escoverthinker

[escoverthinker]

Song 18: Estonia (Koit Toome & Laura - Verona)

The song: Verona is a tropical pop song that is full of references and allusions to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which, if you’ve done any course on Literature in the English speaking world (and even beyond it) you’ll know is set in the Italian city of Verona. The narrative of the song is also the same one as the infamous star crossed lovers although, one assumes, they’ve just broken up rather than died by the end of it.

Key moment: The key moment of this song is the almost hummed ‘aaah’ moments that contain the song’s melody. It’s a great, catchy melody and, since it comes in between all the “we [x] our Verona” parts of the song it’s very much a fill-in-the-blanks lyric where the audience can imagine their own version of whatever the story is

Trend alert: Despite it being absurdly prevalent in the national finals, this seems to have been the lone ‘tropical’ song that made it through into the final line-up. Like Sax House, “tropical house” is a genre of music that has become increasingly popular among the Spotify generation of music consumers. However, I doubt this is going to tap into that Spotify demographic to any great extent because the song also has a strong flavour of mid 80s German Europop (e.g. Modern Talking) meaning it sits somewhere in a no man’s land between contemporary and retro, to the point where it’s almost genius.

Another continuity at play here is the last time Estonia sent a duet about a couple breaking up with 2015’s Goodbye To Yesterday. If Koit & Laura can capture the same magic and chemistry that Elina & Stig had despite the song being a breakup song then they could be on for a similar result with this.

Performance and staging: The Eesti Laul staging was magnificent, managing to really capture the “live performance of a music video” staging that has worked so well over the last few years. A particular highlight being the pair of them pausing to look down the camera while another voice sings ‘we are lost’. And, like Goodbye To Yesterday, which had a similar ‘bare bones’ foundational staging in the national final that got more lavish imagery added on to it when it got to Vienna, it’s only going to get better/more lavish staging by the time rehearsals start. My personal recommendation would be throwing in some tropical/lush Italian imagery (cos ‘Verona’) to use as a backdrop to the same camerawork.

Clues and Context: Unlike in Lithuania where the public grew to love the eventual winner, the Estonian public loved this song the moment they heard it. It stormed every round of televoting it was in by some distance. To some degree you can chalk that up to both Koit and Laura being reasonably big names/former ESC entrants in Estonia but, like I mentioned with Moldova, name power only gets you so far, especially when the public have had opportunities to send you since the last time you competed but ended up going for something else. In the same national final Elina Born, herself a well-liked former Estonian top 10 finisher, came last in the televote which gives some clue as to how much name power can really carry you in Eesti Laul.

Juries weren’t terribly keen on the song, largely because the Estonian juries tend to be more in favour of the contemporary/serious songs rather than the more cheesy/retro stuff but, unlike previous entries of that ilk (like basically every other Sven Lohmus song) they didn’t hate it so much as only tepidly supported it which, given the structural disadvantage, for this kind of song is a pretty strong showing!

Conclusions: Of all the songs that are trying to replicate it, this is the song most likely to give a repeat performance of Poland 2016, albeit maybe on a smaller scale. The similarities begin with the slightly ‘cheesier’ song beating the young pop princess at the last moment and the song storming the televote despite indifference/apathy from the juries. The key thing that the Estonian team must do in order to get a similar type of surprise result is to make sure that the performance/staging is fully committed to that fantasy/narrative of the two lovers lost in Verona. All the songs that got strong finishes last year had a vision and they stuck to it by ramping everything up to 11. If they can manage to pull that off with ‘Verona’ then another top 10 finish is on the cards for them.

[escoverthinker]

Song 17: Moldova (SunStroke Project - Hey Mamma!)

The song: Hey Mama is a sax-lead dance pop song in which the singer is persuading the mother of his lover/girlfriend to let him be/sleep with her. What, you thought it was addressed to his own mother? Honey no!The singer tells ’mamma’ that he is “not that unfounded boy” and that he “will not anymore/Do what other guys did before” and that he is a completely respectable chap.

The only moment where it gets a bit…questionable is the last line of the chorus, “She’ll be back home til sunrise”. Either that means “she’ll be back home by sunrise” safe, sound and unharmed or, what I think it’s getting at…”We’ll be at home shagging until the sunrise”. Totally sure that’ll win over the mother in law!

Key moment: The key moment of both the song and the staging is the sax solo. Not only is it the instrumental hook of the song but it is also the opportunity for the “Epic Sax Guy” memes that will be flooding the internet from the Tuesday of Eurovision week, you heard it here first!

Trend alert: You could argue that this is one of the most on trend songs in the contest this year as since the last time SunStroke Project were in Eurovision, the saxophone has had a total moment in the spotlight with the popularity of ‘sax house’, a genre of electronic dance music where a saxophone riff is the main hook and chorus of the song. For a popular example of this, check out Klingande’s song Jubel. Who knew that the sax sounds so great in a club environment? What this means is that the sax hook will be comfortable enough to both jurors and the public to not come across weird or jarring.

Performance and staging: Obviously not content enough with the cheeky undertone of the lyrics, the national final staging has the three backing singers in wedding dresses with their microphones as bouquets. The whole thing just adds another layer of camp Eurovision fun and madness which is totally what this song is going for (and what Moldova used to have a reputation for always bringing to the contest that they’ve slightly lost in the past few years).

Clues and Context: This was a pretty convincing winner in Moldova, winning on tiebreak over the second place ‘Discover Moldova’ song that would have been an interesting pick but probably would have been left in the semis. Interestingly enough, Moldova have had plenty of chances to send SunStroke Project again after 2010 so the reasons why this year rather than 2015 or 2012 are interesting to consider. Personally I reckon a weak year in the Moldovan selection was as good a reason as any for them to go for the big name former entrants but that’s just me!

Conclusions: This song has every likelihood of being a smash hit on the televote. Cheekiness, wedding campiness, popular forms of instrumentation in the hook, it’s got it all. Where I suspect this will be brought back down to earth is the jury votes. This is not only because there’s a lot of songs in Moldova’s semi who are aiming more towards getting strong jury marks to pull themselves through but also because the more ‘professional’ jurors can very easily mark this one down. Therefore, whether or not this qualifies will come purely down to margin. Maybe this will be so beloved by the televoters that the poor jury score doesn’t end up hurting them too much or maybe the juries will hate it so much that they will drag them out in favour of countries such as Finland or Iceland. Only time, and staging, will tell!

[escoverthinker]

Song 16: Lithuania (Fusedmarc - Rain of Revolution)

The song: Rain of Revolution is a funk/rock track in which…err…well, from what I can garner, the singer describes the feeling of being so in love with someone that they can feel the “rain of revolution”. I guess it’s likening the start of a new relationship to the start of a political revolution, emphasised by the verse in which they sing about “making a start” and “Breaking the rational views and narrow limits”. That concept, at least on paper, is an interesting angle to bring to a love song. So much so that I wish that it could have been executed better than this.

Key moment: This song’s got a pretty good bassline that, if presented correctly, has the potential to be a pretty good “get up and groove” song.

Trend alert: Lithuania’s got form in picking slightly left field songs with strong basslines performed by dark haired women with iffy English pronunciation. By which I mean, what feels like their only non-qualification since time began, 2014’s Attention was fairly similar in vibes to this. That managed to not qualify in a semi where two thirds of the competing songs qualified so Lithuania will likely be hoping this doesn’t go the same way.

Performance and staging: The national final staging was awash with the LED background giving off a red and orange firework circle effect both on the floor and the wall behind the band which kinda works. Or at least it would if it didn’t just stay the same throughout the 3 minutes save for mild increases or decreases in the intensity of the fizzling. Other than that, the singer just seems to walk around the stage aimlessly and sing the lyrics in a way that tells you explicitly enough that English is not a language she speaks at all fluently.

