‘I Dreamed a Dream’: Album of the decade?

Cover of I Dreamed A Dream

Susan Boyle’s album, I Dreamed a Dream is the album of the decade, just not in the way you think.

At Maclean’s, Jaime Weinman writes of Boyle’s success, noting,

It helps that Boyle’s tracks are calculated to appeal to Cowell’s audience—which is to say a mass audience. Her singing style is based on Broadway and West End divas like Patti LuPone and Elaine Paige (Evita), a breathy, heady voice that starts quietly and builds to a big climax. It’s a style that can be applied to any kind of song, and makes them all sound more or less the same… In a fragmented market, this kind of arrangement may work because it’s not really anything in particular: like the uptempo, all-purpose arrangements on the hit show Glee, Boyle’s recordings can’t offend fans of country, rock, or show tunes.

Weinman also points out that Boyle not only went straight to the middle of the road and firmly stayed there for twelve endless tracks, but that her songs were deliberately not personal (“Boyle does not pretend to be a songwriter; she chose 12 standards, ranging from a Madonna hit to public-domain favourites like Silent Night.”). Not personal to her, anyway, but more on that in a minute.

The result: I Dreamed a Dream feels like the musical equivalent of a Hollywood remake – it takes something that you thought you remembered liking, and makes you wish you never knew it existed.

And that’s part of what makes the whole ordeal annoying: it’s an artistic dud, perfectly attuned for the ‘Noughties pop culture palate for stagnant, gray nothingness, manufactured to be deliberately uninteresting. Weinman is wrong: The fact that it was successful for not really being anything in particular is precisely what makes it so offensive.

It sort of comes down to what we expect from our talented peers, or our mainstream pop culture. It would have been a shocking coup had Susan Boyle been able to release an album that was actually personal, heartfelt and interesting. Her life story, after all, is apparently what drew everyone to her in the first place, isn’t it? Why not sing about it? But that’s not what we actually wanted or received, in the end. And that’s exactly the problem – nobody’s challenging anyone here.

On the very first page of his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman writes,

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy… In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

Which is to say, of course, that we love ourselves. We also love being right, and luckily, Susan Boyle tells us that, too.

Boyle appeared on a show that continually tells its audience that every decision they make is the correct one, especially when it comes to the hopeless losers. Under this narrative, Boyle appeared to be yet another entry in the parade of gimmicky idiots that the show presents in order to get the audience used to the premise (judge them, discard them).

When she opened her mouth, three things happened: One, she sang well; two, the constructed narrative appeared to have been usurped; and three, everyone felt – this is strange – haughtily guilty.

A comment below the Maclean’s piece (from “catlady50”) reads,

Susan Boyle has taught the world that pre judging someone (which we all do) can come up and bite you. I think she is what the world needs at this time in our confusion. I know it was for me.. Rock on Susan you’ve earned it.

By buying her album, everyone got a second chance to judge her again – this time, the right way. The success of Susan Boyle wasn’t due to everyone finally learning any worthwhile lesson (the show and others like it will continue, as-is). Rather, it was due to the fact that we collectively got to assure ourselves that our initial scorn at a chubby, eccentric Scottish woman wasn’t the way we really felt after all. We always knew we were right.

Which is partly why it makes sense that her album is a barrage of recycled 20^th-century hits, rather than one that actually said anything about her. In the end, we had to feel good about buying her product (or, more simply, our relationship with her), because that’s how this thing works – we need to be confident that we’ve made the right decision. And our guilt about how we felt about Boyle had to be either destroyed or enhanced in the most commercially viable way possible. Thus, her album’s track listing is ripe with songs that are already heavy in cultural baggage so that, when combined with Boyle’s story, they fool us into thinking that our emotional connection is to her, and not to our own memory.

And this is why I Dreamed a Dream is a perfect end-cap to the ‘Noughties, a decade filled with endless re-hashing of stuff we’ve seen before. Our mainstream pop culture (the American Idols, the Transformers, etc.) was, with some notable exceptions, a re-run, raking in millions of dollars for being nothing in particular, and having been presented to us under the lazy assumption that we’d do all the mental and emotional work. In other words, generally not in and of itself emotional, but just with the music swelling in the usual spot, primed to receive personal projection. It was all about us – just the way we like it.