I've blogged absolute tons about the Eurovision Song Contest in past years but other commitments have kept from even keeping proper track myself this year. However, I just have to share the original, since remixed version of the Greek entry, which takes the whole concept of "ringtone pop" to another level:
Anyway, To make up for my Eurovision slackness in general, I'm going to be live-tweeting the contest instead, starting in around three hours. Follow me at @Birdseeding on twitter.
I'm off to a rather early-starting party for Eurovision, but I thought I'd at least write down my choices for favourite tracks in the Final. Outside the final I'd have to go for Switzerland, which is the only decent track missing frankly, and (just to be a bit controversial) Latvia. Any track that sounds like it should accompany a toy ad from the eighties is fine in my book.
One of the unwritten rules of this nervous marketing experiment that is Eurovision is that each time a country wins the contest a bunch of other countries try to copy it. (I detailed the the past few copycat years in this post last time around.) This makes the 2009 contest a bit of a dilemma, because the trend seems to have been suddenly broken: there are no obvious candidates that are formulaic copies of last year's winner.
If you don't remember Dima Bilan's "Believe", it was a mid-tempo ballad in the Walt Disney vein, underpinned by a rather clever and harmonically driving beat which supposedly Timbaland had laid a hand to. I had it in my top ten. So why hasn't anyone tried to copy the concept straight off? The only vaguely Timbaland thing in the contest is the intro to the Albanian entry, which sounds a lot like a Timbo production circa ten years ago:
Keisi Tola - Carry Me In Your Dreams
Pity it then proceeds to become generic pumping mainstream for the rest of the track. (A short section near the end provides a tantalising glimpse of how great the track could have been if they'd kept it up.) However fun the intro is, though, it's obviously the inspiration isn't anywhere near "Believe".
One thing to consider is that, maybe, the influence lies beyond the mere music. Take the idea of the blue-lit background. "Believe" had it, and this year seemingly every ballad has followed suit: Croatia, Denmark, Lithuania, Estonia, Malta, Iceland, Israel, Cyprus, Poland... That would be a visual connection. Then there's a celebrity connection - last year Dima featured ice skater Evgeni Plushenko, this year Britain is bringing in Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Germany (apparently!) Dita von Teese.
Still, not having any major musical connections at all bugs me, and even casting a wider net only a couple of tracks have similar ambitions, at least. Croatia has a bossa-nova beat behind a traditional ballad that chugs along in a similar way. Russia, which like many previous winners desperately cling to the winning idea, at least bears some similarity in the verses. But if I'm going to pick one successor to the "Believe" sound it's going to have to be Estonia: Urban Symphony - Rändajad
It's probably wont to annoy tastemakers who've compared this track to both Kate Bush and Björk, but the handclaps are there, the harmonics are relatively stable, and there's a fairly freestyle-ish pickiness to the string section. I can definitely get the sort of perpetually delayed feeling off this track that was vaguely suggested last year and which Timbaland does so well. Perhaps the "trendy indie favourite" label on this track is masking its pop qualities?
Wow. I just watched the first semi-final of this year's Eurovision Song Contest and I was really drawn back into it all. What an amazing stage set up! I'm starting to regret not spending several months analysing every single entry like I did last year.
Because there's plenty to analyse I think. Some of the things happening are quite fascinating, and some even have real-world impact. I'm thinking, for instance, of the balkanisation of Romania.
No, not that kind of balkanisation. I'm talking about how Romania has finally succumbed to using imagery, music and lyrics reflecting its place in the Balkans, something they've never done in Eurovision before.
This may not sound like much, but it runs totally anathema to what for many years was Romania's national image. Romania used to be occupied by the Ottoman empire, and its nationalist movement was very clear in emphasising its Western, romance heritage, in strong contrast with anything vaguely Turkish. The Balkan, eastern aspect of its culture was relegated to an "other" - the culture of gypsies, the poor, immigrants. That's part of the explanation why manele music is so despised in Romania.
Similar stories can be found in just about every country whose modernism stands in contrast to the Ottoman empire. But in the past decades, the hate for all things Balkan-sounding has slowly seeped out of Eurovision in most countries. Greece and Turkey let up early, and in recent years even Slavic stalwart Bulgaria has gone nearly full-on Balkanic. But this year must be some kind of record. From Azerbaijan to Spain to Moldova, the pop and folk sounds of the Balkans have spread everywhere, and obviously that now includes Romania. In a rather weak and slightly R&B-inspired way, but still.
