Frivolity and Protest

We watched the finals of Eurovision on Saturday.

Normally this would be about as controversial as watching an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and nearly as much high camp fun. Eurovision, for those of you who live in the US or in caves, is a song contest featuring one entry from each of the nations who subscribe to the European Broadcasting Union television service (which is how you get Australia and Azerbaijan, for example), though not every country makes it to the broadcast semi-finals and final. It’s a contest, after all. The songs have to be three minutes or less, and in recent years they’ve been a festival of gender-bending, pyrotechnics, strobe lights (oh, so many strobe lights – don’t even think of watching if you have any kind of seizure disorder), intricate choreography, scantily clad backup singers (mostly men this year), and thumping club beats.

It's about as substantive as a meringue, but there is room in the world for ridiculous things.

This year, however, there were Politics.

You see, Israel is one of the members of this group – home of some of the biggest advertisers, in fact. Their song made it into the semifinals. And – again, speaking to those of you living in caves – Israel has spent the last several months committing atrocities and war crimes in Gaza at a pace and scale that would be astonishing in a less angry and jaded world and which the Israeli government doesn’t seem inclined to stop despite the condemnation of pretty much every country on earth including, at long last and with no small amount of foot-dragging, the US.

On the one hand, Russia hasn’t been invited to Eurovision since their invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – another barbaric collection of war crimes and atrocities – so there is legitimate question as to why Israel was allowed to compete. And the EBU managed to make that situation even worse by cracking down on any level of dissent and banning one of the more popular performers – the guy from the Netherlands – on a separate pretext mere hours before the final though it was not unnoticed by all onlookers that he was perhaps the most outspoken critic of the decision to allow Israel to perform.

On the other hand, they were allowed to compete, and not watching the show was not going to change anything that was happening in Gaza. In my own personal experience, the fact that we were watching actually led to more and more in-depth discussion of the crisis there, so at least in this instance the calls for boycotts were a bit misplaced. Protests I understand – there’s a lot there to protest. But the Israeli government hasn’t been swayed by diplomatic isolation, moral failure, or the increasingly obvious fact that they have no strategy and no end game beyond blind destruction and counterproductive force, so I suspect that they wouldn’t be all that interested in the viewership figures from Eurovision either.

So we watched.

And all of that notwithstanding (“Yes, Mrs. Lincoln, we know, but what did you think of the play?”) it was a reasonably fun and entertaining time.

Lauren, Max, and Anita came down from Main Campus U for the evening, and eventually Nolan joined us as well. We had a fine dinner of Things You Can Eat In Front of the Television (can’t beat homemade chicken strips!), an array of snacks, and a pitcher of Aperol Spritz because it is the most summery and European of beverages. We found enough chairs for everyone.

We all agreed that the recent peak of Eurovision was 2021, perhaps because they had two years to think about the songs since the 2020 version was canceled by the plague, but there were some good songs this year as well.

Finland’s utterly goofy hard rock performance was a house favorite, though you knew going in that they weren’t going to win with it for the same reason that comedies almost never win Best Picture Oscars – they seem frivolous and when you have an event that is itself frivolous you can’t go further in that direction. There has to be contrast. The Finns should have won last year, as even the Swedish hosts seemed to admit, and it was nice to see last year’s Finnish group invited back to perform their song again.

Luxembourg had what I felt was the best of the actual contenders, and my top seven were rounded out by Norway, Italy, Croatia, France (a power ballad with an astonishing a capella section) and Estonia.  I still think that San Marino got robbed for not being promoted to the final, and the Czechs deserved better as well.

On the flip side, I have no idea what the Irish singer was trying to accomplish, but that was seven motifs in search of a song and it didn’t really hold together as anything. At least it was interesting, though. A surprising number of the performances could best be described as “workmanlike” – decent songs you’d hear at a dance club without really noticing them at all.

They managed to get through the Israeli performance – another bland club song that was inexplicably popular with the voting audience – without too much damage, though not without a chorus of boos and no small amount of cold shoulders all around. So it goes.

The Swiss performer won and I suppose it wasn’t a bad song though as with last year’s winner I had it ranked 8th on my list. But I am old and out of touch, so what do I know.

Here is hoping that for next year’s show the news will have calmed down a bit, that the total level of barbarism will have declined, and that this ridiculous event will be allowed to focus on music instead of being used to highlight the atrocities of the world.

I’m not holding my breath. But one can always hope.