There aren’t many world famous Bulgarians and to be honest I knew of exactly zero until learning of Ken Lee (aka Valentina Hasan).
An auditioning contestant of the Bulgarian version of Pop Idol in early 2008, Valentina performed a somewhat unique rendition of Without You by Mariah Carey. The song was introduced to the judges as “Ken Lee” (Can’t live = Ken Lee) The judges attempted to correct her by saying the song was actually called “without you”, but she replied “No, Ken Lee”.
Her untrained singing voice accompanied by her less than perfect English helped propel Valentina to a comical performance viewed on YouTube over 13 million times. This successfully placed her as the third most famous Bulgarian in the world, behind only Dimitar Berbatov and Hristo Stoichkov.
Predictably the Valentina Hasan version of the song has been hitting the clubs in several different mixed forms.
Check out the video for yourself and leave a comment.
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