What does this mean? Is Romania losing its antipathy to manele, and by extension the Roma? Is Balkan pop softening and becoming mainstream like rock'n'roll once did? Well, I'm waiting for the full-on manele entry to arrive first before I'm totally convinced. But it's an interesting trend nonetheless.
PS. As a fan and staunch supporter of minorities, it's fascinating to me that Elena Gheoghe is Arumanian, one of the most oppressed minorities in Greece and Albania. Update: I found a Romanian blog post which suggests manele can be seen as nationally distinctive music, something that's immediately hacked down on by commenters.
Okay, so obviously saying that you hate allmusic made by black people is racist. Using a stereotype like "all black people are simple and carefree, and I prefer dark and complex music" is racist. Fine. Hating black culture in general is likewise racist by current definitions, although it does not include any of the traits traditionally associated with "races". But what about hating a genre of music, or a cluster of style traits in music, that are strongly associated with a particular ethnic group? In short: are people who vehemently hate hip-hop and rap actually racists?
Ignoring the obvious issues about the social construction of taste, I think I'd side with most people here and say no. But where's the limit, how far can you go? Can you relentlessly mock the imagery associated with the music? To take an example from another part of the world: can you honestly claim to hate manele fans (as many Romanians do) and then claim that you do not hate gypsies? And what would make that different from hating a distinct non-ethnic cultural group like "all muslims"?
I ask because of the general response in the Eurovision community to this:
I think it's probably less enjoyable than the stuff I've written about before from gipsy, having as a youtube commenter deftly noted quite a bit of Queen in it, which is not really my cup of tea. But it's quite funny, the video is gorgeous, and I like the Roma pride message. Literally everyone else in the Eurovision world seems to hate it though. In the Swedish national television preview shows, it got zeros from all five panel members and it was completely laughed out as ridiculous. Likewise, respected website Schlagerprofilerna gave it all zeros. So did Scandinavia's biggest newspaper. It's right at the bottom of the ESC Today charts.
Would it even be possible to heap this much hate on a song that was black pride or gay pride? Can someone who's better versed in the intricacies of structural racism inform me?
(Okay, I'm gonna lay off the mock Latin after this post.) As an interesting mirror to my last post where I looked at people's fascination with being gawked at, here's a bunch who obviously aren't quite as happy to be observed. The Eurovision song contest this year is being held in Moscow, and the Swedish national finals included a intermission segment in which a pair of comedians did a "Russian" version of a (made up) dansbandsong which has been a running gag in the semifinals. It's absolutely bursting with bad clichés and stereotypes, which is probably the point: there are Balalaikas, pumping techno, the Red Army choir, nesting dolls, women who look like prostitutes, gangsters, a bear, even Tetris. See it minus accompanying sketch from the 4:25 point below:
The Russian embassy is not happy. Not happy at all. The choice quote is probably:
“We do not react to eccentricity by some lunatics whose Russophobia should place them in an asylum rather than on Globen’s stage.”
Which leads me to reiterate my point about various reactions available to touristic attention.
I'm considering the idea that it's an issue of power dynamics somehow, but while something like the Entropa squat toilet controversy can be put down to a national inferiority complex, it's hard to imagine Russia feeling inferior to Sweden. Generally, this kind of humour (and it was a riff at Russia, whatever Schlager Ronnie says in the article above) is acceptable between equals, but gets uncomfortable when the butt of the joke is oppressed. Imagine the above joke with the English, and no-one would mind. Imagine it with Arabs, and it starts to feel decidedly less funny. But surely Russia is big enough to take it lightly? Perhaps it represents an insecurity or feeling of offense from an earlier era in which slavs where indeed considered inferior.
(But I'm just speculationg here. There's obviously a cultural difference going on. Another possible factor I think might be included is insularity - many of the governments I can see being insulted by this tend to be rather inward-looking.)
What do you guys think? Is Russia right in being offended? In that case, are those that aren't offended by this sort of thing wrong?
Eurovision meets "nu-whirl music" as represented here by meren-ton (vaguely). The result? A sixth-place finish and non-advancement from one of the national pre-selection semis, but it's a start, it's a start!
Also, the other caribbean-tinged entry this year, finally free of the non-re-broadcast rules. Good show, Sweden!
That one still has a chanceto go through, though the raging queer in me is hoping over-the-top opera diva Malena Ernman wins.
I'm not sure how many Eurovision dubplates there are. But if I'd been fast enough yesterday, I would have swiped one of them. Let it be another Youtube/Archiving lesson.