Clues and Context: Lithuania’s national final system is truly bizzare in that it lasts for three months with a series of rounds of the same songs being performed again and again. As a result, this means that songs that are ‘growers’ and benefit from multiple listens gain a structural advantage over songs who perform well on a single listen which is, afterall, what the structure of Eurovision itself is.

Nowhere is this more manifest than in this song. The first time this song was able to be voted on by the public, it came fourth. It was only in the later rounds that this managed to get any kind of substantial score in both the juries and televotes and eventually it managed to just get over the finishing line.

Conclusions: This song is so frustrating because Lithuania had so many potential options that would have been genuinely competitive. Greta Zazza’s actually really good MF reject, Aiste’s Aminata-penned electro ballad or, if they wanted to go completely crazy, HRH Lolita Zero’s Get Frighten. But what did they actually end up picking, this! If the Lithuanian public were only so-so about this the first time they heard it then it stands to reason that the non-Lithuanian public isn’t exactly going to be rushing to vote for this. The only votes this will be getting are ones based on Lithuania’s automatic diasporic votes which, in some years, is enough to qualify. Since Lithuania has a big diaspora voting base and a fair amount of friends in semi two it probably shouldn’t be counted out completely but even then, if this does qualify it’ll be off the back of other entries going wrong than any strengths of its own.

[escoverthinker]

Song 15: Belarus (NAVI - Story Of My Life)

The song: Story of My Life is an acoustic folk pop song with a celebratory message. We’re relying on google translate to give us the exact wording here but the chorus reads as “Story of my life/Will shine brighter/The sun will sparkle in our blood/The entire beauty of your eyes”. Like a lot of folk music, the song is especially celebratory of the natural/rural world that also, if you want to take a wider reading of it, is also innately connected to the celebration of one’s own national culture.

Key moment: The key moment in this song is the “hey, hey heyayayao” hook. Considering the whole song is in the Belarussian language, the hook is clearly designed to be able to overcome the difficulty of the vast majority of viewers not being able to understand the lyrics. A folk song in Belarussian is a tough sell but a folk song that features lots of ‘hey!’ chants is much easier.

Trend alert: As I alluded to in the earlier section, this is the first Belarussian song to be 100% in their native language. I stop short of claiming it’s the first one not to be in English because their 2004 entry exists and linguists are still debating what language to best place that series of noises into. Belarussian TV have been making noises about wanting to send a song in Belarussian in order to promote their language and culture, so in that sense this is the perfect song to do just that!

Performance and staging: The national final performance staging mostly featured the backdrop in a plain colour with the patterns that are either traditional Belarussian patterns or that are on that one part of the Belarussian flag or perhaps are both. Some people were unimpressed by this but I think the staging works both as a perfectly judged allusion to their own national culture without being too excessive (see virtually every Irish staging for the counter example) and also acting as a neutral background in front of which NAVI can be their utterly charming and endearing selves.

Clues and Context: In most of these sections with national final winners we’ve talked about the comparative performances on the jury and televote sections of the voting and what that’s likely to indicate. Belarus, however, is a…special case. Since there’s been a long history of questionable attitudes to democracy in the Belorussian selection, there’s two competing interpretations of how this won. Either A) – this won the actual televote when you factor out all of the mass SIM card purchasing that those who got higher televote positions did and so Belarussian TV counter-rigged the jury vote to make sure that the ‘rightful’ winner did win or B) – this was the “chosen one” that performed disappointingly compared to the rest of the field and so the powers that be simply rigged the jury order to make sure that the songs finishing above this got nothing or next to nothing. Whichever one you chose to believe is ultimately a choice between one or two sets of rigging. As such, there’s no real honest precedent to how well this will do.

What we do know, thanks to this video is that they have managed to send the highest tempo song of the whole year! So if you buy into the view of this year’s Eurovision as ballad central then context of what’s around this suggests Belarus are potentially onto a very good result.

Conclusions: The entry from last year that this puts me the most in mind of is Austria’s Loin D’ici. It was in a language that the majority of the viewers don’t speak (yeah, you heard me France!) but still managed to qualify and do far better than expected on the televotes because the performer completely charmed the viewers by going full out on the cheesy fantasy. I firmly believe that with a bit of luck and a bit of magic in the staging that Belarus can very easily get one of their best results ever by tapping into that same market that propelled Austria so far up the scoreboard last year.

[escoverthinker]

Song 14: Poland (Kasia Moś - Flashlight)

The song: Flashlight is a downtempo power ballad in which the singer addresses their “forbidden” lover. The two lovers are “creeping round at the depth of night” and are both “shadows in love”. The metaphor of a flashlight is a little clunky (again, likely not their first language so we’ll go easy on them) but it seems to refer to the outside authority that is trying to hunt the two lovers down, be they the police/state, the lovers’ parents/families or, since Kasia is a committed animal rights activist, human hunters chasing down two animals in love.

Key moment: The moment where the core emotions of the song are stated most clearly is in the pre-chorus “fire/like a burning desire” section. Like with the Icelandic song, this is only enhanced further by both being quite a striking hook and allowing Kasia’s strong vocal control to shine through.

Trend alert: Flashlight has a kind of similar vibe to last year’s Armenian entry LoveWave (although nowhere near the same level of power) with the slow intro and the big swell in the chorus. Aside from that though, it’s got the same amount in common/on trend with the rest of the ballads in the field here.

Performance and staging: Aside from a reasonably striking backdrop, the national final staging for this one was remarkably plain. This stands in some contrast to the official music video which has Kasia, if not actually nude then giving a very convincing nude illusion with her body acting as a canvas onto which the same kinds of background animations are projected. The whole video is such a strikingly beautiful portrayal of sensuality, vulnerability and the human body that it’s almost unbelievable that this is the same country that gave us “My Slowanie”. If Poland’s staging plans for Kyiv don’t involve making the staging more like the music video then they will have seriously missed a trick!

Clues and Context: In Poland, this won the maximum possible score from the juries and came second on the televote. It’s widely believed that the jury was introduced into the Polish NF this year so that the selected entry would avoid last year’s dramatically mismatched jury and public vote score so in that regard this was a success. The potential flipside of course is that whether or not the obvious jury appeal of this has lost them more strength on the televote side of the equation than they had counted on.

Conclusions: After Mikael Szpak’s complete surprise smash on the televotes, most people seem to take the attitude that Poland are now “the new Greece” to the point where anything they send is going to be propped up by a huge automatic diaspora vote. Such a reading of last year’s results is rather misguided simply because it doesn’t account for the fact that last year’s Polish song was just a really good song for picking up televotes. Case in point, it won the televote in Belgium. Belgium doesn’t have enough of a substantial Polish community that it could outscore both Armenia and The Netherlands on a televote which is as clear a sign as any that ‘Colour of Your Life’ won all of those 200+ televotes on its own.

What seems to be the main trend with the Polish diaspora in particular is that it’s only able to propel the Polish song forward if the diaspora is activated in a way. My Slowanie was a huge hit in the Polish charts, Mikael Szpak was a huge star and both of them got Poland top 5s in the televote on the final night. By contrast, their 2015 song’s televoting score was steady but not by any means spectacular. Given that Flashlight didn’t even manage to win its own domestic televote and that Kasia is a reasonable but not massively famous name in Poland, it doesn’t seem likely that the diaspora votes are going to be galvanised behind it in the same way as Poland’s big success stories. This, ordinarily, wouldn’t be enough to count them out but in a semi as cut-throat as semi one is going to be, every point is going to count here!

This is an admirable and quality piece of music from Poland but, through no fault of their own, I think this may well struggle to qualify from a highly competitive semi.

[escoverthinker]

Song 13: Iceland (Svala - Paper)

The song: Paper is an electropop broken-beat heavy ballad in which the singer speaks about the weakness they feel as a result of an abusive relationship. Svala has said in interviews that the song is written from the perspective of an internal rather than an external relationship and that the song is about her feelings of anxiety and low self-confidence, and that certainly works as a potential reading of the song without necessarily being the only thing that it’s about.

