By now, just about everyone in the E-World has seen the video of Susan Boyle performing on Britain Has Talent but I thought it was necessary to put in an observation that someone close to me, who wishes to remain anonymous, noted.

Susan Boyle is a good singer, a trained vocalist who is expected to sing at a certain level. Her vocal training and subsequent proficiency may not be on level with say Kathleen Battle, but she is good; definitely as good as most of the people on Broadway.

And yet, the surprise and hope and applause that she’s generating is not merely on account that she sings well. The applause is because she sings contrary to what she looks like.

The thing is, the quality of vocalists is not something based on looks but rather on what they are doing: singing. That’s judged on quality of tone, the way the body is held to maximize the sound and other elements like that. The fact that people have been praising her because they didn’t expect the sound to come out of someone who looks like that, speaks more about societal perceptions than it does about the attainable goals of people who have been trained to sing.

It actually, ironically enough, winds up being a sad commentary on the rest of us.

If she was a pretty girl singing the same song and the same level of trained skill, we likely would have thought “Ah well, she can sing” and it wouldn’t really have made a YouTube clip—it would’ve remained in the vaults of anonymity as something else some random pretty person can do. But Susan Boyle is not a pretty flower; she is plain—and therefore she is praised on something that has nothing to do with flowers but everything to do with birds.

Pretty (so to speak) interesting.