#glams is like my entire passion and i have nothing to show for it 😩

[windup-scholar]

I really need to stop being lazy and take pictures of my glams i always wanna show them off bc of how often i get compliments but im 🫠

[borisbubbles]

Eurovision 2022 (#30)

30. GREECE Amanda Tenfjord - “Die together” 8th place

Decade Rank: 60/79 [Above Ana, below Blas]

Lol this bullshit of including her surname in the title card. She Really Is Greek, Honest, We Swear!

I is tricksy I is. -- ERT

Bitch, I ain’t fooled! Amanda couldn’t be more BOREwegian if she tried. 🙄  If there’s ONE thing Norwegians love (besides insultingly stupid mememongering it would appear), it’s ~fragile ballads~ by wispy wenches, and I’ve had more than my fill of of them in MGP 2022 (which I re-iterate was VERY BAD ). You better deliver something grandiose if you want to rank higher with your Scandi-Blandi mumbo-jumbo!

And honest, it seemed like they might, when the demo leaked? “Die together” deviated from Norway’s accursed “I’m secretly very dangerous, Trust Me” [feat. Zero Semblance Of A Threat] formula and instead goes the route of fatalism, and this I really fucking like.’ A classically Greek take on a romance tragedy, ohhh this could be COOL’, I thought! ‘Maybe they’d add some synths to make it like “City Lights”, or Robyn’s “Dancing on my own”, two excellent synthpop ballads?? Or they could turn it into a better (not shit) Better Love with a beat?' Greece could really make their song stand out as the romantic tragedy of our modern Eurovision times, even with Maro and Cornelia in the mix.’

I forgot of course that Amanda is from Norway, and so her ballad wound up DULL AND STERILE!!!! 😒 It’s Ana “Definitely Not A Ballad” Soklic levels of “ugh, I SHOULD have fucking KNOWN, damn’ you!” and while that’s *partly* on me for getting my hopes up, onto the Mild Contemp pile you go with zero regrets!!!

You see, the take from “Die together” was that, no matter how finite the relationship is, romance is a constant and can survive anything. it’s a sapiosexual and mature PoV, nothing wrong with that. 

I think the execution is too cerebral, however.

The capital mistake that “Die together” makes is that it glosses over the single most important thing about nailing romance, and that’s the love which drives it.. 

WHERE. 👏 IS.   👏 THE.   👏 GODDAMN. 👏 PASSION.  👏 IN.  👏  THIS?

The first minute of “Die Together” is a dead minute, and the remainder two (the ones after the *actual* music kicks in) barely drag it out of stagnation. I understand why they went there. Intimacy and desolation need to be built up, so we can move on to showing the catharsis in the final act. 

The problem runs two ways, however. Greece went with a stripped-down instrumentation to better accost their Quirky Scandi Merc vocalist, but this approach also glosses over the emotional rollercoaster that drove it to this point. Love is an immense force of both creation and destruction, like fire, or electricity, or glam metal, and “Die together” skips over it like it’s an afterthought.   Even the STAGING, with its molten chairs focuses on the post-mortem, what happened *after* the fatalistic deaths of the protagonists, without really visualizing the passion that led them there. Show that, don’t tell us about it. Do you WANT me to be bored???? 

Furthermore, Amanda is just... not very engaging. She can sing, sure, but she’s too morose and twee to carry it convincingly.  There are coma patients with better emotional resonance than Amanda Georgiadi. *THAT* is what you get when you cast the Farida’s of this world to sing your songs, they just get swallowed entirely by the trueborn painbearers of passion (like Cornelia!) because all they can do amounts to “uwu im a smoll bean uwu”.

Also, she smiles like this: 😩 

coincidentally, i had the same expression when i first heard the song as well :-) 

Greece petitioned to be about all-consuming lovestorm, and gave us “pre-nuptual marriage certificate”. Instead of fatalistic and fiery, “Die together” is disappointingly sane and business-like, here to collect your jury’s high-end marks, a televote twelve from Cyprus and Norway, and nothing else. Mission accomplished I guess, (it IS the best Greek result since 2013 and their best result EVER in a jury vote), but it required them to douse “Die together” in musical disinfectant and that’s never a price worth paying imo.

We could have received an all-time classic dramatic ballad from Greece. 

What we got in its place was a misguided cop-out.. 

THE RANKING

30. GREECE - Amanda Tenjford - “Die together” 31. POLAND - Ochman - “River” 32. MONTENEGRO - Vladana - “Breathe” 33. FINLAND - The Rasmus - "Jezebel" 34. BELGIUM - Jérémie Makiese - “Miss you” 35. NORWAY - Subwoolfer - “Give that wolf a banana” 36. AUSTRALIA - Sheldon Riley - “Not the same” 37. SWITZERLAND - Marius Bear - “Boys do cry” 38. AZERBAIJAN - Nadir Rustamli - “Fade to black” 39. ITALY - Mahmood & Blanco - “Brividi” 40. ISRAEL - Michael Ben David - “I.M”