More About Eurovision

Here's some info about the Eurovision contest. This is from Jack Stevenson's essay "Eurovision: The Candy-Coated Song Factory", which you can find in the indispensible Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth, edited by Kim Cooper and David Smay.

"Founded in 1956, this international songfest was a product of television when the young medium was idealistically seen as a tool that could unite diverse European cultures for an evening in the simple shared joy of music. And for all the crassness and kitsch Eurovision has come to epitomize 44 years later, this noble aim is still its main motivation - or so the official line would have it.

"Eurovision pits one act - vocalist, duo or group - from each of Europe's 23 countries in a night-long competition that culminates in a public phone-in vote in each contry. Each nation then casts its votes for other national acts, resulting in the emergence of a single winner with a single song.

"The voting has always been notoriously partisan, as enemies like Greece and Turkey never give each other a single vote, while East European neighbors tend to vote for each other, as do the Scandinavian countries, etc. Beyond that, the voting is unpredictable and erratic in the extreme, and that's one of Eurovision's joys.

"...

"In the capital city of the previous year's winner gather the bright hopefuls from across Europe to form a massed concentration of facially perfect Barbie dolls, photogenic jawbones and a raw maw of uncut charisma. Each contestant is hoping to ride one miraculously catchy tune to fame and fortune the way 'Waterloo' catapulted ABBA to stardom in 1974. This is considered by most to be the event's immaculate golden moment, and it endures as inspiration to countless entrants since, who dream that all this might lead to something more than a free vacation and lots of tabloid exposure back home.

"The acts have all just won their own national competitions and achieved some short-lived hope, hullabaloo and celebrity on the local level, previous to which most of them were total unknowns. And after their 15 minutes of fame, most will go back to their day jobs or go on to supply second-rate lounges and supper clubs with an endless glut of 'where are they now?' easy-listening acts.

"...

"Every Eurovision edition is full of surprises and absurd moments guaranteed by the wide cultural diversity of styles unknown in an assimilationist monoculture like America. Pop culture is, above all, local and untranslatable, and despite all the warm fuzzy talk about pan-European unity and brotherhood, Eurovision is really a celebration of nationalism, provincialism and parochialism. This tends to result in acts wildly popular in their own countries but totally inscrutable to anyone else. All those stunned silences at otherwise noisy parties might be described as the sound of a million jaws dropping..."

Stevenson seems to contradict himself on that last point when he surveys the 1999 contestants, among whom was "Germany's entry, the all-Turkish band, Surpriz, singing in Hebrew (!) [who] finished a dangerous third with 'Journey to Jerusalem.' Surely as it becomes easier for people and populations to travel, work and move to different parts of the continent, many of the "national, provincial and parochial" styles will pop up in weird places, undergo unexpected changes and transform other insular folk traditions (or is that pop traditions? I'm getting confused...). Add to that unprecidented emmigration from the middle east, central Asia and north Africa, the rise or drop in nationalist sentiment that the EU constitution debate may bring about and a hundred other things I don't even know about. How can you not be interested?