggers to tackle the big issues of the day - something Susan had certainly become. What was a little more unusual was when the academic community started to take an interest, too. Susan’s story had become so important, so universal and so personal to viewers from all over the world that Dr Robert Canfield, professor of anthropology at Washington University in St Louis, wrote a treatise about the phenomenon entitled ‘Susan Boyle and the Power of the Moral Imagination’. In it he pointed out that the lyrics of the song Susan chose to sing at her audition were actually about hopes dashed, a life wasted, the promise of youth thrown away. What song could have been more suitable for Susan to sing? Patronized, ignored and bullied as a child, what dreams had Susan dreamt that had come to ashes and ended in nought? And yet there was this late flowering hope, the realization that her life might amount to something after all.

‘Buried within the human psyche are feelings, yearnings, anxieties too deep for words, usually,’ he wrote. ‘Always it is something outside ourselves that touches us, somehow, where we feel most deeply. At such moments we remember that we are humans - not merely creatures, but human beings, profoundly and deeply shaped by a moral sensibility so powerful that it breaks through our inhibitors; it can burst out, explode into public view, to our own astonishment. And sometimes that objective form - a person, an event, an object, a song - embodies deeply felt sensibilities for a lot of us at once, so that we discover how much we share in our private worlds, worlds otherwise inaccessible to anyone else. It becomes a social event, so we can all rejoice, and weep, together.’

Susan had become such a phenomenon that she was almost instantly embraced by popular culture, too. There were instances of it happening in the UK, but again it was the United States that led the way, incorporating her into the artistic output of the pop culture it produced.
South Park
was the first off the mark, although it adhered to its usual vulgarity when Susan got a name check. Cartman goes off to round up his fellow South Park children to run away to join the pirates in Somalia, and Kyle leaves a letter to his parents, saying, ‘Dear Mommy and Daddy - I am running away. Everyone at school is a f****** idiot and if one more person talks to me about that Susan Boyle performance of
Les Miserables
I was going to puke my b**** out through my mouth.’ It was a compliment - of sorts.

After that, the references came thick and fast.
Late Night With Jimmy Fallon
had a comedy sketch that talked about the feel-good nature of the clip. It showed a series of office arguments, starting with a row over a lost document, continuing with one when the coffee machine breaks down and ended up with zombies breaking into the building. Every incidence pales into insignificance as each staff member is won over by the shot of Susan singing in her audition. ‘That was amazing! I love that lady,’ cried Jimmy Fallon at the end: he was not alone.

Next up it was the turn of America’s most dysfunctional family,
The Simpsons
. It was the show’s twentieth anniversary, and to mark the milestone there was a show called
Springfield’s Got Talent
. Homer Simpson took to the stage, introducing himself: ‘My name is Homer Simpson, I’m thirty-nine years old and, well, I’ve never been kissed,’ he began. ‘My dream is to be a great singer like Susan Boyle.’

In May, a new video game,
The Sims 3
, came out, featuring a character based on Susan. Then in June, Britain finally got in on the act when a Radio 4 short story entitled
I Dreamed A Dream
was broadcast, drawing comparisons between Susan and the Scottish prime minister, Gordon Brown - a recurrent subject for cartoonists at the time. In November, it was back to the United States and the series
30 Rock
, in which the character Kathy Geiss, played by Marceline Hugot, sang in Susan’s style while a row raged on in front of her.

When you Google the name Susan Boyle, over 18 million hits come up (and that’s at the time of writing - it’s increasing all the time). The audition clip continues to be one of the most widely viewed on the web, not least because, as well as gaining new fans, established ones tend to watch it time and again.

At the centre of this maelstrom, Susan carries on her life, still bewildered by the reaction she’s provoked, but accepting her glorious fate and enjoying the attention after spending so long in the shadows. She wants and loves her new life, and anyone who doubts her ability to deal with the limelight would do well to remember that.

What, ultimately, has made Susan so universally loved is that she is everywoman. Everyone in the world has a bit of Susan Boyle in them - the frightened wee girl treated badly at school and dismissed as an adult - but Susan proved that these are handicaps that can be overcome. Everyone has dreamed a dream of some description, though few of us are able to follow it through. After all, it takes guts to leave the safety zone and expose yourself to the eyes of an unforgiving world - something Susan did and has kept on doing. Ultimately, the Susan Boyle story is about hope.

 

The following comments are taken from the numerous fan sites for Susan that have sprung up on the web.

 

She’s gorgeousssssssssss! I love reading articles where the writers are trying to guess why she’s become such a huge sensation. They’re always looking for an answer that sounds so complicated when it’s so easy to see. As soon as she started to sing, her voice owned the stage and everyone listening.

It became obvious that interest in her was remaining very international. When I heard fans of other (much younger) singers bragging about how they’d come out in front, I’d think, ‘just you wait - your singer does not have the international audience Susan has won already!’