Ken Lee (correct pronunciation: "Can't live") is a garbled interpretation of the song "Without You", performed by Valentina Hasan (Bulgarian: Валентина Хасан), a contestant auditioning for the Bulgarian show Music Idol in February 2008.
The fan montages circulating in the internet, her performance was intercut with footage of an actual performance by Mariah Carey for ironic comparison. When she was asked what language the song was, she replied firmly that it was 'English', which she doesn't speak well.
Although she did not continue to the next round of the competition, a video of her performance was soon posted on the web where it became popular in Bulgaria and abroad. Hasan's extremely broken English, coupled with her yet undeveloped singing abilities, combined to great comic effect, and garnered the video over four million viewings in its first month on the video sharing website YouTube.
In an interview, Hasan explained to the Bulgarian media that she had no knowledge of English. She had just learned the song by heart and by ear, by listening to it repeatedly on a cassette recorder, and "sang it the way she felt it."[3]
