Author Topic: Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent  (Read 36563 times)

Offline David In Indy

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Re: Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
« Reply #60 on: April 21, 2009, 01:24:10 am »
Well, I was VERY impressed with her! I hope she releases an album. I'd definately buy it. :)

Apparently there is a little boy who did very well on that show too. He's twelve. Larry King offered a video clip of the boy on his show. I was very impressed with him as well.
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Offline Kelda

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Re: Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
« Reply #61 on: April 21, 2009, 03:49:01 am »
David - he's on this thread already -  posted a little youtube clip of him at the weekend.

Nothin too spectacular, although here is her competition from this week:

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj15wqGeHb0[/youtube]

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un2guR1jt04[/youtube]

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9mtE__GBKA[/youtube]



Re wanna Bet, i didn't know that...thanks to the link to Wanna Bet!  - its like a remake of a show we had in the 90's here called You Bet! But from thre page its says its not getting renewed for a second series. shame becasue they are a really good duo!
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Offline David In Indy

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Re: Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
« Reply #62 on: April 21, 2009, 03:56:16 am »
David - he's on this thread already -  posted a little youtube clip of him at the weekend.

Re wanna Bet, i didn't know that...thanks to the link to Wanna Bet!  - its like a remake of a show we had in the 90's here called You Bet! But from thre page its says its not getting renewed for a second series. shame becasue they are a really good duo!

Oh, I didn't know that Kelda. I can't watch those videos. Damn dial-up connection. :P

Yesh, I guess I should have said they WERE the host of a game show here. Past tense. The network did a poor job with the time slots. The show couldn't compete against the other programs aired at the same time. It really was a cute game show. Maybe they will come back and host something else here at some point in the future. They were very cute. And funny!
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Offline serious crayons

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Re: Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
« Reply #63 on: April 21, 2009, 08:32:44 am »
I have seen geekier, uglier, older, and fatter people sing 100 thousand times better that her. I've seen dirt poor black singers rise from ghettos to become international performers earning tens of thousands of dollars per night.

Well, if they could get Simon Cowell and a couple of other people to insult them in a timely manner on camera, maybe they could become international YouTube sensations, too.


Offline LauraGigs

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Re: Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
« Reply #64 on: April 21, 2009, 03:05:52 pm »
Plus, I *think* (I'm not certain) that likk American Idol, they probably have a panel before the real panel in secret, so they have an idea whos really bad or mad (makes good tv) whos medeocre and whos really good (makes good tv) or who has that compelling story (makes for good tv).

Yes, the stadiumful of applicants you see at the beginning of Idol definitely don't all make it to Simon & them.  There's a pre-screening process in which all the boring, middling performers are cut.  Only the very good, very bad, and the interesting surprises (like Boyle) make it to Simon.

Offline Front-Ranger

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Re: Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
« Reply #65 on: April 22, 2009, 12:07:54 am »
I just got around to watching this for the first time. Yes, Susan has a lovely voice, but what really makes it is her delivery and her personal connection to her audience. It was a matter of timing, delivery, performance, and the times we live in. Viva Susan!! She stands for many!!
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Offline serious crayons

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Re: Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
« Reply #66 on: April 22, 2009, 12:07:19 pm »
Here's a blog post from Slate that makes another good point. We love the Susan Boyle video because it lets us exorcise and transcend our own demons regarding appearance and age. But the experience is temporary, because those prejudices are deeply ingrained. We hate that we feel them, we think it's wrong to feel them, but nonetheless we do.

I'll know this is wrong if beautiful celebrities suddenly go out of style altogether and are replaced by talented plain folks.

Quote
The Contrarian Take on Susan Boyle
Posted Wednesday, April 22, 2009 8:16 AM | By Meghan O'Rourke


