Just to inject a wee bit of debate into this otherwise peaceful thread
I can't help but think that if she had been a reasonable-looking, 24 year-old female from Blackburn, with exactly the same voice - not an eye would have been batted! No-one would be talking about her, and everyone would probably just have said "that girls got a nice voice, but shouldn't she be on X Factor!?" The 24 year-old certainly wouldn't be doing breakfast TV in the US.
Seems strange the music industry gets a hard time for being all about image, and trying to project the "glamorous" female image. And everyone has suddenly jumped on the bandwagon, simply because of her image. So image is everything then?
In reality she's clearly got a good voice, but is she any better than probably thousands of other singers in the UK? Seems strange that she gets all of the publicity simply because she looks like a reject from the spinster factory. Not sure what it says about society at the moment, seems more like people are looking at her in a "freak show" type way
Just my thoughts on it