We spent a good chunk of last week watching Eurovision because it is a pointlessly enjoyable thing and there should be more of those in this world.
For those of you who have not had the pleasure, it’s basically a song contest. It’s been running since 1956, and every country that subscribes to some vague European television consortium gets to submit a song. This is why Australia and most of the Caucasus countries are members. They have two semi-finals and a final, all held in the country that won the last one. The host country and the five biggest sponsors (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK) all get a free pass to the final but the others have to get through on the combined votes of national juries and popular voting. The acts tend to be power ballads, Nordic heavy metal, a few comic relief numbers, and enough high camp and gender fluidity to pucker the asshole of every Republican in North Carolina. The winner gets a strange looking glass trophy, the adulation of the crowd, a huge recording contract to be named later (one assumes), and the national responsibility for hosting all of this the following year.
There’s always a strange undercurrent to it, though.
Most obviously, even though it is supposed to be nonpolitical it never is. It really can’t be, when you think about it. Russia has justifiably not been allowed back since it invaded Ukraine and it was no accident that Ukraine was declared the winner the following year in what was the most obvious sympathy vote in history. Why Israel is allowed to participate after nearly two full years of genocidal war crimes in Gaza when Russia remains banned is therefore a mystery for the ages – from a moral standpoint there is precious little to distinguish them and what little there is makes Israel look worse.
And before anyone gets cranked up at me about that, my advice to you is not to do that.
I grew up in a Jewish area, where the public schools got Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana off. Many of my friends, two of my first three girlfriends, and an entire branch of my family are Jewish. I am therefore extremely well aware that the sovereign state of Israel is emphatically not the same thing as the Jewish people, the Jewish faith, or Jewish culture and can and should be judged separately on its own actions like any other nation state. The idea that criticism of Israel automatically amounts to antisemitism is morally leprous and anyone making that argument should feel shame unto the third generation for even bringing such nonsense into the public sphere.
What the sovereign state of Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide, pure and simple. They went far beyond what they were permitted by reasonable self-defense within weeks of the Hamas assault that started this round of violence between them. There is no theory of self-defense that allows a nation to go out of its way to starve children and deliberately assassinate medical workers. The mere fact that the sovereign state of Israel was allowed to send an act was a travesty.
We did our best to ignore that act, which it turned out wasn’t all that hard since it was the sort of nondescript song that mid-level FM radio stations use to fill up the gaps between commercials without having to shell out too much for royalties. Even on its merits it was meh.
How it got so many votes is therefore rather curious and I look forward to a transparent explanation for this, since that did not match what I saw or what I’ve heard since from others. I suspect the Eurovision organizers breathed a sigh of relief when it did not win, though, as otherwise next year’s event would have been the smallest on record.
The other acts, though? Those were a lot of fun.
The 70s were back this year in both costuming and hair styling, though oddly enough the outfits were surprisingly modest all around. No, I’m not talking about the Finns. Or Malta. Or the Danes. Or the Spanish. But for the most part? Fairly tame.
My favorites this year were the Swiss song (an endearingly lovely ballad), the Italian song (another quiet song that contained the immortal line “Living life is a child’s game, mother would tell me as I fell out of trees”) and the Latvian song (absolutely killer harmonies), but there were a bunch more that I enjoyed thoroughly. I almost always like the German song, seemingly alone in the world sometimes.
Coming in on the comic relief side, you had Estonia’s deliriously skewed paean to Italy (“Espresso Macchiato”) with the priceless line “Life is like spaghetti – it’s hard until you make it,” the Swedish song (an ode to saunas), and the Australian song (a double-entendre-filled love song about milkshakes that somehow didn’t make it through to the final). The Icelanders looked like they were 12 and deserved more points than they got.
I kept a running list of favorites in order as I watched. Of course I did. There’s a reason I ended up in academia.
The Austrian song won in the end, and while it wasn’t my favorite I did enjoy it – it was a definite WOW moment of a performance and probably the only time a countertenor operatic solo has taken home the trophy. There can’t have been too many of those over the last seven decades of competition, can there? Surely not.
We celebrated Mother’s Day yesterday and since Kim is a huge Eurovision fan and the reason the rest of us have gotten into it that’s mostly what we did – we tried to cut ourselves off from social media enough to avoid finding out the results and watched the replay of the final on Sunday, and then we had homemade pizzas to celebrate because Mother’s Day is a good holiday to celebrate.