Topaz Sound was a surprise entry in this year's Swedish Eurovision pre-selection, especially considering they got Red Fox in to do the toasting. Okay, so the song was a fifties-inspired number that sounded like a mediocre blend of Shaggy's Oh Carolinacover, and Lou Bega's Mambo No. 5cover, and I can't post a link to you because they advanced to an elimination round and SVT guards its copyright claims like a hawk. (*coughpiratebaycough*) But it's still fun to have a reggae/reggaeton group entering...
And their promotion was really fun. Yesterday they posted a dubplate (recorded in 2003) of Eurovision song contest winner Carola doing a special of her 1983 3rd place finisher. It was duly reposted on a bunch of Eurovision blogs and got a good laugh from everyone. Today, though, it was gone when I went to download it. I'm guessing Carola or her lawyers got to it before I did.
It's a pity. I love the idea of mainstream artists doing dubplates for sound systems, as a kind of reverse colonialism, even if most of the sounds are European. Apparently it's not nearly as rare as I thought, according to a littlegoogling, so I'm going to fill up the rest of this post with first-world-made dubplates. Fun!
Well, similar in a dictatorship, I guess. But what would music sound like if capitalism was suddenly wrenched free from today's western society? What would people listen to? (I'm beginning to feel like Professor What If here.)
The market is the classic way to measure popularity in music. In a lot of (bad) books on the history of popular music, music that's sold well is considered more important than music that's sold badly, the idea being that music that sells well is what people actually listen to. But is that really the case, even if we discount the file-sharing part of the audience? How would you go about determining what music is actually popular? And even if we could, how would we discount the effects of capitalism from the results?
A statistical survey sounds like a good starting bet, if someone was willing to pay to conduct one (companies are, of course, only interested in the market). Interestingly, Sweden pretty much has a standing one that's been going on since 1962: the survey that's the basis of public radio chart show Svensktoppen. (Are we a country of bureaucrats or what?) It's conducted pretty much like a proper statistical survey with randomly selected respondents conforming to the demographics of the whole population, who then get to vote on their favourite music of the moment. It's hampered a bit by having been restricted since 1974 to only include music by Swedish songwriters and by some silly selection rules, but it still produces interesting results, quite different from the official sales chart.
Inevitably it's much more static (with one song right now that's been on the list for 241 weeks straight, and another for 75), and the average voter is older and more rural. The mixture is also, perhaps surprisingly, much more eclectic, with everything from awful post-grunge to nashville-recorded country. The genre that dominates the sales chart, normal commercial pop, barely makes an appearance. A radically different picture of popularity appears, where adult contemporary music and dansband are suddenly king... Correct picture? Incorrect? Well, someone who's into experimental economics (which is the only branch of that discipline I respect, for its results if not its interpretations) would probably tell you about the lack of any motivation on the respondents' part messing up the results. Another factor which means the market is hardly erased is the continuing presence of marketing, where a lot of radio plays (for instance) can easily warp the reception.
Perhaps to some extent both problems are solved in another public broadcasting arena: the national selection for the Eurovision song contest. I've expressed my love for this pseudo-experimental arena before. The semi-finals for this have just started, and already a lot of established stars and songwriters are being knocked out for having weak track material or voices. Voting costs money, and with over a third of the population watching and a tenth voting the significance is probably not totally off. It's a sort-of democratic selection with the market only marginally involved - and the results produced are generally pretty decent.
Yet another reason to love Eurovision so much. Come the revolution, if it's fair, this is what we'll all be listening to. :)
Interesting developments in Romani music today as Czech rapper Gipsy.cz has been chosen to represent the country at this year's Eurovision song contest (h/t ESC Today).
In some ways, this guy is rather divorced from the potentially similar scenes of chalga and manele, whose respective Eurovision histories are interesting and revelatory enough in themselves (chalga represented once already, manele systematically excluded from national finals). Compared to those genres' working class, scenius unity, Gipsy is considerably more world music in outlook and his music can be rather haphazard in its wild leaps along the modern-"traditional" scale. Still, I think that it's an interesting and inclusive choice at a time when the oppression of the Roma is unusually high, although it might just confirm the traditional cast(e)ing and acceptance of the Roma as entertainers. Apparently, the performer is highly popular among the Czechs.
The actual track has not been revealed yet, but here's his entry from last year's national contest and from 2007's, plus a few of the more successfully hip-hoppy tracks he's released. Not bad, all in all!
Hello Belgrade! I must say you've put on a great show tonight - these are the votes of the Birdseed jury.
