Tessanne-Mania Is A National Embarrassment

Songbird Tessanne Chin with
 her winning trophy. - Ricardo Makyn/
Staff Photographer

Keiran King, Gleaner Columnist

Let's get one thing out of the way: Tessanne Chin can sing. Not like your sister-in-law in the church choir. This girl can grab a note and raise your ancestors with it. After years of hard work - hustling restaurants, hotels, corporate soirees, soca fetes, Jazz & Blues - she deserved a break.

Thirteen weeks on American network television qualified big time. Her life will never be the same. She now has a bona fide recording contract with Universal Music Group and a guaranteed crack at the biggest media market in the world. That's awesome-sauce (I think that means 'really good'). We should all be so fortunate.

Kieran King

But this isn't about Tessanne. This is about us. The rest of us. The 2.8 million of us who aren't her, who sat glued to our screens every Monday night for months, who generated a never-ending stream of Facebook and Twitter posts like so many hyperactive schoolgirls, who bought T-shirts emblazoned with empty slogans, who plastered results in our workplaces, who harassed our relatives abroad to vote, who all in all behaved as if this privileged 28-year-old entertainer was the persecuted civil-rights leader on whose shoulders the very future of the country depended. more