For those of you who have not had the pleasure, it’s basically a song contest. It’s been running since 1956, and every country that subscribes to some vague European television consortium gets to submit a song. This is why Australia and most of the Caucasus countries are members. They have two semi-finals and a final, all held in the country that won the last one. The host country and the five biggest sponsors (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK) all get a free pass to the final but the others have to get through on the combined votes of national juries and popular voting. The acts tend to be power ballads, Nordic heavy metal, a few comic relief numbers, and enough high camp and gender fluidity to pucker the asshole of every Republican in North Carolina. The winner gets a strange looking glass trophy, the adulation of the crowd, a huge recording contract to be named later (one assumes), and the national responsibility for hosting all of this the following year.
There’s always a strange undercurrent to it, though.
Most obviously, even though it is supposed to be nonpolitical it never is. It really can’t be, when you think about it. Russia has justifiably not been allowed back since it invaded Ukraine and it was no accident that Ukraine was declared the winner the following year in what was the most obvious sympathy vote in history. Why Israel is allowed to participate after nearly two full years of genocidal war crimes in Gaza when Russia remains banned is therefore a mystery for the ages – from a moral standpoint there is precious little to distinguish them and what little there is makes Israel look worse.
And before anyone gets cranked up at me about that, my advice to you is not to do that.
I grew up in a Jewish area, where the public schools got Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana off. Many of my friends, two of my first three girlfriends, and an entire branch of my family are Jewish. I am therefore extremely well aware that the sovereign state of Israel is emphatically not the same thing as the Jewish people, the Jewish faith, or Jewish culture and can and should be judged separately on its own actions like any other nation state. The idea that criticism of Israel automatically amounts to antisemitism is morally leprous and anyone making that argument should feel shame unto the third generation for even bringing such nonsense into the public sphere.
What the sovereign state of Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide, pure and simple. They went far beyond what they were permitted by reasonable self-defense within weeks of the Hamas assault that started this round of violence between them. There is no theory of self-defense that allows a nation to go out of its way to starve children and deliberately assassinate medical workers. The mere fact that the sovereign state of Israel was allowed to send an act was a travesty.
We did our best to ignore that act, which it turned out wasn’t all that hard since it was the sort of nondescript song that mid-level FM radio stations use to fill up the gaps between commercials without having to shell out too much for royalties. Even on its merits it was meh.
How it got so many votes is therefore rather curious and I look forward to a transparent explanation for this, since that did not match what I saw or what I’ve heard since from others. I suspect the Eurovision organizers breathed a sigh of relief when it did not win, though, as otherwise next year’s event would have been the smallest on record.
The other acts, though? Those were a lot of fun.
The 70s were back this year in both costuming and hair styling, though oddly enough the outfits were surprisingly modest all around. No, I’m not talking about the Finns. Or Malta. Or the Danes. Or the Spanish. But for the most part? Fairly tame.
My favorites this year were the Swiss song (an endearingly lovely ballad), the Italian song (another quiet song that contained the immortal line “Living life is a child’s game, mother would tell me as I fell out of trees”) and the Latvian song (absolutely killer harmonies), but there were a bunch more that I enjoyed thoroughly. I almost always like the German song, seemingly alone in the world sometimes.
Coming in on the comic relief side, you had Estonia’s deliriously skewed paean to Italy (“Espresso Macchiato”) with the priceless line “Life is like spaghetti – it’s hard until you make it,” the Swedish song (an ode to saunas), and the Australian song (a double-entendre-filled love song about milkshakes that somehow didn’t make it through to the final). The Icelanders looked like they were 12 and deserved more points than they got.
I kept a running list of favorites in order as I watched. Of course I did. There’s a reason I ended up in academia.
The Austrian song won in the end, and while it wasn’t my favorite I did enjoy it – it was a definite WOW moment of a performance and probably the only time a countertenor operatic solo has taken home the trophy. There can’t have been too many of those over the last seven decades of competition, can there? Surely not.
We celebrated Mother’s Day yesterday and since Kim is a huge Eurovision fan and the reason the rest of us have gotten into it that’s mostly what we did – we tried to cut ourselves off from social media enough to avoid finding out the results and watched the replay of the final on Sunday, and then we had homemade pizzas to celebrate because Mother’s Day is a good holiday to celebrate.
Eurovision is one of those grand and goofy events that defy explanation, that seems to succeed in spite of its best efforts not to, and which no matter how much you think you won’t you know you will in fact watch it again next year because of course you will, and there is some redemption in that after all.
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