Key moment: The main refrain of the word ‘paper’ is in many ways the key moment of this song because it��s the expression of all the things that work about the song. It allows Svala to showcase her vocals, it’s a pretty memorable hook and feeling like ‘paper’ is the emotional core of the song.

Trend alert: The main two revival trends from this year’s Eurovision seem to be ‘jazz’ and ‘80s’. Paper belongs to the latter of these two revived genres of ESC 2017 but, unlike something like Portugal which is a pure ‘directly liftable from a previous decade’ piece, this is more 80s influenced than a straight up 80s song (which really, all of the “80s” songs are this year, but they’ll get their turn in the spotlight later).

Something that I instantly picked up on but that seems to have gone weirdly unnoticed by a lot of people is the similarities between Paper and Latvia’s 2015 song “Love Injected”. Both had a ‘broken beats’ lead bassline, the main hook was the singing of a two syllable refrain (either “Paper” or “Your Love”), lazers and lightshows played a big part in the staging and both had pretty explosive choruses with comparatively more lowkey verses. Love Injected wasn’t fancied as much of a challenger going into 2015 but it eventually managed to end up in second place behind eventual landslide winners Sweden on the jury vote that year. Could Iceland this year manage a similar type of success?

Performance and staging: Like Latvia, the difference between the national final venue and the Eurovision stage are marked both by size and budget but the basic concept won’t end up being that different from the domestic staging. The ‘base’ of the stage is black or dark and the beats of the song coincide with blue lights flashing and as the song progresses, the background changes to a criss-cross pattern that gives the stage an added sense of depth. Coincidentally Robin Bengtsson’s staging for Sweden uses the same pattern for broadly the same reason. This really ramps up the ‘live performance of a music video’ trend in the staging which we’ve talked about before.

Svala has a bit of a unique style of movement in her performance but this shouldn’t be as off-putting as something like Portugal. When you see her moving you don’t go “what the hell is she doing, that’s well weird”, you’d likely just go “oh okay, that’s choreography, I’ve heard of that”.

Clues and Context: This is a rare thing in this year’s Eurovision National Final winners, something that won both the jury and televote strands of the 50/50 system. Not only that, but it broke the record for the most televotes ever in the Icelandic selection. Part of this was because she was the most famous of all the finalists in Iceland but I hasten to add that name alone doesn’t account for that much in Iceland especially. The nation’s sweetheart Yohanna has failed to win through again not once but twice after her runner up placement in 2009 so obviously name power only gets you so far if the general public are unconvinced. I think that record breaking televote still needs to be considered as an indication that this has got the legs to make a seriously good impression on the voters.

Conclusions: This song has all the elements that suggest it can make a run for the top end of the scoreboard but nobody’s really been hyping Iceland in the online commentary. I suspect that after the fans really got behind Greta last year only for her to make a shock semi-final exit, people are being a bit overcautious with Iceland so as to not get their fingers burned. On the one hand this is understandable, especially since Iceland are in the stronger semi with a lot of countries with perfect or near perfect qualification records but on the other hand Iceland presumably won’t have had Russia come along five or six songs before them with the exact same staging concept as them causing them to lose their USP so simply cross-referencing them is simply a false equivalency.

The juries that will mostly be the same types of jurors that majorly swung behind Love Injected will surely swing behind this, that much is a given. Iceland have a bit of a comparative disadvantage in the televotes in the grand scheme of things but if it was televote toxic then it wouldn’t have broken the Icelandic record (compare this to Hear Them Calling which only managed third in the televoting in the first round) so they have it in them to do reasonably well in the televote too. How much they swing behind it and by what margin is where its success will be made which we won’t know until the results are declared. If this makes it out of the semi then don’t be surprised to see this surprise everybody and end up in the top 10.

[escoverthinker]

Song 12: Georgia (Tamara Gachechiladze - Keep The Faith)

The song: Keep The Faith is a peace ballad in line with many a peace ballad of the Eurovision tradition. The singer addresses the audience to reassure them that they are “not alone” and to “keep the faith”. It’s not exactly breaking new ground as far as songs are concerned but, again, you don’t accumulate a tradition of a certain kind of song without it being provably popular

Key moment: Unlike a lot of the ballads this year, the best bit of Keep The Faith is the climax (I mean, it actually has one for a start) from the chants of “hope” to the moment where her dress lights up

Trend alert: This feels like my 100th time trying to assess how on-trend some ballad is this year so, again, re-read those earlier blog entries for that information (and while you’re there like and reblog them too #promo). One thing that is an interesting continuity between this entry and entries past, however, is that double key change at the end. This song element was also used by last year’s surprise televote smash, ‘Colour of Your Life’ from Poland. So who knows, maybe the power of the double key change could inspire another such surprise televote success?

Performance and staging: For Georgia, their selection show this year (held the same day/during the Trump inauguration and providing a far more enjoyable slice of entertainment) was pretty much the most high budget show they could have possibly put on. But, “for Georgia” really is the key there. Like Latvia, this will look a lot sleeker in Kyiv once there’s a bigger stage and more money for it but I can’t imagine it’ll look strikingly different from this.

In its present form, Keep The Faith’s staging uses both standard techniques of ballad staging such as starting alone in darkness and ending being brightly lit with the trend of recent Eurovision “live version of a music video” staging by, well, having a literal music video as the background. Unless they really want to make a statement, that’ll likely not survive the trip to Kyiv (especially the frame where it stops just short of revealing a headline “Russia invades Georgia”) but the same building blocks will be there.

Clues and Context: The Georgian final was more or less a mildly plagiarised Georgian-domestic version of the Eurovision proper, so this was capable of winning in a more or less replicable version of the voting in the main contest, so it’s at least proven its battle ready in that sense. Questions do have to be raised, though, about THAT frame in the video backdrop and how much that played into the voting in Georgia. Tamara was part of the infamously disqualified “We Don’t Wanna Put In” group Stephanie & 3G so she certainly has form with stirring up anti-Russian sentiment.

Conclusions: Georgia this year really is the definition of a ‘borderline’ qualifier. If it were in any other half of any other semi then I would fancy its chances far more than I do now due to it being a ‘comfortable’ style with an easy to translate message, a relatively strong qualification record/amount of friendly votes and good staging potential. However the first half of semi one is both very strong and very similar in tone/style for the most part (especially Albania, which is going to be more or less directly compared to this one but we’ll get to them later) which is just about the worst possible draw for this song. If this does make the final then I would have this as a dark horse for the top 10 since it would have obviously made enough of a strong impression to overcome the handicap of the draw but 90% of the battle for Georgia will be making it out of the semi. Don’t rule them out, but don’t bet your house on them either!

[escoverthinker]

Song 11: Latvia (Triana Park - Line)

The song: Line is a synth-rock song in which the singer ponders over how to define the relationship they have with their lover. Whilst it has an outward presentation of a rock song, its structure in which it begins with pretty bare and basic but with each chorus another element is added into the mix such as the synth bassline or the drums being ramped up to higher in the mix is a technique that has been used in pop music as well. This is a very good and sophisticated way of giving your song a sense of build and progression to a major climax. For the RnB/Pop version of this I recommend Little Mix’s still criminally underrated track ‘Move’.

Key moment: The most impactful moment of Line is the synth breakdown or ‘drop’ after the second chorus. Not only does this signal the first ‘explosion’ of the track, it also allows Agnese (the lead singer) to look straight down the camera and say with her eyes “I’m here to have some fun” and I unashamedly live for it.

Trend alert: Line marks something of a hat trick of Latvia’s recent Eurovision revival. Latvia seem to have cornered the market on “alternative” or somewhat left-of-center pop between “Love Injected”, “Heartbeat” and now this. In addition to this, the rave aesthetic the band are going for with all that neon places this firmly within the same genre as Georgia’s Midnight Gold from 2016 which managed to qualify despite being largely written off by the time the contest came around. So if you’re looking for something to take a similar kind of trajectory then keep your eyes peeled for this one.