[Now that I've plowed through them all I was going to a top ten of my favourites and a top ten of my predictions. But heck, I'm going to be so optimistic that I'll just post my favourites and make those my predictions too - I believe in the Eurovision audience, and "quality" in Eurovision terms can't be defined as anything other than broad pop appeal.]
The very last (well almost) post of Eurovision entries rounds out all the entries that don't fit into the other categories, should have been in other categories but weren't, or that I've just not had the energy to write about before. All of them should ideally have got their own, well-considered entries but time is running critically short.
Let's start off with four more mysterious retro offers.
I grew up listeing to this sort of music, being a total Eurocheese fan around the age of ten. That was in 1991. And however much Iceland has updated some of the electronics and adapted the song to Eurovision stylistics with that soaring duetting, it's damned hard to look beyond the fact that it's essentially a stylistic borrowing from an era that falls into the Uncool gap. (Usually stuff more than a couple of years old up to maybe fifteen-twenty years old is always going to be uncool. Although the early nineties are possibly on the verge of a pending revival what with the renewed interest in Portishead and stuff.) In any case, it's gonna take some more clever reworking than this to get it contemporary - they could easily make something decent by keeping the vocals and changing the backing.
Norway's entry sorely needs heavy restructuring. Currently it's some sort of ABCABCC', of which the B part is so completely out of place it's ridiculous, with a totally different melodic feel and no apparent connection to the rest. And then C', the repeat of the bit that must tentatively be considered the chorus, goes into the same feel - bombastic broadway rather than popped-up folk song. It's major confusing and won't fly in this competition, where simplicity is utterly the key. They should have just gone for the verse and the chorus, added a Hardangerfela and written different lyrics for the second instance of the worse, walking before attempting to run.
The last Scandinavian entry also suffers from some gelling issues, with a straight-up happy chorus that doesn't really seem to work with the more relaxed verses and a strangely uncompelling bridge (though a decent middle-eight). That and its near-painful Danishness should prevent me from liking it. But the last half is killer: Beatles-like drive at a high level with a great horn part, good voice, lovely harmonies and a compelling singalong quality that could easily have gone along for several more minutes. I think this could be Denmark's most successful entry for years.
Yes, it's memorable and stuff. But the UK's entry falls under my strong aversion to fake old-style music and I'd rather not be poking at it too much. Soul fans might well vote for it anyway. *shudder*
And now for an entry that should have ended up somewhere in the previous two posts but inexplicably was forgotten.
I seem to have, eh, mislaid Georgia's pop entry with rock guitars last time but it fits well enough into that theme, with its touch of Bond-themeishness and its unusual lyrical content the only stand-out features. The eastern-ish chorus is probably the best part.
And finally host country Serbia's entry, which I'm a bit afraid might be the first step towards an Ireland-style development. First they become more and more successful at perfecting a formula, then after they win the quality of the entries slowly starts decreasing as the pattern becomes more superficial and formulaic. This isn't bad but it's nowhere near as dramatic as the best stuff; "low-key" might be the first step towards "smoothed-out". (Actually Greece is doing something similar - haven't their characteristic up-tempo pop songs become way more dull since they won it?) Watch out for a couple of bombs followed by a turkey in years to come.
Right. I know I'm ploughing through these with a fervour that makes Johnnn's obsession with Fleetwood Mac look like he's maybe heard a song by them once and kinda liked it. But I'm in a rush to review them all by Tuesday when the first semi-final is broadcast. So expect a couple of big, loosely-held-together round-out posts in the next few days, after which I never, ever, ever want anything to do with the Eurovision ever again (until next year).
Well, anyway, here's the other dubious trend for you - commercial pop that incorporates ideas and moods from rock. (We've had Lithuania and Azerbaijan previously who also echo this sort of theme.) Is it a more sophisticated attempt to cash in on the Finnish winner two years ago? Is it another sign the Eurovision is trendier than previously? In any case the world of rock now seems to be open pickings for all sorts of poppy songwriters.
On the other hand it doesn't have to be that modern at all. The Montenegrin entry is ageless pop-rock, the kind that might as well have been written by Elton John or Mark Knopfler or Don Henley (if they spoke Serbo-Croatian). It's reasonably well-produced and clad in a contemporary costume, and I guess the chorus is kinda memorable, but it's not going to matter an iota since no-one likes this kind of music anymore.