I didn't see the Susan Boyle clip until Sunday, and unlike everyone else in America, I didn't find it moving. Instead, I found it to be a savvy, cynical piece of TV editing. The visual sequence (the one now on YouTube) is perfectly designed to elicit a crude catharsis in its viewers—to borrow a crucial critical term from one of our earliest drama critics, Aristotle. The skeptic in me hardly believes it wasn't scripted. All the obvious reasons why so many have found it so "moving" have been trotted out. Letty Cottin Pogrebin proclaimed it a powerful strike against pervasive "ageism," a clip that showed us how wrongly snide we are about the dreams of a plain 47-year-old woman. And on one level, that's right. Boyle's life has been changed. (For now, at least.) But the real catharsis the sequence offers is that it lets us indulge as a group (this is crucial) our culture's superficial feelings about appearance, age, sexual worth, and then expel them. (Boyle is as unerotic as it gets; actually, she's an-erotic, since she has never even been kissed.) Watching at first, we too are the sneering audience members, the young girls who roll their eyes. (Note how carefully edited the audience shots are.) But—then, cue the music, and even as Boyle is just opening her mouth, people's faces are lighting up. She has relaxed into herself and her voice is... pretty good. (Not great.) And so we get to exhale and let our saccharine hearts soar with the schmaltzy music as, for a moment, we see "proven" on TV that looks and sex aren't everything. For that moment, the light mantle of eros even seems to rest around Boyle—she smiles, she has some cultural worth, someone, we think, might even kiss her one day! Thus, release. In a sense, Boyle inhabits the role of the scapegoat of early village traditions whom we punish with exile (or sneering), but whom we now, through the magic vehicle of TV, welcome back into the fold, surprising ourselves with our capacious hearts.

But do not take this for a moment to be a blow in the face of ageism. Or a sign that we're becoming a more thoughtful culture. Just listen to the condescension in beautiful, tanned, made-over Amanda Holden's language when she tells newspapers that the moment they give Boyle a makeover would be the moment "it's spoilt." Indeed, it would be. It would mean we couldn't for that moment feel our little hit of catharsis, of canned "uplift," before going to our usual over-valorization of erotic value and celebrity plasticity. In one sense, Robin Givhan was wrong yesterday to suggest we're fooling ourselves if we think Boyle doesn't need a makeover. She does. But my bet is that the makeover will only disenchant us with her over time. We got the hit we needed, and like any stimulant, its effect will decrease as we try to re-experience it.




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Re: Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
« Reply #67 on: April 22, 2009, 06:49:09 pm »
I would buy an album by her!

Offline Kelda

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Re: Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
« Reply #68 on: April 25, 2009, 04:41:22 pm »
Week 3 and only two acts which are possible competition....

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMqFXKmuJ9I[/youtube]

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY-BY4YNs0o[/youtube]

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Offline serious crayons

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Re: Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
« Reply #69 on: April 26, 2009, 12:28:59 pm »
Another fascinating Susan Boyle analysis, from the New York Times:


April 26, 2009
Yes, Looks Do Matter
By PAM BELLUCK


FOR more than a week now, people on both sides of the Atlantic have been using the story of Susan Boyle — the dowdy Scottish spinster who sang her way to fame on “Britain’s Got Talent” TV show — as an example of just how shallow we’ve become.

Before she sang, Ms. Boyle seemed to be merely a frumpy 47-year-old unemployed church volunteer who lived alone with her cat, Pebbles, and had, she said, “never been kissed” (a claim that she later took back).

Now, after the video of her performance went viral, a flurry of commentary has focused on how we stereotype people into categories, how we fall victim to the prejudices of ageism or look-ism, and how we should learn, once and for all, not to judge books by their covers.

But many social scientists and others who study the science of stereotyping say there are reasons we quickly size people up based on how they look. Snap judgments about people are crucial to the way we function, they say — even when those judgments are very wrong.

They would even agree with Ms. Boyle herself, who said after her performance that while society is too quick to judge people by appearance, “There is not much you can do about it; it is the way they think; it is the way they are.”

On a very basic level, judging people by appearance means putting them quickly into impersonal categories, much like deciding whether an animal is a dog or a cat. “Stereotypes are seen as a necessary mechanism for making sense of information,” said David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University. “If we look at a chair, we can categorize it quickly even though there are many different kinds of chairs out there.”

Eons ago, this capability was of life-and-death importance, and humans developed the ability to gauge other people within seconds.

Susan Fiske, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton, said that traditionally, most stereotypes break down into two broad dimensions: whether a person appears to have malignant or benign intent and whether a person appears dangerous. “In ancestral times, it was important to stay away from people who looked angry and dominant,” she said.

Women are also subdivided into “traditionally attractive” women, who “don’t look dominant, have baby-faced features,” Professor Fiske said. “They’re not threatening.”