Performance and staging: Line is presented in almost exactly the way every other rock band at Eurovision has presented their songs with the band members not on singing duty doing their best to make it look like they’re doing anything other than miming to a pre-recorded backing track. The performance in the National Final also borrowed a fair amount of influence from the big rock hits from last year with the lighting effects going all out and crazy (and if Latvia are smart/have the cash then they’ll buy in the staging director who directed both of those rock songs from last year that both qualified). The Latvian studio is famously small and has pretty terrible acoustics so the level of performance will only be enhanced by the time we get to Kyiv and Triana Park has access to more budget money/hi-tech effects to work with. But even as it is now, it’s tremendously effective. Like how the elements are gradually introduced into the mix in the song, increasingly bright/flashy lighting effects come in as more and more elements get added. The only slightly shaky part of the package is Agnese’s vocals which aren’t terribly strong but overall the strong staging more than makes up for it. Brava!

Clues and Context: Latvia, seemingly always the experimental indie kid these days, trialed a new method of scoring the National Final this year. In addition to the televotes and online votes they’ve used in the past, they also included Spotify streams in the scoring criteria. Triana Park successfully won in all three sections of the voting, meaning that they were the overall winners with over 50% of the total vote in the four song final.

Conclusions: In what is by far the most downbeat of the two semi-finals, this is going to stand out massively, not only in terms of song but by the potential stage show if they really go for it (and given how they’ve staged their songs in the last few years, it’s highly likely that they will). Their potential downfall is that, now all the songs have been declared and that semi one is so ridiculously competitive, the mix from about 6th to 16th is so tight that it could happen that Latvia just fall short, especially is the juries are more concerned with pushing up entries like Portugal and that Latvia don’t have the instantaneous support they can call upon to the extent that Armenia and Greece in the same half of the semi can. So Latvia need to work for it but I remain confident that they’ll be on for three qualifications in a row. And if you’d said to Latvian television after 2014 that the next three entries would all be qualifiers, I think they’d have called that a complete success.

[escoverthinker]

Song 10: Italy (Francesco Gabbani - Occidentali’s Karma)

***Now for something totally different***

Now, let’s be honest, if you’re reading this then you actually know all these songs already, in particular you know a lot about this one. The hyped up favourite, the predicted winner on a similar scale to Alexander Rybak and Loreen. Surely all of this year is just a glorified contest for second place at this point? Well, allow me to burst the bubble in this piece I am jazzily titling…

…Why Italy is not winning Eurovision 2017.

The review will be broken up into mini-sections as my blog usually is, but not the one’s I usually write around. By the end I will hope to shine a light on the cracks in the theory that Italy are running away with the win.

1. It became the favourite mostly based on when San Remo fell in the selection calendar

When Italy’s annual clusterfucky hot mess of a parade that is the San Remo festival finally drew to its conclusion and Francesco won, less than a quarter of the competing songs had been selected. At that point, the only other jolly uptempo number was Belarus’s NAVI and their folksy stomper. Plus, for the next fortnight or so, a lot more countries seemed to be picking songs with mid to low tempos. This created the impression that seems to have stuck that we’re “drowning in ballads” this year which feeds into the conventional wisdom that this is definitely winning. Having had all of the entries now declared, that simply is no longer true. But because it seems to have stuck that this is the lone uptempo, it hasn’t really shifted from its position atop the odds.

2. Other songs have come up that can win, the fan community has just been too infatuated with the Italian entry to appraise them fairly

Belgium can win. Australia can win. Israel can win. Sweden can win. Romania can win. Bulgaria might be able to win. It’s not impossible for Serbia to win. Some misguided eurofans seem pretty sure Portugal can win so I’ll include them for rhetorical effect. If all of the previously listed candidates fail in some way then Estonia could even win (but I’ll concede that’s a stretch).

But when all of these songs debuted, the fans (who are 100% of the people paying attention at this point) who were all convinced of the inevitable Italian walkover by that point jumped immediately to the “I just can’t see it winning” (pause: which is an opinion, which is infinitesimally susceptible to bias and not a legitimate reason why something can’t win) or it “isn’t as good as Italy” (again, an opinion which is totally fine if you’re describing what your favourites are, less so if you’re assessing the relative strengths of the potential contenders).

3. It didn’t win the San Remo televote until the final night

On the first night that this was in the San Remo heats (or semi-finals? I’m unsure what the exact nomenclature is) it came fourth on the public vote. That’s right, fourth. It was boosted into first place overall by the “press jury” that really loved it but it was very much dragged up to just barely beating Michele Bravi.

The second time this was up for a vote (we’re not counting the covers round where he came 8th because, obviously, nobody’s going to be voting on it), it came third both in the public voting and in the overall voting (the public vote is weighted at 40% in the second and then again in the final round – I know it doesn’t make sense, it’s San Remo – just go with it). A comfortable distance behind Michele Bravi and Fiorella Mannola.

Only in the final night of voting did it win the televote but even then, it was kept off first place by Fiorella.  Only in the superfinal did Francesco turn it around and make it over the line. What this suggests to me is that the song wasn’t strong enough to win domestically in the first round and needed the week’s build up and hype that the format of San Remo allows to happen because of the nature of what it is as a show to make it over the line, and even then only just barely. Compare this to the last time Italy won the televote, Il Volo’s Grande Amore in 2015. That won every single televote round it was in by an absolute landslide. This is an especially pertinent precedent of the SR televote being a good indicator of the Eurovision televote as Il Volo would then go on to comfortably win the final televote, but were brought back down to third by an only ~okay~ jury score (which was even indicated as well in San Remo as both sets of juries marked Grande Amore last out of the three superfinalists in 2015).

If you think that, for instance, Sweden will have difficulty winning because it didn’t win its televote, then you should also be mindful of Italy’s slow start in winning the televote.

4. Italy are an automatic qualifier

Automatic qualifiers are at a structural disadvantage in terms of going for the win (which for being automatic qualifiers is probably a fair compromise) because the ‘buzz’ and media coverage that might have propelled them forwards to the victory gets eaten up by the semi-final qualifiers. Sweden’s Frans and France’s Amir were widely believed to be in contention for the win in the build up to last year’s contest but the momentum from the semis was swallowed by by Russia, Ukraine and Australia. If they’d both had to qualify from a semi to get there, things may well have been different. Italy will face a similar hurdle they have to overcome this year to make it over the line, arguably amplified to even greater levels because the song relies on the buzz of “omg this guy with the dancing gorilla is going to win Eurovision” going into the final for enough people to be looking out for it. Wednesday morning the buzz will probably be all about “the Belgian girl with the moody electro song and the stunning staging” and Friday morning will likely be all about “that one with the yodelling”.

5. The message/narrative isn’t clearly readable on first listen/viewing

What, if you break it down and analyse it, is the message or narrative of the Italian song? The main crux of the lyrics are about how western culture is vacuous, technology dependant, fame obsessed and inherently depraved. This is emphasised by…dancing about with a Gorilla. Okay. That at least works in tandem with the song in a surrealist/borderline camp way so I’ll give Italy credit for that. The problem is, the vast majority of viewers seeing it for the first time who don’t speak or understand Italian won’t be reading it as a well thought out parody of western culture and a comment on contemporary culture. I bring this up because all of the main challengers for the Eurovision crown over the past few years had a message/narrative that was easily readable even without knowing the words. You knew what the message of “1944” was even if you didn’t speak Crimean Tatar or English. You could buy into the relationship of “Calm after the Storm” even if you didn’t speak English. But if you don’t understand Italian then, in its current form at least, all that is readable about it is a guy the wrong side of thirty doing a kitschy dance with a Gorilla.