Israel's entry is also on the traditional side (though rather more Savage Garden than fogey-rock) but the attempt to update it with little touches of oriental pop flavour almost work. I say almost, because the greater part of the song (from about 0:20 to about 2:10) is such a straight-forwardly dull pop-rock excercise that it's a bleedin' mystery they didn't put just take the intro and the last part and constructed a whole song around that. I guess they're trying to go for the often-so-successful ethnic-western combo but the energy just deflates completely in most of the song.
It's like we're going through a gallery of different combinational approaches here. Here is the entry from debutant country San Marino and it tries to be big, grandoise pop-rock in the Andreas Johnson tradition, but here it's the production that totally, utterly falters. It so needs a big, fat beat and more soaring keyboards to work and the flagging energy in the verses is just ridiculous. It's a pity because it's a fairly fresh entry and a decent first effort from the tiny mountain nation. And it could have been real good.
Now we're reaching the opposite end of the scale - pure pop songs that incorporate a deft touch of rock in their formula. The Slovenian entry is one of my favourites all-round in this category, partly because the rock can only be felt in the little electric guitar touches and in the melodic structure and it doesn't disrupt the pop in a way that feels somehow very now. It's also probably the one song in the competition which is most incessantly memorable, with it's extremely simple and meme-building chorus. It's bound to do fairly well, pity they didn't make more out of the marvellous bridge.
Europe's last dictatorship Belarus does again what it's done every year - pick a big pop star from Mother Russia, spend millions on consultant songwriters and producers and marketeers to make the perfect Eurovision song... and fail because it's always somehow soulless, forced, and people see through the veneer of modernity to the ugly heart beneath.
Need I say that it fits completely perfectly into this category of tinkered and manipulated music?
There's been a lot of discussions and speculations what this year's Eurovision trends might be, and I've certainly heard novelties (which isn't true) and rock mixed with pop (which kinda is, see my next Eurovision post). But if I would have to name one trend that's more substantial than all the others, it's the shift towards standard mainstream, well-produced pop. Besides the six countries in this post there's also (conservatively counting) Russia, Greece, Malta, Armenia and Hungary - that's a quarter of all the entries in a fairly tight genre field.
Now, this might not seems surprising in a competition based on audience voting, but Eurovision has been notorious for lagging behind even the most stale mainstream pop. All the entries in this post, on the other hand, basically have the qualities of production (not necessarily song writing and performance, though) to do fairly well in the charts even outside the competition. If there's anything at all to set them apart it's little touches of slight national flavour in all the cosmopolitanness. But maybe, guys, it's not always the country you expect.
Take, for instance, Isis Gee. She's American, the song is American-produced, and whaddyaknow, it sounds American. Like an album track by Mariah Carey or something. Bright, overloaded with strings, slightly larger dynamic range than most European pop... It's not going to work, because Europeans can sense a straight import when they hear it (witness the failure of a similar strategy by Cyprus in 2006).
Or why not the Netherlands? Like Estonia (whose track is in some sort of fake-gibberish Croatian) the Netherlands have tried to analyse the recent win series of Eastern Europe and created something pseudo-Balkanic. I detect the rocker roots of this one unfortunately in the walking bass part that's a little to hard mixed and especially the wispy freakbeat drums, so it might not work too well on all audiences (especially with the fairly uneventful vocal performance). Still, it could do okay - people are, after all, flattered by imitation.
And then there's us (by contrast, since obviously you can hear it's Swedish, right?), and it's as well-crafted as anything we've sent of in the past few years. But I still don't like it. It feels squashed, somehow, slightly over-compressed (especially in the second verse) and there's something about the diva vocals and high-end synth riffs that reminds me unpleasantly of E-Type. Plus I've got little affection for Perelli. Still, I can easily see this breaching the top ten. But let's not dwell on it, shall we?
Ukraine, on the other hand, have everything but a very silly song title going for them. There are strong superficial similarities with Perelli's track - closer to dance music than anyone would dare do in the US, strong vocals, lack of dynamic range. But the detail work is immense, with great synth sounds, a brilliant and very modern-sounding bass line, and enough eastern flavour to work as both a cosmopolitan and a local number. Somehow, if there's anything that can be described as European pop as a contrast to America, it's this. And it's great. Top 3, if not the winner?
Another really strong entry I think. Hanson meets Timbaland meets traditional Eurovision and it actually works, it's got that coasting I associate with good-quality modern production. And it's even got a fake rewind! Still, I doubt anyone with a bit more taste will be as enthusiastic as me, so It'll probably end up in the lower half of the final.
And then there's Germany which sounds like a second-rate sleepy All Saints song and is all round snore-inducingly awful. (The secret is in the tempo or in charismatic performers, guys.)
