This week everyone’s talking about Susan Boyle, 47-year-old contestant on Britain’s Got Talent, who apparently shocked the world by having talent unaccompanied by supermodel looks. At first, when I saw the clip (and Boyle does have an amazing voice, so it’s worth a listen) I thought people were shocked, surprised, and excited because someone on a reality show actually had talent. Then I realized that they were actually shocked, surprised, and excited because they expected that someone who isn’t “pretty” must be deluded about her own talent. It’s kind of like the opposite of “The Bubble,” a concept explored on 30 Rock this season, which stipulates that pretty people end up deluded about their own talents because everyone caters to them and tells them how great they are. Susan Boyle is no Bubble-dweller, and kudos to her for that.

Tanya Gold of The Guardian has a great commentary on the audience-and-judge reaction:

“By raising this Susan up, we will forgive ourselves for grinding every other Susan into the dust. It will be a very partial and poisoned redemption. Because Britain’s Got Malice. Sing, Susan, sing – to an ugly crowd that doesn’t deserve you.”

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Carrisa Smith

2 Comments

  1. Yes, I agree. My dominant reaction to the YouTube video was surprise that so many people were surprised. I mean, honestly: why is it so improbable that this woman can sing? I examined my reaction further and determined that it is partly the result of growing up in the church and being around (and in) so many church choirs. In churches around the world, you will find many thousands of people (men and women) who don’t live up to the world’s standards for beauty, youth, weight, style, etc., but sing just as well as (or better than!) Susan Boyle. Do non-churchgoers not sing in public unless they’re young, pretty, and/or classically trained? In many churches, I think people consider it their act of worship to God to sing along with the songs (either in or out of the official choir), and often they (and others around them) find that they actually sound pretty good. That’s not surprising; that’s how God works. Anyway, I do think she did a good job, and I’m glad she’s being recognized for her talent, despite all the rather bizarre hype.

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  2. I think it’s a mix of our expectation that pretty packages contain pretty gifts (this is in strong operational existence during almost any Christmas white elephant exchange) and something probably more central: the idea that performers typically sell packages rather than just a single talent.

    The rule goes like this. If somebody wants to market a great talent, they do their best to pretty up the package containing the talent so that ugliness of any kind will be thwarted from interfering with the delivery of the talent. Hence: world-class pianists don’t perform in jammies, great tenors use cumberbunds to hind their enormous gut, world leaders have tailors, business people dress for success and work out and dye their hair and pluck their brows and cetera. Rightly or not, the societal standard for performance is a neat package.*

    Conversely, the natural assumption (natural as based on years of societal programming) is that they who do not look the part, probably don’t have the talent to deliver—for if they had and they wished to be noticed (as Susan Boyle here surely did), then surely they would have taken more care with the package.

    As far as chastisement of societal prejudices, the program itself offered that chastisement in the female judge’s response to Boyle’s performance when she spoke of how cynical the entire audience had been.

    *Note: This is, interestingly enough, less noticeable in jazz performance as the greatest songstresses of all time (Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Shirley Horne, the list goes on…) were by no means package deals. They still dressed nice for performances, but they carried little better in the looks department than Susan Boyle.

    The Danes last blog post..20090417.teaParty

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