And while we’re on that Gorilla…

6. The gorilla actually hampers the song’s scoring potential

A lot of people are cross reading the Gorilla as having the same totemic power as Conchita Wurst’s beard and Mans Zelmerlow’s stick figure animation. This is a false equivalency. While both the beard and the animation worked in a similar way as the gorilla by providing an easily memorable gimmick, neither of them strayed over into being read as crass or kitch. Conchita’s beard was the visible marker of her difference that caused her the pain of rejection and the animation/projections during the Heroes performance made the whole performance stunning on an aesthetic level and made it look just like a live performance of a music video. Whilst those gimmicks made the performance novel, it didn’t make them novelty. When a juror, for instance, saw them, they probably didn’t think ‘oh okay, this country aren’t taking it seriously’ and consciously or unconsciously adjusted their mark for that country.

The Gorilla, by contrast, is easily readable as a joke. If you didn’t know that this had won the San Remo festival and a country like Ireland were sending it, I don’t think people would have bought into the gorilla as working on that level. If you’re a jury in, let’s say, Latvia for instance, are you going to go for the kitschy gorilla dancing OR are you going to go for (say) the young guy with the sleek and modern pop song with memorable staging, the dark and emotive ballad or the young girl with the stunningly staged hooky electropop song.

If you think the jury are going to mark Romania down for being an “obvious novelty song” then you should have concerns about Italy’s jury score.

7. It doesn’t work (at least as well as some of the other entries) on an emotional level

A related factor to being marked down by the juries for being kitschy and an obvious novelty, Occidentali’s Karma doesn’t fit the pattern of the last few years of Eurovision high scorers because it doesn’t work effectively on an emotional level.

Jamala, Mans and Conchita all had the narrative of triumph through adversity (across the spectrum of persecution and discrimination to just personal insecurity), Emmelie de Forest (and basically every other peace ballad that's done well) was a “aww that’s sweet” moment, Sound of Silence was all about the struggle to connect in a disconnected world and Calm After The Storm was a will they/won't they about a couple that were breaking up. The basic thread that runs through all of them is that the message/narrative is about tugging people's heartstrings that is emphasised by things like the staging (and, like the message/narrative section, is performed in a way that is translatable across language barriers). For an expanded version of this (written in the run up to 2015) then there’s this article from Sofabet that provides a good introduction.

What then, really, is the emotional or affective core of Occidentali’s Karma? Most people if you ask them why it’s their/the favourite will tell you either “it’s funny”, which implies that this is a glorified novelty track, “it’s catchy” or that there’s a “euphoric instrumental”. Whilst it certainly makes sense that that should mean it’ll have an undeniable cross-continental appeal, the battleground of Eurovision is littered with the corpses of “catchy” songs with a “euphoric instrumental” that failed to make any kind of impression much at all (the song from last year that probably fits that description the most is probably Spain’s Say Yay and we all remember how that went!).

So why has the fan community elevated this catchy and frivolous song to the level of favourite when it seems so comparatively out of step with what you’d expect to be majorly challenging for the win? Well, in addition to the reasons we discussed at the start of this piece…

8. Italy is the “fetch” of Eurovision

For all that they don’t seem to have the same kind of approach to the contest, Sweden and Italy have more in common in terms of their positions in the Eurovision fandom than most people would care to believe. Both have their own extensive and popular independently from the Eurovision world selection show, both generally send songs that are professional and well produced and both will generally be overrated by the fan community in the run up to the main event.

Much has been said about why this is the case with Sweden. Generally if you’re over about 35 then it’ll be because of the peak schlager music days of Charlotte Perelli, Carola and Linda Bengtzing (among others) and if you’re under 35 it’s because the high quality and quantity of quality pop music the Swedes export around the world, currently best encapsulated in Zara Larsson. Italy faces a similar type of overhyping because people tend to have a very over-romanticised view of Italian music, related to the over romanticised view of Italy as a country in general. The difference is that a substantial part of the fandom will instantly write off the Sweden fans as “fanboys”, “the fans” or “the OGAEs”, nobody uses such words to deride people about overrating the Italian songs. And they are overrated. From 2012 onwards, the Italian song has always finished higher in the OGAE poll than they have in the final contest. So if you’re distasteful about Sweden being overrated by the fans every year, you ought to be equally as suspicious of fans overrating Italy (unless of course, your stereotypical view of the types of people who enjoy the Italian song every year aren’t perceived to be from a cultural minority in the way that the fans of the Swedish song are, in which case, stop being such a prick).

The fandom has been trying to make Italy “happen” ever since their return but, for the reasons I have outlined above, I have extensive reasons to believe that it’s not going to happen.

In Conclusion

Italy might still win. I’d be foolishly blind and blindly foolish to say that it isn’t going to score very well. What I wanted to show in this piece is that there are still reasons why it isn’t the locked in runaway that people are hyping it up to be, based on both the context in which it failed to win San Remo until the last moment, the fact that the staging makes it easily readable as a joke entry ergo the juries have an excuse to mark it down, Italy’s history of being overrated and over hyped every year since 2012, the fact that Italy cannot gain momentum via the semi finals and that the song doesn’t have an emotional register that other eurovision songs both past and present do have.

[escoverthinker]

Song 9: Portugal (Salvador Sobral - Amar Pelos Dois)

The song: Amar Pelos Dois is an intimate piano bar jazz song in which the singer asks for his lover to come back. In the final verse, perhaps after realising the situation is hopeless, he says that if his lover won’t come back then he will “love for the two of us” (which is ~broadly~ what the title of the song translates as).

Key moment: To my ears at least, the key moment of this song is the very start with the orchestral swell and Salvador’s vocals starting. I say this because that’s the moment where the song lets you know what kind of song it is and what kind of mood it’s going to put you in. Quick deciding listeners may even have made up their opinion about the song before Salvador even sings a single note.

Trend alert: Aside from the strange mini-revival of jazz in Eurovision this year (I mean 1944 is kind of a jazz song so it makes sense that there’s one or two trying to imitate that style), one trend that this songs seems to be tapping into, almost by accident, is the recent near-Oscar winning film La La Land. Translate this into English and it would fit very easily into the soundtrack as background music during an important scene for the romantic leads. Is incidental music the type of song that can rake in points in a meaningful way at eurovision? That is the question.

Performance and staging: The first thing that you notice about the performance of this song is Salvador’s…unique performance style. At first I thought it was Tourette’s syndrome or something adjacent to that but that’s been subsequently poo-pooed so my conclusion is that it’s just the way he is/how he deals with the nerves and pressure of the live performance. Your reaction to this will likely fall on either one of two responses. The first is that it’s cute, adorable and the dorkiness brought on by nervousness makes him appear vulnerable and like you want to give him a hug OR it comes across as weird, bizarre and off-putting.  

Clues and Context: This won the final after not making too much of a strong impression in the semi-finals. And even then, this only managed second on its final televote but won because the jury didn’t care much for the televote winners Viva La Diva. In a way this is a narrative that is familiar, the initially dismissed/not much fancied song gains momentum from a huge response by the online fans/viewers and eventually takes the win over the pre-contest favorites (see Conchita Wurst in 2014) but generally that does also involve winning the televote. Those labeling this a potential winner in the vein of Conchita would do well to remember that one striking difference between those two stories.

Conclusions: This song has really captured the imagination of the Eurovision fan community and as a result this has made a dent in the odds to the point where this is being talked about as having a chance to win. I think these people are slightly letting their imaginations run away with them. In order for this song to qualify, it (and all of the other songs too) will probably need to score in excess of 100 points. It could very well happen that it gets all of those points via the jury and only needs whatever minimal diaspora televote it has (in this semi probably about 6 or 7 points from Spain and no more) and then it’s there. But, like how we discussed with the Finnish song, this won’t have a monopoly on the “this is a wonderful composition and we need to give it points because the public’s not going to go for this” vote at all, especially in the first half of the first semi (never mind that this view of the juries often doesn’t match the reality of how they vote). So if you strip away all of the hype, what you’re left with is a song that sounds like background music, performed by a singer who is potentially very off-putting, with a poor draw, virtually without friends that it can call upon for automatic votes, that didn’t win its domestic televote and with competitors that are going for the same performance vibe in a much more accessible package. This isn’t qualifying.