There. If you think I'm rushing through these it's because there's only just over a week left, and I'm dead set on reviewing every track by then. Two posts to go...
I don't get it. I've read half a dozen accusations I'm sure of the Eurovision being especially novelty-heavy this year. But however I count them I only get to four proper full-blown novelties, Spain, Estonia, Latvia and Ireland. Maybe it's because I'm very restrictive in applying the tag, but something like Malta's entry is never a novelty in my book - it's a well-constructed pop song, conventionally sung, that happens to have a (subtle) spy theme. Is anything that's not about love or dancing a novelty song?
That said, here are three clear-cut examples, two that I've seen labelled novelties but aren't, really, and one that maybe should be. Let's start off with one of the most obvious examples, Estonia.
Kreissiraadio - Leto Svet
Yup, this is a novelty, through and through, made by an appropriately "kreissi" comedy troupe. To me, that's not really a problem - I think the song works okay on its own terms. The skacid-like backing is energetic, the melody is okay, the earworm chorus is memorable (if a tad too closely connected to the Goliat theme song and the bridge of Buffalo Soldier). Whatever, though - the singers and the humour are not nearly as charming as Verka Serducha was last year, and it's going to sink without a trace. As could Estonia's neighbour Latvia, if things go against them:
Pirates of the Sea - Wolves of the Sea
This one failed to make the first round in the Swedish competition which doesn't surprise me because novelties rarely do. (Which reflects rather badly on us Swedes if anything.) The idea is obviously to create a Dschingis Khan for the nineties-- er, I mean, 21st century, by updating the semi-disco backing to some sort of bubblegum dance. It works fine in a Hits for Kidz kind of way and might do fairly well in the competition, since it's actually a well-connected, well-brought-together pop piece under the silly gloss.
Now you're probably asking, do I like all the novelties? No.
Dustin the Turkey - Irlande Douze Pointe
Ireland is a nation of Morons. Fed up with sending (and failing) with dozens of awful folk ballads they chose to "comment" on their own lack of success by sour grape blaming everyone else and making a joke of the Eurovision. Which could be okay if it was remotely funny or a worthy entry but this excrement is the worst song in the whole competition. By a mile and by every standard.
Two more countries that usually make the novelty lists this year I'm rather more reluctant to include.
Ishtar - O Julissi
This doesn't conform to any standard of novelty really, it's not meant to be funny, it's not particularly gimmicky and it's not bad at all (in fact rather pleasant and well-crafted). Except, of course, one thing: it's sung in a completely made-up language. Belgium (notorious for its language conflicts) has done this before and no-one went around accusing Urban Trad of being a novelty, because their tone was less light and springy. Mid-level final?
Laka - Pokusâj
This is where the accusation really gets weird and fairly disturbing - making fun of outsider musicians always gets my blood boiling. So, the man has a live hen on stage and dancers dressed as farmers. But how is this music novelty in any shape, sense or form? It's a heartfelt, slightly new agey pop song that's closer musically to Coldplay than to any other entry in this competition. Obviously the stage persona is not something thrown together for the occasion, and the humour is totally positive and a little sweet. I dig this a lot, I hope it does really well.
Finally, while I'm already worked up, time for an entry that no-one has dared label a novelty but which maybe should be.
Sebastien Tellier - Divine
Critics have been fawning over Tellier whose co-operations with Sofia Coppola, Daft Punk and Air supposedly makes him a "real musician". As far as I'm concerned he's a beard and not much more, and the video is by far the most gimmicky one of all the entries, with a bunch of fake Telliers in wah-wah funny locations throwing microphones at each other. I can just guess at how novetly-oriented his stage performance might be, but since he's "oh-so-distant-ironic" in his humour I'll assume it'll be far from a lone man with a guitar.
I guess the question is: why should the middle classes be excluded from the tag? To me, Belle and Sebastian are just as much a novelty band as ever The Archies. Totally another reason why the Novelty tag stinks, it's a method of propagating class repression.
Very much unlike last year's contest, this year Eurovision is almost entirely bereft of proper rock entries. Maybe the trend boiled over completely last year (when there were like ten, all of which bombed), or maybe it's all more integrated this year (as you'd expect) and pop-with-metal-guitars entries like Azerbaijan and Lithuania are the new black. Whatever. Essentially, there are only two rock entries proper this year.