Indeed, attractiveness is one thing that can make stereotypes self-fulfilling and reinforcing. Attractive people are “credited with being socially skilled,” Professor Fiske said, and maybe they are, because “if you’re beautiful or handsome, people laugh at your jokes and interact with you in such a way that it’s easy to be socially skilled.”

“If you’re unattractive, it’s harder to get all that stuff because people don’t seek you out,” she said.

AGE plays a role in forging stereotypes, too, with older people traditionally seen as “harmless and useless,” Professor Fiske said. In fact, she said, research has shown that racial and ethnic stereotypes are easier to change over time than gender and age stereotypes, which are “particularly sticky.”

One reason our brains persist in using stereotypes, experts say, is that often they give us broadly accurate information, even if all the details don’t line up. Ms. Boyle’s looks, for example, accurately telegraphed much about her biography, including her socioeconomic level and lack of worldly experience.

Her behavior on stage reinforced an outsider image. David Berreby, author of “Us and Them,” about why people categorize one another, said the TV audience may have also judged her harshly because, in banter with the judges before singing, she appeared to be trying, awkwardly, to fit in.

“She tried to be chipper, and when they asked her age, she did this little shimmy,” as though she assumed that on such programs “you’re supposed to be kind of sexy and personable, and she got it wrong,” Mr. Berreby said. “Nothing sort of triggers our contempt more than something trying to be acceptable and then failing.”

When people don’t fit our preconceived notions, we tend to ignore the contradictions, until they are too dramatic to overlook. In those cases, said John F. Dovidio, a psychology professor at Yale, we focus on the contradiction — Ms. Boyle’s voice, for example. While that makes us see her as more of an individual, we also “find a way to make the world make sense again, even if the way we do it is to say, ‘This is an exceptional situation.’ It’s easier for me to keep the same categories in my mind and come up with an explanation for the things that are discrepant.”

Even when presented with multiple exceptions to the stereotype, we often keep the broad category and simply create a subtype, Professor Dovidio said.

For example, President Obama challenged negative stereotypes about blacks, but some people may have come up with a subtype of blacks — black professionals — rather than challenge the overall stereotype, Professor Dovidio said. “That does it in the simplest and most cognitively energy-saving way.”

Scientists are finding that stereotypes are not simply stored and retrieved by the brain, but “are associated with general regions in the brain involved in memory and goal-planning,” Professor Amodio said, suggesting that “people recruit stereotypes to kind of help them plan a world that’s consistent with the goal they might have.”

Professor Fiske’s research suggests that those in low status register differently in the brain. “The part of the brain that normally activates when you are thinking about people is surprisingly silent when you’re looking at homeless people,” she said. “It’s kind of a neural dehumanization. Maybe we can’t bear the horrible situation they are in, or we don’t want to get involved, or we’re afraid we might get contaminated.”

But, she said, the neural response is restored when people are asked to focus on what soup the homeless person might like to eat, something that makes one think about the person as someone with wants or goals.

The fact that we can switch our reactions to people —Ms. Boyle’s status went instantly from low to high — also has roots in our physiology, scientists say.

Professor Dovidio said that encountering discrepancies to stereotypes probably “creates a sort of autonomic arousal” in our peripheral nervous system, triggering spikes of cortisol and other indicators of stress. “That autonomic arousal is going to motivate us to do something in that situation,” he said, especially if the situation is dangerous.

Helen Fisher, an anthropology professor at Rutgers, theorizes that in Ms. Boyle’s case, the audience also experienced a “rush of dopamine” from the surprise pleasure of hearing her voice. “Novelty drives up dopamine in the brain and you feel good,” she said.

That may help explain why so many people are drawn to the Susan Boyle story. But their embrace of her and other underestimated underdogs is unlikely to upend our penchant to stereotype.

MODERN society, with its awareness of the prejudices of history and its unprecedented ability to introduce so many different types of people to one another, may dilute or even neutralize some preconceived notions. But others will persist and new ones will form, experts say.

Which may be why, even as she expressed the hope that “maybe this could teach them a lesson, or set an example,” Ms. Boyle has begun to change her appearance in recent days, wearing makeup, dying her frizzy gray hair, and appearing in more stylish clothing.

“The raw material of saying you’re with me and she’s not is always present,” Mr. Berreby said. “It’s not something we came up with because of TV or the car. It’s not connected to modern life at all. It is inherent in the mind.”