[escoverthinker]

Song 8: Romania (Ilinca & Alex Florea - Yodel It!)

The song: “Yodel It” is a rap yodeling song. Yep you heard me, rap yodeling. Okay…I take that back. It’s a standard pop song with rapping, yodeling and standard singing components. The Song is directed at the audience who the singer presumes are stuck in their mundane and boring little lives and encouraging them to live for the moment and “act real crazy”. It’s quite the existentialist anthem!

Key moment: For some of these songs I struggled to pick a key moment because, frankly, there weren’t any. This, on the other hand, has key moments galore! Obviously there’s the “yodeleo” hook and Alex’s increasingly drastic “going crazy” movements and gestures in the live performance but overall I’d have to give my nod for key moment to the section before the final chorus where they both chant “one, two, three…YODELLEE” as that’s the moment where it truly gets kicked up into the higher gears and elevates Yodel It to a singalong anthem. Or should that be a yodelalong anthem…?

Trend alert: Weirdly enough, this isn’t the first ever yodel fusion number that’s been on the Eurovision stage in Kyiv! Back in 2005 Austria’s Global Kryner attempted a mash up of Bavarian yodelling with a latino style mariachi band sound. The result then was a (criminally underrated!) 21st place in the semi and a non-qualification. I doubt this one is heading for the same fate though.

Staging and performance: For a song as ‘out there’ and ‘lol eurovision’ clip show worthy as this is, there isn’t really much in the way of over the top gimickery in the national final staging. Given TVR is among the most cash strapped of all the broadcasters in the contest after their disqualification this year then I guess it’s not so surprising that everybody in that final had to present their song in a relatively ‘basic’ way but Alex and Ilinca fill that stage with their personalities. The relatively bare stage, in a way, ends up enhancing the performance as it lets Alex and Ilinca ‘flirt’ with each other by moving in and out of each other’s space which gives it another level of cheekiness and frivolity

Clues and context: This managed to beat songs performed by much bigger names in the Romanian music industry with songs that were already big hits locally not just by a bit but by a landslide. Not only this but in their 100% jury vote Semi-Final this got the maximum score from every single judge! That’s a rare occurrence in non-rigged national finals (which I don’t *think* the Romanian one was but if you’ve got evidence to the contrary then point taken). All while being performed in the 2nd song “death slot” as well. I guess that goes to show that this is one of those songs that running order doesn’t really matter for because no matter what comes on after it, you’re going to remember the rap yodel song

Conclusions: There’s no doubt Romania are coming back to the contest with a bang (and then a yodel). They’re one of four countries with a 100% qualification record and I doubt that’s changing this year. A lot of the commentary around it seems to be treating this as a “novelty” song but lumping this in with the likes of their 2013 song “It’s My Life” doesn’t make sense to me. This strikes so fine a balance between ‘novelty’ and a proper pop song that it may just be a genius move. As a result, given Romania’s natural comparative advantage they have every year and the fact that domestically it was such a runaway success, I don’t think it’s completely out of the question that this wins the televote in the final. That’s not to say that it will or it’s likely to but it’s worth considering. I stop short of saying this is going to win the whole thing because it’s arguable the juries won’t take to this as kindly as the televoters will but the fact that all of them gave it their top score domestically (and the people on that jury were broadly the kinds of people who are on Eurovision juries - former entrants, radio DJs ect) I think suggests that they wouldn’t snub it completely and there’s less obvious cues here apart from the yodeling that it’s a novelty song (like Italy for example!) so at that point it becomes all about margins, which we won’t know until about 3 hours into the final broadcast. So, if you’re looking for a potential dark horse to emerge and gain momentum after the performance in the semis, this could be the one!

[escoverthinker]

Song 7: Malta (Claudia Faniello - Breathlessly)

The song: Breathlessly is a classic Eurovision style ballad where the singer vows to do anything to stay devoted and loyal to her lover. The line “hoping there’s a vacancy within your heart” maybe implies that they aren’t necessarily even together in the first place, or maybe that vacancy has recently been filled by somebody else? Hey it’s Eurovision, most of these songs are written in people’s second languages at best (although Malta insist that English is an official language of theirs so really they’ve got no excuse but I’m in a good mood today so we’ll let them off the hook just this once). Basically, it’s a needy ballad.

Key moment: I’m struggling to highlight a ‘key moment’ within the three minutes (spoilers for the conclusions section!) but the lyric “climbing over walls that always felt too high” is a reasonably fresh lyric in what is otherwise quite a clichéd song.

Trend alert: Basically re-read the Slovenia review for this section. Only thing I’ll add is that if it’s a song that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1995 contest AND it’s sung by a woman then it’s even more part of the Eurovision tradition than being its own entity unto itself.

Performance and staging: She stands still and she’s wearing a white dress. The white dress is used to signify purity and innocence which implants in the viewer’s mind that the singer is in the moral high ground of the troubled relationship she’s singing about. And, save Malta throwing another budget busting LED-projection session onto this song, I gather that the staging isn’t going to be much different on the night of the semi final.

Clues and context: Most people thought going into the Maltese NF that this would do well but not win so the fact that this won was a bit of a surprise. Part of me puts it down simply to the fact that this was performed last in a final that in typically Maltese fashion lasted (what felt like) all night. So that, by the time the phone lines were opened, I’d be surprised if anybody much remembered the songs further back than the last four or five. This is also Claudia’s eleventh attempt to represent Malta in Eurovision. Yes, you read that right, eleventh. One One. 11. Most ‘serial entrants’ in the national final system experience something of a law of diminishing returns beyond maybe their second or third attempt save for some people like Sweden’s Sanna Nielsen who get a second wind on lucky seven but even then it tends to be with something that’s not quite as good as the songs they could have won with. The fact that this is lucky eleven only adds another dash of desperation to what is already a pretty needy song.

Conclusions: This is not a bad song by any means but the fact that I’m struggling for unique things to say about this embodies what will be its biggest challenge, struggling to find a unique selling point that makes this stand out among a field of any kind, let alone one that’s got a lot of the same kinds of songs in it that it’s going to be compared to (Denmark is in Malta’s half of the semi for instance, and that blows this completely out of the water). At the time of writing the running order isn’t out yet but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this gets put in the second song ‘death slot’ where ballads get put to be forgotten about. Nice try Malta but, better luck next year.

[escoverthinker]

Song 6: Slovenia (Omar Naber - On My Way)

The song: On My Way is a pretty standard issue ballad. The singer states his intention to walk his own path. It’s written intentionally vague so that it can be referring to a breakup of a relationship or to just deciding to move away to the big city from your small town or a variety of other classical song topics of the ballad tradition. It builds progressively throughout the song to a climactic finale, bish bash bosh.

Key moment: Like all of the best Eurovision ballads, the best moment is the key change in the final chorus where it builds to the climax.

Trend Alert: As you might have pegged from the first part of this review, this song is part of a tradition of songs that goes all the way back to its roots but probably reached its peak of success and high frequency in the mid-90s. As such, this kind of song nowadays has a very hit and miss success rate. Either people buy into it and enjoy a nostalgic/familiar number like Poland’s 2016 song “Colour of Your Life”, or they just think it’s dated and shrug their shoulders like Ireland’s Niamh Kavanagh in 2010.

Performance and staging: Again, we’re not exactly pushing the boat out here staging wise. Like Denmark’s super obvious hot-cold contrast, Slovenia opts for a black and white filter in the verses and switches to full colour in the choruses with added ‘rays of light’ protruding from the stage to give it a bigger sense of scale. Like with Denmark, there’s a less *obvious* way to show this but it remains perfectly functional.