Teräsbetoni - Missä Miehet Ratsastaa
This year the Finnish entry has dug even deeper into metal history - after 2006's GWAR-Kiss-Alice Cooper ripoffs Lordi (who won the whole thing) and last year's dour pop-metal exercise this year they're sending Manowar-style power metal. It's considerably less funny than the trend-driving Lordi entry (despite the probably unintentional analogue to Dschingis Khan) but there's something about it that's stuck with me. Maybe the neatly-produced Melodeathish drums, maybe the little close-harmony embellishments. Or maybe just the fact that the band is unironically named after a building material. I don't think they're going anywhere in any case, maybe low-end final.
Mor ve Ötesi - Deli
This radio-friendly alternative rock band is apparently huge in Turkey and has been going on for a decade and a half. I think it shows - although some of their othersongs scream "hit!" a lot more this is the type of solid, professional product we've been able to expect from Turkey's highly-evolved music industry. I like the slight oriental touch to the melody, less thrilled by the evenly thick production treacle; it feels a bit like a half-baked album track. Pity, I usually enjoy it when Turkey sends band entries.
Anyway, if this was the fate of last year's big trend maybe all the crap novelty entries (see forthcoming, reluctant post) will go away for 2009. Here's hoping.
Damn, Portugal, damn. I really want to like this - it's a jazzier version of the Balkan ballad, over-the-top emotional, hugely built up, sung by a huge-bodied and huge-voiced senhora.
Vânia Fernandes - Senhora do mar
If only. I know it's a well-known tasks of musicologists to identify plagiarisms and melodic copying, and though I generally very lenient with this sort of thing this is going to run into huge problems. Because, essentially, the chorus has been lifted melodically and rhythmically from "Crucified" by Army of Lovers. Which happens to be one of the strongest tracks from a brilliant album. Like I said, it's a pity.
Two ostensibly similar Eurovision entries. Uptempo, slight ethnic overtones grafted onto conventional pop material, similar rhythm. Yet one is at the very top of the betting firms' odds, and the other is at rock bottom. In this post I'll have a shot at explaining why, and why those small differences in rhythm are more significant than one might think.
These are two of the most modern songs in the competition from one way of looking at it. But what does "more modern" mean in a pure pop context? It's not being the music that's the most boundary-pushing, that's for sure. (It's questionable whether that's even a possible definition of modern in the first place. Chart pop ten years ago was arguably more boundary pushing than today, depending on which boundaries you count.)
Nor is the music that's seemingly ahead of its time, which is incredibly hard to predict of course (are we heading towards funky or dark dubstep?). And it's probably not even relevant in this context. To pull an analogy with, I dunno, the late sixties, "Cold Sweat" and "Here Comes The Fleas" were definitely symbols of the future. But if we look back at that time and think "what sounds the most 1966?" or whatever, we're gonna nevertheless be stuck with something like "Scarborough Fair". This "modernity as sounding like your time" is probably best represented so far this year by Usher's latest hit.
I think this kind of modernity is what Macedonia are aiming for.
Tamara feat. Adrian and Vrcak - Vo Ime Na Ljubovta
Listen to the rhythm here. For most of the song it's a semi-regular, Eastern European three-grafted-onto-two beat (with hits on the first, fourth, fifth and seventh quaver). But in the scene-setting first verse that beat is reduced to just a 3+3+2, a change that together with the singing rappers signal some sort of assymetrical dancehall or reggaeton. I know that trend is not exactly new but it's still signalling being ahead to the conservative Eurovision audience.
But there's one more conception of modernity that's probably even more relevant to that audience. And that's the idea of not sounding outdated. Something like Iceland's entry this year is never going to work because it sounds like something that went out of fashion long ago, but Armenia has really gone to lengths to sound universal in a current way. And yes, the result sounds a bit like some sort of Shakira song.
Sirusho - Qele Qele
Now, listen to the rhythm on this one. This one also has that slight ethnic assymetry in the rhythm, but it only appears every other bar and the four-on-the-floor is much more heavily emphasised. It's saying - "I'm current, but I'm also a normal pop song with the safe symmetric beat."
And that's why it's an odds-on favourite and Macedonia is tipped to fail. Or it could be that it's much more memorable and that the Macedonian rappers are distressingly out of tune. But whatever.
Timbaland is one of the world's best-selling producers and certainly one of the few in the pure pop world whose production signature is instantly recognisable. Considering his success, it was perhaps inevitable that some of this year's Eurovision entries would try to copy that signature sound - I mean, we all know what a mature Timbaland production sounds like, right? Lots of short vocal samples like "hey!". Jiggly rhythmic figures that go semiquaver-semiquaver-quaver. Multilayered rhythms, strange percussion instruments, some handclaps.
