Susan Boyle: New Face of Hope

When Susan Boyle emerged from the thickets of YouTube some days ago, a flurry of way-too-personal emotional overshares subsequently spread like wildfire across the internet. It was the sort of thing that future generations, unburdened with an economic recession, will chalk up to severe hormonal imbalance. Ordinary people registered their heartfelt confessions across Twitter and Facebook, scrawling, "I know this is totally manipulative, but it made me weep." Even in the illiterate comment-threaded wilderness of YouTube, many proclaimed, "IT'S! OH MY GOD! I HAVE CRY!", and the more literate of us couldn't help but nod in agreement. Ultimately, even the hippest and most stoic among us eventually crumbled and fell prey to this flat-nosed, adorable cat lady -- even Patti Lupone, who was the first to sing the Les Miz ballad.

To date, Boyle’s turn on Britain’s Got Talent has amassed just under 20 million views on YouTube. A Facebook fan club (the true barometer of success these days) devoted to her counts over 210,000 fans among its masses. Bear in mind this is all premised on her performance of a single song, with nary an iTunes download or CD single. And the only inkling of a professional career has been this song she performed for a charity record a decade ago. Or perhaps this puff piece on The Early Show. So, how the haggis is it that a Plain Jane from Scotland has transformed into a worldwide icon of emotional catharsis?

Simple. Owing to the fact that populist tirades against the rich are all the rage lately, we’ve become a culture quick to embrace unlikely heroes. And when faced with a panel of judges that include Simon Cowell, that adulation intensifies. Enter Ms. Boyle. The producers depict her as a doddering old frump, pairing up-close footage of her eating with silly musical cues. The gall! How dare an aspiring superstar eat!

After walking out onstage, she’s almost immediately met with disapproving glances and chuckles from everyone else, especially upon declaring that she’s 47 years old. Then she starts singing, and within seconds, there’s not a dry eye in the house. In fact, she manages to elicit a massive standing O, which, in turn, makes the YouTube viewing population even more hysterical. Our enlarged hearts swell with pride and a feeling we can all faintly remember as hope resurfaces.

So what exactly is the hope of Boyle? It’s her ambivalence about full-fledged superstardom, despite her serendipitous course directly towards it. Whereas others in her position would find a way to drum up fan support and mint multimillion-dollar record deals, Boyle appears content to simply remain in the running. In fact, she’s doing something that most musicians don’t dare do: Letting the music sing for itself. And therein lies her greatest allure.

Yet even more excellent is how she hasn’t felt the need to act out select scenes from Pygmalion since her unexpected success to convince the emotionally unstable masses to keep rooting for her. Somehow, in about four minutes, she manages to make threadbare maxims about inner beauty ring true. And through the vapid medium of reality television, no less. Luckily for her (and for the most emotionally unhinged among us), until the frenzy around her dies down, her fate is probably secure on the show. The Brits can’t deny a woman who’s managed to make the colonies take note of their otherwise tedious program.