I suspect most of you have seen this already. If not, do yourselves a favor. Visit this YouTube page, and watch an unemployed, 47 year old spinster walk on a Britain's equivalent of American Idol... and just blow the effing house down.
Thanks to the Internet, this was the viral equivalent of a tsunami. Follow-on TV appearances have been frequent, she may be about to record a duet with her singing idol Elaine Page (who was impressed), and it seems like she won't have to be looking for a job any time, well, ever again. The only shame in all of this is that she's been singing in her village, recording local charity albums (listen to "Cry Me A River" from 1998), rather than being on stage in London's East End for the last 20 or more years. Where she belongs. The good news is, some of the people in her village think that what you just saw on "Britain's Got Talent" wasn't even her best singing. Um, wow.
It's a great story. I love the fact that she sang a stage tune to do it. And I love it that someone with that level of talent was able to walk on, demonstrate it, and let that trump everything else. She didn't win a sympathy vote. She's just that good, and she'll rise as high as her talent lets her. To me, that's what it's all about.
Incidentally, 2007's winner was a guy named Paul Potts, now a multi-millionaire who's touring the world. He was a 41-year old mobile phone salesman, who remembers being beaten up at school every day until he was 18. That was excellent training for his subsequent dissertation on the problem of evil and suffering in a God-created world - and for his life's ambition, which was to become an opera singer....
Listen to his walk-on audition, for an extra treat. My wife, who is an opera fan with a pretty good ear, was very impressed. You will be, too.
Opera. He went out and sang "Nessun Dorma" - and won an "American Idol" equivalent. I love it. He went on to perform before the Queen, of course:
"Well, what did you expect from opera... a happy ending?!?"
Sometimes, even operas have a happy ending. May the best contestant win.
That was a fun moment, but lets pull the curtain back for a moment... It was set-up. I've had a good deal of info from deep inside the AI machine and nothing is left to chance, and nothing is a surprise.
Funny moment- after she finishes and and all the judges rave and Simon quips something about 'I knew the second you walked out here this would happen'... it's a joke, but he's telling the truth. He's winking at the camera for anybody who knows what's going on.
Doesn't diminish the talent one iota, but don't get sucked into the myth that Boyle was any kind of surprise to the producers of the show. Great drama, but manufactured.
Too often, people applaud what's famous and approved rather than what's good. Sometimes, with very abstract and avant garde work, it seems there is no such thing as "good". What the audience is disposed to favor, whether out of political fashion or peer pressure or because the performer looks hot in a skimpy costume, is all there is too it.
Sometimes you hear the magic, but even the greatest performer, performing in the most accessible, popular style can be helpless against the prejudices of a bone-headed audience. (link) Since the audience was disposed to despise a no-name American guitarist (not-yet famous Stevie Ray Vaughan, playing his heart out as always), there was nothing that he could do that they would not boo. A few years later, everybody loved the same performance - or did they never really get it in either case? Did they just applaud in 1985 for the same reason they booed in 1982? They heard what they expected to.
And then comes Susan Boyle, and reminds us that there is such a thing as being really good, and that it can overcome prejudice. Those people did not hear what they expected to. They did not react out of fashion, or pity. She blew them away because she was great. True aesthetic power was vindicated.
WOO HOO!
Booing Stevie Ray Vaughn... wow. But Bowie and Jackson Browne weren't fooled. They heard what was really there, and it changed everything.
The audience, both times? In the words of another famous rock man:
"Well, that's it. You see what you want to see. And you hear what you want to hear."
(Challenge: name that source...)
Did we see what we wanted to see on the talent show? Is it all staged? Probably is. You scout, you do advance local auditions, you have a pretty good idea of who's good, who's bad, and create some variety.
But at the end of the day, someone still has to go on stage, and perform, and connect with an audience. And in this age, there's a very big audience outside the studio, too. There's a point beyond which that can't be faked, and I think both performers reached it.
I put in a Pavrotti CD singing the same song, shortly after listening to Potts. I'm not a huge opera guy, but I figured that Pavrotti's rendition would show me the difference between not bad and great, and point up a whole whack of limitations that weren't noticed due to the setting. And I was shocked, because that didn't happen so much. It was better, and it showed in a couple of places, but the gap just wasn't that big.
At which point, I'm thinking. "This guy's a mobile phone salesman? That's like making Einstein a short order cook." And you don't... people shouldn't die with their music still inside them. Whatever it may be. However it happens, find those people, and set it free.
I do listen to a fair bit of Broadway, and as soon as Boyle started to sing my eyebrows went up like Simon's. And then she reaches the point in the song where she has to go up the scale, and up, and up, and she has the lungs to do it totally smoothly, and it's all note-perfect. At that moment, she confirmed that she was a major, major talent. The ovation at that point could have been staged - but it would have been no less deserved.
I have two minds on this which is related to our 'celebrity-culture' as well.
The 1st is that I think this rag-riches stories are uber-cool. It gives me the sense that greatness is all around, you just have to dig for it. In many ways, it is the actualization of the iconic 'american dream', no matter where in the world it happens.
On the flip side, this dream can be devastating. For every 'idol', there are thousands of people putting everything on the line to live a dream that very few people can afford. This is a massive problem in sports, where people put aside their entire youth for the chance at a lottery ticket... For every lebron there's a 10,00 kids who graduate high school with 'basketball experience' that will never pay them back.
The 'it was staged' argument doesn't bug me as much, I guess my generation has spent so much time in front of the tele that we just assume that it's faked.
Another thing that I thought was inspiring about her triumph was her looks. Unspectacular, to say the least. And then she started to sing, and blew my socks off.
It's an important lesson that someone can be great in one sphere of life, while being quite unremarkable in others.
Or, to say it the way that's important in living one's own life, even if I am unremarkable in some ways, it's still possible to work on others and be great.
How about them apples, real-life Goodwill Hunting(s) aka Matt Damons? Instead of the janitor mathematicians, we've been brought Opera and fine singing.
We are more than the sum of our jobs.
Triumphs like these are inspiring.
Beard said:
Yup. And that goes for each of us. What really, really gets my goat is that so many miss that.
The Navajo (Dine') have a saying: