Reminds everybody to -never- judge a book by the cover...

[Chika]

I was amazed.
I actually cried a bit... What a woman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

[Jezerai]

Yeah, I listened to her the other day.   I don't know why we assume you have to be physically beautiful to have something to offer, when that is only a small part of who you are as a person.  But I guess it is built into the human psyche.  What a gift she gave me and I hope to be able to listen to her sing again.

[Namae Nai]

Also, remember this is an American Idol style contest. The audience has seen literally hundreds of people exactly like her claiming against all odds that they have the potential to pursue a singing career, but not acting/dressing/speaking like it. Everyone of those people fail, so naturally when someone appears and makes the exact same overblown clique claims but doesn't have anything apparently magnificent about them, you naturally expect them to fail along the same lines.

I think it's important to give people a chance at least, and that's what these shows should be about. The dramatic reversal is part of the fun though, and I think there's a good message in the sense that once you display your amazing talents it's easy to get past how 'dowdy' or 'Roosevelt-era' you look. She didn't have to sing past three notes before everyone knew she was remarkable, despite any prejudice they had moments before.

[Corsair]

Agreed. I am not an idol fan....but I like this quite a lot.

I like that at least we're not all so far gone that we can't marvel when we hear her voice raised in song.

Now if only we could get ast the judgementalism in advance of hearing her...based on appearence.

Take a guy liek Stephen Hawking. If he had not already proven to be brilliant before his physical handicaps became so severe, would anyone have really given his brilliance the opportunity to shine? Maybe, maybe not...and that's science! Not the much more brutally skin-deep world of show biz.

Or to be more to the point...video killed the radio star.

[Jodas]

OK my ONLY problem with this is the judges, the cast, the entire Fn show knew she could sing, WHY act so surprised, it is just like the little boy that belted out the most amazing opera, google him, might be the same dam show. 
Ok rant off, she was/is incredible!

[Erendrel]

The point is, Jodas,that while the staff of the show may have known she could sing, the audience did not. Given American Idol's penchant for inserting the most untalented people among the talented, I think it's safe to assume that both the studio audience and the home viewers rushed to judgment on the basis of the woman's appearance. In this sense, the show did us all a service by holding up a mirror to our won biases. Good for them!

[Chika]

Yup. I think that's exactly it.

I know the judges here were informed before hand, they know also what the person will sing, and even thought they know, they still ask the candidate. The way she presented herself, the way her hair was done, her figure, her background story, she was one of the people I assumed would sing like a craw..
When she claimed to sing something from les Miserables, one of my favorite musicals I was like... Oh nooooo!

She just amazed me. I got goosebumps from beginning to end, and maybe not just by her singing...
The moral here, is that we judge, before we know. We assume by what we see, without listening, and without seeing the person behind their appearance.

One of the judges put it perfectly when he said... This was a wake up call.
I know for me it was.

[Namae Nai]

*nods*

I don't actually think it was necessarily bad to judge her based on what you initially saw, when she initially appeared on stage. I don't feel the audience shouldn't have scoffed at her, honestly. There was nothing about her that wasn't true of a hundred different candidates that all sucked. Her singing pedigree screamed out 'amateur poser' and she even had the sort of reckless overconfidence that tends to precede a train wreck of a performance.

When all you can see of a book is it's cover, what else are you supposed to judge by? Prejudice only becomes bad when you cling to it and refuse to change your opinion of her as a singer after she's begun singing and pretty much blown apart any initial negative assessments. What I'm happy about though, is how suddenly and completely everyone changed their collective minds. That's the positive message I want to take from this; when you give people a chance, sometimes they surprise you with something amazing. And she was really, really fabulous.

As far as the judges knowing beforehand, I'm sure they did. They pre-audition this stuff, and I think that's why she showed up looking the way she did; the show's producers wanted the huge contrast and they wanted to make this a story people could identify with. They basically wanted to slap us across the face with a dead fish for making the assumption that we can possibly judge someone's singing talent before they, you know, actually sing. Like Erendrel said, they held up a mirror to our own biases.

[Jezerai]

Here's another such book and, though the cover is a bit different, it was just as big a refreshing surprise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVU4IkzMNIo

[Lyrima]

Ok, call me an innocent, but the folks who knew she could sing were the guys behind the stage.

I don't think the judges knew.

They might have been TOLD, but experiencing it was a completely different thing.

I dunno.

Now I"m going to go click Bou's link

[Lyrima]

Oh my.

Watching these clips can get addicting!

I've never watched the show, so when I see the links, all I can imagine is that it must be ugly otherwise since it appears to be such a miracle when the judges give the three yes's (yeses? huh. /stumped)

[Orrernoeth]

They are both great singers and are from this years show.

Here is a guy from 2007

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woAUSJpHHuI

[Jezerai]

And another ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hhOXu-wSoc&feature=related

[Wayena]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ron8saK8It4

[Jezerai]

I have that on my IPOD library.  It is my favorite version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.