"Cry Me A River"

Yes, I'm jumping on the bandwagon here but I can't help myself. Cathlene sent the link and said she couldn't stop crying and that I had to listen and so I did and, boy, it got me right in the throat and I bawled my eyes out, and, yes, sent the link around to everyone, and have received so many replies saying receiver heard and couldn't stop crying either.

Naturally, I'm talking here about Susan Boyle's stunning performance on "Britain's Got Talent" and I would have placed it here only they've disabled the "embed" so I'm posting this one instead.

This is the song Susan Boyle recorded ten years ago. It astonishes me because no one picked her up. I cannot believe that we've all been denied a decade of hearing her sing. Honestly, record jerks are such stupid shallow jerks, aren't they!



Mind you, we've also got Te Vaka out there for twenty years with the most exquisite songs and the most incredible musical talent, unable to get a record deal ... and it wasn't until the late great George Harrison heard them and swept aside the record company TOSH that they finally had the chance to make it.

Or Keith's little brother Paul, who is such a talented musician and songwriter (his latest song is the next post) who can't get a hearing from anyone in the industry. Or Paul's son Reuben who is an absolutely extraordinary musician and who can't get a break so works as a sound engineer instead. Oh, and he's gifted at that too, but it's not what he truly wants.

And then there's me ... but let's not go there.

Susan Boyle! Amazing! I think she'll become an icon and role model for all of us who've ... well, spent so many years getting screwed over and rejected and dumped on by those TOSH-BAGS in our industry of choice and yet still have the audacity to dream!

Later:

Was sent an e-mail on this topic so wise and wonderful that I really must share it:


I think you're confusing sentiment and emotion with talent, Denise!

We ALL give up our dreams to some degree. We all know people like Susan, who've "put aside" her or his own life to pursue something else like looking after her or his ill mother or father. We all know people to whom life has dealt an "unfair" hand, whether physically, emotionally, mentally or geographically. There is no great difference between a bullied, quiet, mildly brain-damaged unemployed little girl like Susan who pushes aside her dreams and hopes and fantasies to follow one path at the expense of others so she can look after her mum and do a bit of Meals-on-Wheels volunteer work, and the dozens of beautiful, brilliant, talented, extroverted artists/musicians/performers/actresses I know who've shut the door on their own artistic dreams and ambitions to study hard, work hard in unrewarding jobs they hate but do so to keep bringing home the bacon to their families because they need the money.

Life is about selfless sacrifice, on a continual basis. One of the issues I've always had with Feminism as a generality is the fact that the world is, and always has been, full of men who suffer the same fate of being held back from realising their true potentials because of prejudices and labels and restrictions and obligations and legalities. Do you think that gentle, creative, inventive, artistic, musical men like my father, conscripted against his will into World War II and sent to the war in New Guinea only to come back completely broken and spend the rest of his life a shaken shell of his former self, working five and a half days a week to support a family -- his own wife and children AND his mum and younger sisters -- before dying relatively young from war-related cancer got a fair go? My father wanted to be an inventor. He was amazingly good at it, too. But real life got in the way, unfortunately -- as it does for all of us.

Sometimes we make our choices, but most of the time our choices are made for us. For ALL of us.

And the fact the Susan is being marketed as a virgin is just about the most offensive thing I have ever heard. "Of course she's a virgin," people say. "Look how ugly she is!" Like that isn't the most insulting exploitation thrust on any woman. The choice of song, I would happily place money on, was Simon Cowell's alone -- chosen for MAXIMUM emotional effect on television. If she'd sung something NOT Andrew Lloyd-Webber-esque and less anthem-like and more poppy, like, say, a nondescript Shania Twain song, would anyone have listened? Did anyone listen when she recorded "Cry Me a River" nine years ago?

Susan's performance of the Dream song tears at my heart, but interestingly it's the line about the hell she's living that irritates me the most. We as an audience are interpreting HER interpretation of the song far too literally. By all accounts Susan is a happy middle-aged woman who lives in a village in the same four-bedroom house she grew up in. She has family, and friends, and a cat, and a social life. She goes out to local bars and sings karaoke. She's made a record. She does volunteer work. She is not some sad lonely isolate who deserves our pity. She is NOT living a hell. She's a woman who suffered mild brain damage when she was born (old mother, oxygen deprivation) and was bullied as a child because she was "quiet". So far, she sounds no different from many people I know. She does not deserve to be labelled a virgin (whether true or not) any more than any other female performer on the show deserves to be labelled a slut.

We don't know the first thing about her, other than those few things. We are simply projecting our own values and choices and judgements and pity on her, which is offensive enough. We are assuming from her song that she bemoans her lot in life, and her unmarried status, and her unemployment, and her role as a carer to her late mother. We call her "noble" and we infer that life has passed her by. We have put her in a box labelled "Scottish virgin, lives with cat." She is a mythic archetype. We have labelled her with the crudest and most reductionist labels we know.

And, long before I read the article, I thought, "She sings as well as plenty of people I've seen perform in the Charters Towers Players, or the Cloncurry Amateur Theatre Society, or the Ipswich Little Theatre Group over the years. And she looks exactly as unattractive as most of them."

Hell, she sings as well as my sister.

As I've said before, I am not condemning Susan Boyle in any way. Presumably she wanted a chance to chase away the tigers, and it looks like she got it. But she was clearly manipulated by the entire reality television system. Marketing any performer has NEVER been just about the voice -- it's always been about their whole package. And, overwhelmingly, an audience prefers its performers to be attractive. The only difference between Susan Boyle and someone like Shania Twain is that one looks good and the other doesn't. It distresses me that the biggest part of Susan's appeal for marketers is that she IS unattractive, and that unconventional point alone then becomes the "hook". Yes, we can pretend that all the dowdy middle-aged menopausal women everywhere finally have a voice, when in fact it's fuck-all to do with empowerment and claiming their rightful places up their with the gorgeous goddesses finally, and all about just more manipulation by producers and marketers and manufacturers to put an ugly girl out there for public consumption. She's Janis Joplin or Amy Winehouse without the heroin addiction.

So, Denise, I remain cynical.

Love


P.S. Hey, on that subject, do you remember that bit in "The Andy Warhol Diaries" where he says "I don't know why Lisa Minelli imagines she's a singer. She's so ugly."