Clues and Context: This won in Slovenia, in most part because it stormed the jury vote to the point where as long as it didn’t bomb with the public vote then it would have won (and in the end it came second). This is in most part because the public vote score totals were predetermined so the televote winner (and what SHOULD have been their entry) could have run away with it and still only have an advantage of 12 points (and as it turned out they got nearly three times as many votes as this did). Sweden ditched this pre-determined public vote numbers thing after 2008 but, alas, Slovenia are still stuck in the relative dark ages. Since this is the first of a few songs where this was the case this year, it should at least be noted now that if a song can’t even win a televote in its own country, don’t be optimistic that it can win heaps of points from the rest of Europe.

Conclusions: Slovenia always have an uphill struggle to do as well as they deserve in Eurovision. This is partly because they’re a bit of a black sheep in their own “gang” of the ex-Yugo countries (History geek alert: mostly because they got out of the Balkan wars relatively unscathed as opposed to the likes of Bosnia & Herzegovina) so they really start at a disadvantage compared to other countries with large “friendship groups”. That means that they have to send stuff that is doubly as good as other countries just to compete at the same level. So if you add together all the things discussed here together, a comparative disadvantage in the televote regardless, a song that by Omar’s own admission was written over a decade ago, the fact that it got less than half of the song that beat it in Slovenia’s own televote and the fact that there’s a high frequency of other countries doing similar kinds of songs this year, Slovenia’s prospects do not look good. This is probably more likely to finish last in its semi that qualify for the final.

[escoverthinker]

Song 5: Denmark (Anja - Where I Am)

The song: Where I Am is a mid tempo power ballad (yes ballads can be mid tempo) in which the singer worries whether they’re holding back from being fully open to their lover before ultimately vowing to ‘lay down their weapons’ and be fully honest with them.

Key moment: The best moment and, I suspect, what will earn Denmark most of their points is Anja’s vocals in the final chorus, in particular the moment where she ‘rises back up from leaning forward as the camera pulls away to a wide shot. She’s got all the vocal talents of someone who can belt it out but without ever losing the melody and/or being sharp and screechy with it.

Trend alert: Where I Am is kind of influenced by everything and nothing in musical terms and , given this is the year where more countries than ever seem to be going with something low in the tempo, it’s pretty bang on trend as far as Eurovision 2017 goes. However - *hot take alert* - if you ask me, this song is more than a little bit influenced by last year’s runner up “Sound of Silence” by Dami Im. Both songs were about the singer’s internal conflict over being able to make an emotional connection, both have clear changes in beat/mood between the verses and the chorus including the soft middle eight before they tear it apart with their vocals at the end (but not so drastic that they sound like they’re from different songs – the failure of last year’s Norwegian song has taught us about trying that) and they’re both sung by Australians!

I’m not necessarily suggesting that this is going to be the next Sound of Silence and come within a whisker of winning, but it should certainly be noted that Eurovision viewers are more than able to respond to this kind of song/performance

Performance and staging: The staging in DMGP clearly makes visible the fact that there’s a clear difference between the verse and the chorus but it does this in a really obvious way. The stage is blue or ‘cold’ during the internal conflict of the verses and red/orange or ‘hot’ during the climaxes of the chorus. Given that DR seems to be so bankrupt on both money and ideas since winning in 2013 they’re still using the “about to start” jingle from the hosting in 2014 I’m not surprised that they did this in such an obvious way but still, there’s probably a better way to show that kind of emotion on stage without being SO obvious about it.

Clues and Context: This ran away with the win in the superfinal of DMGP with 64% of the vote. What was notable in this year’s DMGP though was the introduction of the “fan jury” that was clearly introduced by the Danish team to steer the Danish public away from their spooky obsession with average middle of the road male singers to an all-female top three. So the theory goes that this alteration of the voting formula will mean that this year’s Danish song should be able to travel more than their last two non-qualifiers and make it to the Saturday night.

Conclusions: There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this song. The lyrics come at the ‘love story’ angle in a pretty fresh way, she sings it well, the staging works in tandem with the music and overall the ‘package’ is cohesive. The area where this is potentially going to struggle is just through not having enough of a distinct USP in a year of inspirational female-led power ballads. After the last few years I think Denmark are more trying to get into the final than win the whole thing and this is more than capable of doing that. Come the final though, the dilution of the “ballad vote” may potentially see it lingering on the right hand side.

[escoverthinker]

Song 4: Spain (Manuel Navarro – Do it for Your Lover)

The song: Do it for Your Lover is a laid back, chilled, summery acoustic radio-pop song. I’ve seen some people describe it as a ‘reggae’ song but I think it’s more ‘reggae influenced’ than a straight up reggae song myself.

Key moment: The main hook of the song is the section with the ‘lo o ov er’ lyrics that are on the backing vocals in the national final performance. Assuming the Swedes don’t throw in another rule change before Kyiv, they’ll need to come off the backing track but the other people on stage can easily just recreate that themselves.

Trend alert: I mean, white boys with acoustic guitars pretty much run the pop charts at the moment so it’s pretty much bang on trend there. Furthermore, as Spotify and streaming platforms has become more dominant in the music industry, ‘chilled’ and ‘relaxed’ music has become an increasingly lucrative market to tap into for record labels. If we’re talking Eurovision specifically, then ‘boy with a guitar’ has shown to be a niche that can garner you support from the voters if performed well. We might think of Belgium’s Tom Dice from 2010, Finland’s Paradise Oscar from 2011 or Cyprus’s John Karayiannis from 2015. If we’re reading it as chilled Spotify music then we might even compare him to Frans from Sweden in 2016.

Performance and staging: The staging in the national final wasn’t terribly complex, but ‘boy and his guitar’ songs don’t tend to be or even, need to be especially complicated. The vibe they are going for is ‘the beach at summer’ which is definitely a marketable angle. Vocally, Manuel is occasionally a bit wobbly but he does have a good ability to pick out and connect with the camera. He’s relatively young an inexperienced with TV performances but he’s definitely someone who can grow with more practice and rehearsal (which, given his team bothered to make the trip out to Kyiv to perform in the Ukrainian selection show, seems like the view in Spain too).

Clues and context: We’ve all heard about the drama that went down in Objetivo Eurovision at this point and as such it feels unnecessary to go over the scandal again. What I will say about the whole affair is that it does raise questions about the ability for ‘Do it for Your Lover’ to attract votes that weren’t acquired by ~shenanigans~.

Conclusions: The (potentially corrupt) jury in Spain that majorly backed this were all radio DJs and I think that makes total sense. This kind of song is the perfect kind of thing for listening to on the radio, especially during the warmer months of the year. However, radio songs aren’t guarantees of successful Eurovision entries, not least because such lowkey songs can end up being used as spacers between two high energy/impact numbers causing them to get forgotten about easily, especially if you’re drawn in the first half of the show. This is more or less exactly what happened to Cyprus in 2015 who were used as a spacer between Sweden and Australia. Overall, regardless of the quality and/or charm of the song and the environment it creates, this is probably the song that’s most at risk of under-performing simply as a result of context.

[escoverthinker]

Song 3: Hungary (Joci Pápai – Origo)

The song: Origo is a midtempo fusion of Romani-style folk music with rap/hip hop rhythm. If you’re from a country where the Romani gypsy community doesn’t make up a culturally significant part of the populace then this mash-up might seem a bit random but it’s working in a similar way that a lot of UK hip hop artists from the diasporic Caribbean community play with dancehall styles as part of the cultural melting pot of contemporary hip hop.

Key moment: Origo’s two key moments are the refrain in the Romani language that give the song its melody and the rap section in the lead up to the final chorus.

Trend alert: See, in the Swiss review I felt like I had barely anything to write for this section. Hungary on the other hand, oh boy! Strap yourselves in!

In the intro I spoke about the song being a fusion between ‘ethnic’ and ‘hip hop’ musical styles and both of them have a long history with Eurovision as a cultural event. Really, the “story” of Eurovision from the early 00s is about the expansion of the contest out into the “new Europe” part of the world being driven to new heights by these countries bringing their own indigenous styles of music onto the world stage. Although, a recent development in this story, as jury voting has been phased back in and Western Europe have upped their game is that entries that feature a lot of “ethnic” music have tended to have been an easy targets for, particularly juries, being marked down due to some people just not getting it as the genre of music doesn’t resonate with them in their country as much as it does for the country sending it.