The Greek entry has copied all of those aspects. Yet they get it so wrong.
Kalomira - Secret Combination
It already starts off wrong. Timbaland would never establish a rhythmic hook in the intro that then completely disappears into the background for the remainder of the song. Once the main rhtyhm is introduced it drops very conventionally into a first verse which I guess is okay, until the chord change and the guitar, and then the chorus which is very standard Eurovision pop. Not necessarily a wrong thing ("slightly hard" verses and a "soft" chorus has a tendency to produce winningentries) but it totally breaks the illusion of continuity. The only bit of the rest that feels good in the context is the last break, which adds an "ethnic Timbaland" touch as well. Still, overall it rests uncomfortably between two chairs and the constant breaks in style fuck up what is perhaps the main strength of newer Timbaland production.
Starting around 2006 Timbaland started incorporating a great minimal-hypnotic quality in his music, largely based on the influence of Latin Freestyle from the eighties. The shimmering, high-pitched chords, the subtle yet relentless propelling rhythm, the little repeated changeover motifs... It's brilliant. "Secret Combination", of course, has very little of it.
Russia's entry does though, at least a bit. It retains the "Timbaland hand clap" (in place of the vocal shout) and some of the rhythmic complexities and although it's excessively buttery it hints at the kind of regularised chord changes and hypnotic continuity discussed above. (Perhaps you hear it better in a studio version.)
Dima Bilan - Believing
If you've been following the Eurovision news you will know that the reason for this is that it's actually Timbaland who's produced this track. It's not one of his stronger productions (very throwaway and old-fashioned) but it does have a small touch of the magic. I think it can do fairly well in the competition.
As will probably Greece, unfortunately. Pity they couldn't repeat the quality of the last Greek code-themed entry, which actually has the high-pitched hypnotic synth chords this one is sorely missing.
The Spanish entry for this year's Eurovision makes me want to forego the usual "first voted in, first posted about" rule for my Eurovision coverage. And that's because it fits so very clearly in with all my other blogging interests.
Because "Bailar El Chiki Chiki" by Rodolfo Chikilicuatre is, strangely enough, en reggaetón. And because it raises questions about post-colonialism and the internet age.
Rodolfo Chikilicuatre - "Bailar El Chiki Chiki"
Welcome to the brave new world of Eurovision. The Spanish TV company TVE decided this year to make all the sent-in entries (numbering in their hundreds) available on Myspace for the public to select from. Fairly revolutionary in itself, I guess. But then a team of Catalan comedians, led by Andreu Buenafuente whose TV Show is apparently very popular, perfectly interpreted and exploited the new selection method and placed a song all the way at the top.
They did it by creating a meme.
Rather than market their song through the usual channels they worked very hard to ingrain the song in internet culture. The character of Rodolfo (played by actor David Fernandez) has his own web page, Twitter page and Facebook page, all very popular. Even more importantly, they encouraged people to create remixes and funny videos of the song, putting them all into a group on Youtube. And it worked amazingly well - this marketing effort (as driven by a rival broadcaster to TVE, by the way) has managed to push itself into the general Spanish realms of internet phenoms. There are the required teletubby mashups, Counterstrike machinima, etc. It's been watched something like a million times altogether in various versions.
On the surface this does bear some similarity to the memes created around El Chombo twofer Chacarron and El Gato Volador, that are very similar musically, thematically and as phenomenons. This, too, is a (no doubt loving) send-up of reggaeton and its themes. The timbres and the way of singing might as well have been lifted straight from El Chombo.
But obviously Rodney Clark as El Chombo is Panamanian whereas David Fernandez is Catalan/Spanish, making their position in the post-colonial world very different. I'm wondering how much of a difference this makes to the reception of the music - there's a real danger "El Chiki Chiki" will be perceived as racist against Latin Americans, minstrelsy style. I've yet to see any reggaeton fan's responses to the song, but that would certainly help clarify things.
One thing that speaks in its favour is that it seems to have been reggaetonned-up considerably during the selection process. The original, as appearing on Rodolfo's Myspace, is that worst-thing-of-all, a mild western copy. But somewhere along the way someone who knows reggaeton has added on a proper production with a real, prominent dembow.
I've got mixed feelings about it myself. I like the idea of the extension of the competition into the internet sphere and don't mind the resultant entry as a piece of music, even liking it a bit. But I am concerned about the implications of its position in the post-colonial power structure. How much easier it would have been if Fernandez, as suggested on another site, had been Mexican...
