Yet More on Susan Boyle.

I have to stop posting on her but everywhere you look her name intrudes in the most unlikely of places. Now there is a new competitor from Wales, a 12 year old boy who I listened to and wasn’t too impressed, a Michael Jackson/Stevie Wonder wannabe, with neither the charm of the very young singer………

…..or the presence of a more mature performer of that age…..

[Meaning Faryl Smith in the blue dress of course.]

Anyway, isn’t it a bit suspicious when S Cowell stops his song after less than a minute and asks him to pick something else which happens to be more suitable and they just happen within a few seconds to come up with the music for it?
Maureen Callahan thinks the whole thing is scripted. I have thought that with American Idol too, the manipulation is wondrous to behold and anti-democratic for that reason. Remember how Simon trashed Jennifer Hudson presumably because he thought she wasn’t a commercial proposition? That one sure came back to bite him.

Meantime, Spengler is on to more weighty stuff on the Boyle phenomenon. He makes some interesting points but to load the amount of significance that he does on to SB’s shoulders is going too far and misses the point that you can have both popular and classical music.

Singer Susan Boyle, our latest instant celebrity, reminds me of any number of singers I conducted in amateur renditions of the easier Schubert or Haydn masses, or the sort of matron who sings “Katti-Shaw” or “Buttercup” in the local Gilbert and Sullivan production. Musical talent springs up like grass, and engaging voices are a dollar a dozen. That Boyle has come to embody the triumph of ordinary people over obscurity, complete with invitations to appear on Oprah and Larry King, is disheartening. The popular audience in the West likes to validate its own

But each voice has its own timbre and character and millions of people have decided they like SB’s voice, couldn’t he just say good luck to her?

In a time of economic strife and stress, she came out of nowhere to make us smile and maybe even shed a congratulatory tear or two for someone who had finally fulfilled a life-long dream. Hey, we all have our dreams, right?” gushed Steve Rosen at the Kansas City Star newspaper on April 17, in a variation of a theme that has appeared in numberless versions in the media.

Meanwhile, in China, 60 million children are learning Western classical music
under the gimlet gaze of strict teachers. East Asian singers, particularly Koreans, are working their way up the ranks of provincial opera companies, and every one of them sings better than Boyle. Who do you think is going to run the world 20 years from now? As the Italians say, we’re bolliti, “boiled”. Now we can spell it with a “y”. I hate to always be the one to say this, but the hope is fatuous. No, you can’t.

There is an undercurrent of self-worship in the aptly-named American Idol and its British knockoff, which lifted Boyle to stardom. As I wrote some years ago (American Idolatry Asia Times Online, August 29, 2006), at some time during the 20th century, the people of the West elected to identify with what is like them, rather than emulate what is above them.

Churlish resentment of high culture comes from the slacker’s desire for reward with neither merit nor effort: the sort of artistic skill that requires years of discipline and sacrifice is a reproach to the indolence of the popular audience of the West. Better voices than Boyle’s can be found in a thousand choirs and amateur theatricals, but the crowd has embraced this late-hatching Scottish songbird as a symbol of its own aspirations.

He goes on to symbolize all this as emblematic of the decline of the West.

This isn’t exactly how I had in mind to do this post but it’s late and I’m tired so excuse if it’s a bit disjointed and not as well expressed as it might be.

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