Take the Bulgarian performers Elitza and Stoyan as an example here. In 2007, a year awash with entries that celebrated/played up ‘ethnic’ music probably to its highest point we’ve ever seen, their Bulgarian drum fest gave them a surprise top five placing. Six years later and Bulgaria, desperately trying to revive their sagging fortunes turn to their lone qualifier to work their magic again and Bulgaria is greeted with another failure to qualify. Particularly striking was that they would have qualified on a pure televote but were brought down by being placed dead last in the jury rankings. That’s below PeR’s “Here We Go”. Sad!

Whilst ethnic music has certainly had a long history of success in Eurovision, hip hop….has not. Robyn Gallagher has a great listicle of the most well-known examples here but those examples are not generally well known for their smashing success. Although, you do have to consider this one on its own merits. Trying to lump this in the same category as Waldo’s People, Daz Sampson and Stefan Raab doesn’t feel quite right.

Origo even has a predecessor from last year in the “ethnohiphop” stakes with Greece’s “Utopian Land” which has the dubious honour of being Greece’s first ever entry that failed to qualify. Notice how a lot of these examples either didn’t qualify or did really badly? Interesting isn’t it.

Performance and staging: The staging, at least in the national final, wasn’t terribly complicated in terms of technology. This is not to say that it needed any hi-tech projections, the thinking behind it was clearly to stand out by its simplicity. What interests me most here is the symbolism at work here. Joci is joined by a singular dancer dressed in what I’m assuming is traditional Hungarian ‘national dress’. The dance they do together as opposed to the bits where the dancer is apart from him might represent the fusion or ‘battle’ between the different aspects of the culture the song is involved in. By the dancer embracing him at the performance’s conclusion, the dual impulses of Joci as the romani ‘foreigner’ and the Hungarian-ness of the dancer have joined together and Joci has become fully integrated into the Hungarian social body. As the Hungarian woman has symbolically embraced him, so too has the state of Hungary.

And if you think that reading is reaching then I kindly say, its hip hop. If hip hop isn’t about social issues in some way, it’s not really fit to call itself hip hop (well, at least not to call itself *good* hip hop).

Clues and context: Throughout the different stages of heats and semis in the Hungarian ‘A Dal’ selection show, this consistently performed well with both the public and the jury vote. Although there are potentially questions to be raised about how the Hungarian final system where only four of the eight entries get into the public voting superfinal seemed to conveniently leave out both Kallay Saunders Band, the main other consistently strong televote scorer and Gabi Toth, the main other ethnic song in the mix. On reflection it does feel rather like it was given a bit of an easier ride to the victory than it might have got otherwise, either by accident or on purpose.

Conclusions: The trends of recent Eurovision years suggests that this will have an uphill struggle to qualify. I think part of the reason ethnopop, hip hop and any combination of the two struggles in Eurovision these days is due to the perceived inability for it to ‘travel’ in any meaningful way to the other countries. What does the best at Eurovision these days is stuff that has either a universal message that is understandable across all of Europe, or that jives with what’s popular in terms of mainstream European music trends (which is basically why Sweden are ruling Eurovision at the moment but they’ll have their turn later). In the nicest way possible, this doesn’t do that. That is not to say that it’s completely out for the count but in order for it to do well, the staging and performance needs to frame the narrative and message of the song in a way that makes it legible to those that speak neither Hungarian nor Romani. The interpretation I outlined earlier in the piece would certainly make a good starting point!

[escoverthinker]

Song 2: Switzerland (Timebelle - Apollo)

The song: Apollo is a soaring mid-tempo pop song in which the singer vows to keep trying to make their relationship work. It may never be easy but “I’ll follow you, Apollo”. The namecheck of the roman deity Apollo, the god of (among other things) music, truth, poetry, the sun and healing again implies that the narrative of the song is about dedication to following the ideals of a relationship despite the onset of troubled times. You could make the case that, in the great poetic tradition going at least as far back as Donne and Shakespeare that the relationship isn’t so much between the singer and their lover as much as it’s about the singer and god buuuuuut maybe that’s reaching a tad.

(going into this I did not expect to have written that much about the different potential interpretations of the Swiss song, spot the person who did a Literature degree)

Key moment: Similarly to Finland, the most significant dramatic passage of the song’s narrative is the middle eight’s “don’t pull the rug from underneath us”. The singer is begging for fate to not let their plans and future together be upset or destabilized

Trend alert: Apollo is part of a long running trend of “outsourced” songwriters being brought in from Sweden. Indeed, not long after it was released as being part of the Swiss Final, William from wiwibloggs confirmed that this was nearly sent by the kings of outsourcing, Azerbaijan, in 2015 (since he was on the advisory jury that national broadcasters occasionally fling together when they feel like they need advice but don’t have the will/resources to go for a big scale selection show). Aside from that, there’s not really much to say in terms of trends, so let’s move on…

Performance and staging: Oh my god, so much red! Really I could leave it at that but this is long-form so we’re doing this. The red hues are used to suggest a passionate and romantic tone to the performance. Plus the explosion of red confetti symbolizes the climax (*wink wink*) of the song being the resolution of the tension of the song. In layman’s terms, she and her lover are staying together. Leaving aside all the Freudian imagery, the confetti trick is a standard method of staging psychology. The most recent example of this is Emmelie de Forrest’s win for Denmark in 2013 where the consensus (although mostly disseminated by people who never much cared for it in the first place) was that the staging used the falling confetti as a means of showing the song’s “winnerness” in a purely visual and aesthetic register despite it not having the song worthy of backing that up. I think the people who spout that were a bit blinded by prejudice at the time that that was popular conjecture (looking at you Ewan Spence!) but nevertheless it’s a good example of the use of ‘winner signal’ semiotics. Since we associate the confetti shower with the winner’s reprise, it stands to reason that the explosion of red confetti is meant to act as a signal to the jury/viewer that the song is good and worthy of your votes.

That’s in theory at least. The problem with this train of thought is that it leads to some rather lazy thinking around what is “good staging” where all you need to do is put on some confetti/pyro curtains (and we’ll get to the use of the pyro curtain later in the season no doubt) and that’s all you need do to make it good staging. And that’s not just in fan commentary, that’s clearly what the UK delegation in 2014 were thinking with their staging concept and that didn’t exactly end up setting the scoreboard alight did it?

Clues and context: This was the favourite by a mile in the Swiss selection but in saying that, the term “damning with faint praise” does spring to mind. The question remains over whether or not this song has got the legs to compete at the same level with (we presume at least) stronger competition.

Conclusions: This song is very formulaic. There I said it. But, the thing with formulaic is that it doesn’t always necessarily indicate that the song is going nowhere. If a formula exists, it’s usually because on some level it probably ‘works’. That said, it usually needs to be performed faultlessly to stand a chance of really doing the business since you have to assume to some degree that this isn’t going to be the only “rousing midtempo” in the mix. To their credit though, lead vocalist Miruna sings it very well. It’s not quite nailing the performance, given their company in the national final they didn’t need to nail it, but it’s as well performed as it could be given the circumstances.

The additional benefit of having a, shall we say, more conventional pop song as your entry is that to most people the song is going to be comfortable to listen to. This means that it’ll easily find a certain amount of televotes from just being a nice song that’s sung well and juries will find it hard to mark this song as low as 17th – 19th meaning that it could, almost by accident, pull a stunt similar to San Marino’s infamous surprise qualification in 2014 by getting low to middling points from a lot of countries. The key word is could though. For that to happen, they need everything to line up just right for them (good running order position, weaker songs in its half of the semi ect). I imagine a potential situation where a large part of those making predictions this year will write this one off only to be completely stumped when it’s the third song out of the envelopes. At time of writing we don’t know much about what’s joining them in the back half of semi two but, company depending, don’t count Switzerland out just yet!