When Does the Backlash Against the Susan Boyle Backlash Begin?

It was inevitable, you know. Really, it’s a classic American trait to build up our heroes and then tear them down in a merciless feeding frenzy. Why? To create the kind of second-chance-comeback  story we love to lap up.

In the case of Susan Boyle, what has happened is that this typically American syndrome has been globally redefined. Boyle is not so much a cultural phenomenon as a cultural incident; and now, in the media as well as at watercoolers, parking lots and wood-panelled suburban dens everywhere, she has been built up so that, right on cue, she can be torn down, surely to rise again.

Nora Ephron — her finger on the pulse of each gust of cultural wind — gives a superb example of a tear-down in a Huffington Post piece called Stop the Music. Tortured more by melodic memes than meaning to lance Boyle, she writes:

“…the worst thing about Susan Boyle — and there are several, but I’m going to deal with only one — is that she sings that horrible song. That song is worse than all of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and it’s worse than “It’s A Small World After All.” That song from Les Miserables that Susan Boyle sings is the all-time most horrible song ever in history, and the reason is simple: it sticks in your brain and never stops playing. Even if you watched Susan Boyle only once, dry-eyed, it sticks for days and days. And just when you think it’s gone, you see the title in print, and it starts playing again.”

By tear-down standards, by the way, this wasn’t so devastating: What Ephron is actually doing is railing against the music of Claude-Michel Schönberg and the lyrics of Herbert Kretzmer. This effectively puts her in the company of at least half the theater critics in New York. (The other half, alas, prefers American Idol.)

Still, I wish Ephron would consider what Boyle’s alternatives might have been. Would she have asked Boyle to sing No Doubt’s “Hey Baby”? Something from Spring Awakening? Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls”?

To read more of this story, visit The Clyde Fitch Report.