Eurovision Song Contest

The Eurovision Song Contest Final is over and done with, and there’s a year till the next time. Serbia won with a ballade that I’m sure is very nice, but when I woke up this morning I could not for the life of me remember how it goes. I am afraid that this one will end up like many of those other nice but a bit strange ballades; it’ll be forgotten in a couple of days. I don’t like it when kind of insignificant songs wins Eurovision. I really enjoyed it when Lordi won last year because there’s no chance that we’ll forget that song anytime soon.

I think it will be interesting to see what they will do to the Eurovision Song Contest concept in the year to come, if they choose to do anything at all, but I think they will have to. Now that neither Sweden nor Denmark made it into the top ten countries, they will have to qualify together will the other Nordic countries next year, and I predict that none of them then will make it to the final, this means that in a couple of year Eurovision Song Contest will have lost interest in the Nordic countries and they will stop watching it. It may seem like many of the other Western European Countries are facing that same fate, because there are so many Easter European Countries that can vote for each other.

I am not saying that the Eastern European songs are any worse than the Western European once, and even though there probably is some politics in the fact that countries tend to vote for their neighbours, I think that it’s more like that you’ll vote for music that comes from the same cultural background as yourself. I can see that many of the Eastern European songs this year were very good, but even though I quite enjoyed them, I still am more likely to really love one of the Western European once: they are more like the kind of music I usually listen too.

And that’s the problem: if only the Eastern European countries (and the four Western European that are buying their way to the final) are going to be in the final this won’t be a very interesting competition for most people in Western Europe; they will feel alienated from it all. It’s hard to grow any kind of enthusiasm for the Eurovision Song Contest year after year when you know you’ll never make it further than to the semi final anyway because there is an Eastern block that prefers their kind of music to ours, which is very natural.

How this can be solved? I have no idea. Someone has spoken about dividing it into two competitions, one for Eastern Europe and one for Western Europe. Others have spoken about dividing Europe into ten regions for the semi finals and then allow two countries from each region to the final. Others again have demanded the professional juries back. I am just happy that I don’t have to make any decisions about this; I just get to bitch about the things I don’t like about the concept!

But I must admit that one suggestion I heard kind of appeals to me as well: the Nordic countries should withdraw completely from Eurovision Song Contest and have their own Nordic Song Contest with two or three participants from each country. The reason why this idea appeals to me is because I know that this will be a competition with lots of the kind of music that I enjoy, and that is, at least partly what we want from Eurovision, isn’t it, music we feel familiar with and can enjoy? If it’s a good thing to withdraw from the bigger “unit” and form a smaller closed “unit” of our own, that is a completely different discussion that I’m not getting into now.

And oh, by the way, I didn’t use my phone to vote last night, but if I had, I wouldn’t have voted for Sweden, but I probably would’ve voted for Finland, which once again goes to prove: we vote for the music we know; that comes from the same cultural background as ourselves.