Eurovision 2007
It’s a European thing.
Pop quiz: what song contest is the most watched in the world? That’s right! It’s Eurovision. Why? What were you going to say?
Right now, I’m busy watching the Eurovision semifinals at work. (Remind me never to complain about my job.). It’s a crash course in European pop music that runs through no less than 28 songs in two hours of non-stop delight. Well, non-stop stimulation. Some of these songs are decidedly not delightful. (I’m looking at you Albania!)
Tonight, Europeans are voting among those 28 songs to move ten of them into Saturday’s final round where the best of Europe’s songwriters will compete. Past winners? ABBA and their song “Waterloo,” Celine Dion and Lordi (the metal group pictured above). Performing as I’m watching right now is a grunge band from the Czech Republic called Kabat, which was preceded by a KD Lang-styled torch singer named Marija Serifovic from Serbia. In other words: you get all kinds.
I was poking around on eMusic today and was really excited to find that we actually have the two most interesting tracks (imo) entered into the festival. The first is “Push the Button” by Teapacks, which is Israel’s entry. The song has received a ton of media attention because it’s basically a song written about the fears that average Israeli’s have about the nuclear ambitions of Iran.
Sample lyric:
The world is full of terror
If someone makes an error,
He’s gonna blow us up to kingdom come
There are some crazy rulers
They hide and try to fool us
With demonic, technologic willingness to harm
It’s not my favorite song in the world musically – the moves between folk, rap, and hard rock seem a bit forced – but I’ve been looking forward to seeing how well Eurovision fans will react.
The other track we’ve got is pure Eurovision cotton candy. It’s the Swiss entry and it’s called, um…”Vampires Are Alive.” Like many things with Eurovision, I feel like I’m missing some important piece of the puzzle in understanding it, but I’m going to keep on listening until I figure it out.
Other Eurovision Contenders
The Ark - The Worrying Kind [Sweden]
Watch
Dmitry Koldun - Work Your Magic [Belarus]
Watch
Verka Serduchka - Dancing Lasha Tumbai [Ukraine]
Watch
DQ – Drama Queen [Denmark]
Watch
DJ Bobo is quite the catch. Perhaps you like some Pirates of Dance? Or maybe DJ Bobo Instumentals part 1-10?
…snicker
Umm. todd who are the lovely people (read GWAR look alike contest winners) in the Pic in this post. I’d like to think it is “Vampire” but maybe Drama Queen ;-P
It’s 2006’s Eurovision winners: Lordi.
There IS no important piece of the puzzle.
Eurovision is, and has always been, absolute mind-numbing drivel of the worst kind.
Yes, ABBA won it, but I think they were good enough to be stars without doing Eurovision at all.
Even back in the old days when you often got well known artists taking part, the songs were 99.9% garbage. The truly staggering thing is that some countries actually seem to take it seriously!
The best thing to do on Eurovision night is either to go out and ignore it completely, or have a very drunken party and laugh at all the crazy foreigners (and our own entry as well, for being so s**t again).
Scooch make me embarrassed to be British. Normally it would take marauding football fans or Prince Philip or something, but Scooch made me think we were just trying to be awful. Perhaps we decided to be bad so we wouldn’t have to foot the cost of hosting the contest next year? That and the Olympics would be stretching it a bit.