[These are three of my comments concerning Susan Boyle and the reactions of both the audience and the judges.]
The I have a Dream from Les Miserables really did capture the emotional impact of her musicality.
People heard the song from many levels. Simon’s been a past master at emotional manipulation, aka drama, so it is no surprise. And it doesn’t even matter whether he heard her rehearse before the show, either, he has seen enough of these surprises to know how the audience will react and he plays his part dutifully.
I am not a master at reading facial language, but the female judge looked genuinely surprised and the other male judge only looked moderately surprised but got himself in check very fast when it came time for comments to the effect that I didn’t read any surprise latent in his mannerisms once he started talking.
The first thing people heard was the audience’s amusement at this middle age woman who has a quirky mannerism and a subtle, not pronounced, accent. The image and expectation with singing devas and stars were too incongruous for the audience and some of the particularly younger members (including one foolish and inexperienced young female who rolled her eyes and was caught on camera). THen the audience heard the expectation and the fear, their own and each other’s. People feared a train wreck, others expected one, and still others were hoping for an underdog extreme success. One girl was holding her hand against her mouth, cause she was so gripped with expectation and dread of a embarassing moment. Still others were envious and admired her for her pluck and determination in front of such an audience reaction, something most of the audience knew in their heart of heart’s that they could never ever withstand such a thing as she has been doing.
And then the song. First the surprise reaction and the applause. Not sure who they were applauding, as she was here to show her talent and she hasn’t finished just yet. I surmise the audience was applauding fate or serendipity or luck that had them be the audience to see such a thing at such a moment in such a show.
THen after the relief and the joy and the various other emotions started cropping up in the audience gripping them, came the musicality. People started actually hearing the words and it interspersed with what they heard from her auto-biographical details and some of Obama’s Hope and Change mantra that has filtered into the dull wits of the young and the foolish cynical minds of the old.
They saw her success and heard the words of the song and knew she was living her dream. Her hope. And they then started applauding that.
I could not have planned a better propaganda event had I the resources of an entire government and I had been given the charge of improving morale for an existential war effort.
# Ymarsakar Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
I rewatched the judge’s expressions during the song and here are my more conclusive judgments.
The other male judge on the left didn’t hear her first rehearsal so he was surprised. Neither did the female judge. Simon, however, I suspect, did know. If not by actually hearing it then at least because he was told by those that did hear her before her stage performance.
Btw, the female judge, while very attractive before, became stunning once you started seeing the interplay of emotions on her face.
And, of course, not everybody was against Susan. That was just a judge’s projection or displacement or theatre act. There are those like me, I am sure, who watched the reactions of others far more than we watched the actions of Susan on stage. And this would have been true even had we been tipped off that this was something special, spectacular, or spectral.
Simon, of course, was perhaps surprised only in the sense of how powerful the words of her song was combined with SUsan’s singing voice and the reaction of the audience. You could see Simon enjoying the audience’s reactions and even once started glancing around before he caught himself.
# Ymarsakar Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Okay, I just heard Simon’s comments for the first time and he admitted he knew. Which is as I surmised.
The female judge commented that “we were cynical”. I wouldn’t phrase it that way, actually. Rather, it is more like when cynics don’t believe in things, they will then believe in anything produced by a good con man, as Obama has testified and demonstrated.
I would term it this way. The people are fools not because of what they believe or do not believe, they are fools because they do not pay attention to the emotions and reactions of others. THey are not vigilant. Whatever they feel and whatever they think, they are unable to control because they don’t even notice what causes it in others, how can they notice what causes it in themselves?
They do not understand the power of emotional manipulation or psychological adjustments. THey do not understand the basis of power or what moves the masses. They are not a Simon or a Reagan or even an Obama.
They do not respect work because it has been drilled in our society that 1. either you are born with talent and genetic benefits like intelligence or 2. you are relegated to the bottom classes, economically or otherwise. Social Equality is such a big deal because people believe that things cannot be balanced any other way except through the all powerful government, which they have been taught brought the US out of a World Wide recession and won a world war in the bargain. They want that kind of comfort. THey want to be able to say “I am not responsible for this, therefore I need not feel any guilt for the government will take care of the inequalities for me”.
Dirty Jobs has already proven that there has been a war on honest work in favor of “intellectual pursuits”. But the cost of that is a further handicap on people, young or old, to misinterpret their reality.
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