Solid Gold Chartbusters #4 — The Susan Boyle Experience

The dumpy bitch has nowhere left to go, but sometimes dreadfulness en masse can have an adverse effect.

---

On the heady night of 11 April 2009, nothing changed for the British music industry.

Praise for Susan Boyle was on the lips of every troubadour, town crier, etc.

It's like when people let out bloodcurdling screams on rollercoasters. They're not really shitting themselves where they sit. It's not like there's a serial killer or a wild animal after them. It's a performative token that signifies a common cultural understanding, a collective experience; a game to be played, so to speak.

The same, I feel, is true of the countless millions of Vicky Pollards and jobless layabouts who felt the overwhelming compulsion to weep and blubber at what some might call 'the beauty of the moment' that occurred on the night of 11 April 2009 during a bog-standard airing of Britain's Got Talent.

I'm sure you are all familiar with the viral YouTube clip that sees a rather gruesome-looking Boyle warbling her way through I Dreamed a Dream of Les Misérables fame, all while swaddled up in a garment that looks like it was harvested from my nan's old living room curtains. I guess people enjoyed it. I thought it was okay, though by now I'm long-immune to the clammy hands of popera and musical theatre.

What it really is is 'opera' for people who don’t like opera. In the great pool of operatic singers, Boyle is mere pond-scum dredged to the surface by the cloying net of a faux-sympathetic, faux-earnest public who would have liked to claim to have been part of the ‘Susan Boyle Story’ had she turned out to be anything more than a novelty chartbuster locked up in a cheap studio year-round and only allowed out for the holidays.

Though, to give credit to the Syco spin-doctors, said 'Susan Boyle Story' really did seem to resonate with the working British public, though on a more surprising note she actually ended up finding a more loyal audience in the States; long after her irrelevance here she was still topping the album charts across the pond.

Boyle is often branded a 'novelty' act, but in truth there is nothing new at all here. It is, I hope, a well-known irony that so-called novelty music is often the most done-to-death, dated shit around, and here it proves no exception. The 'dumpy fishwife-turned-superstar' trope in particular is so played out at this point. In fact, such is the unoriginality of this convention that I am compelled to mention the likes of Mrs. Miller and Florence Foster Jenkins, notwithstanding Boyle’s vocal talent. Unworthy bedfellows? Perhaps, but if the brands of exploitation that haunt Boyle and Miller respectively are not one and the same, then surely it can be admitted that they at least take supper with one another. After all, the entertainment value of both parties is derived from their incongruity as performers rather than their vocal chops.

Herein we find the familiar story of the dowdy, down-on-their-luck ne’er-do-well, subject to the daily abuses and humiliations that plague the world’s underclasses, who discovers that they possess an extraordinary, impossible gift that may provide an escape from their shit job and stick-in-the-mud friends and family, a way into a world of glitz and glam, hair and makeup, besequined ball gowns, record deals, documentaries, TV appearances, tabloid coverage, magazine profiles, YouTube videos. It’s Cinderella, it’s Harry Potter, etc. ad infinitum. In the case of Paul Potts, Boyle’s spiritual predecessor, he was working a call centre job at Carphone Warehouse. Susan Boyle; to seek shores far away from the humdrum of Tesco clubcards and being verbally abused on the bus by Lynx-Africa-ridden teens still in awe at the novelty of a frumpy middle-aged tubster who doesn’t wear a drop of makeup or comb one strand of her hair, and who in all likeliness smells worse than them. One nock above a bag lady.

Boyle is the sort of artist for whom once popular appeal dies out, there’s really nowhere left to go. Now That’s What I Call Music crowd.

It's safe to say that SuBo more than deserves the much-coveted privilege of being one of our Solid Gold Chartbusters.

Stay tuned for the next issue of Solid Gold Chartbusters — The Works, where I will be reviewing three of Susan Boyle's releases: I Dreamed a Dream, The Gift and Someone to Watch Over Me.