You Love Eurovision

Last night was a media event that brings together a sometimes geographically creative Europe for tastelessly American pop music, the occasional folk tune in an obscure Slavic language, and lots of higher SMS bills: Eurovision Grand Prix du Chansons.

Once again, I managed to vote for the completely wrong nation, namely Moldova (14th of 25). Moldova, for those of you who have forgotten, is in Eastern Europe between the Ukraine and Romania.



There's something authentic in her bright green dress, in the backup folk dancers, in the DOS screen saver quality of the lighting show. Sure, they sing "hoy, hoy, hoy" over and over, but that's what Moldova is all about. And I want my Eurovision to be about authentic Europe, even if that means having to shout "hoy."


France also gets kudos for not singing in English, and for stubbornly not including back-up dancers or a show of any kind:

Eurovision France 2009 (finale) - Patricia Kaas

Much more typical of Eurovision, though, is the kind of crap that wins third place:

Eurovision Azerbaijan 2009 (Final) - Aysel & Arash - Always

Or second place:

Eurovision Iceland 2009 (Final) - Is it true

Many Eastern European countries seemed to follow Turkey's lead (yes, Turkey, like Israel, is in Europe) and hired hip-shaking Shakira look-alikes to sing American pop with enough traditional instruments to make it sound adequately un-American.



Germany's spectacularly bad entry managed to get it to 20th (of 25).



Germany, which only won the Grand Prix in 1982, spends a lot of entertainment television time discussing what should go into their entry. This year's sure-win idea was to have a "famous" Hamburg stripper perform onstage--without taking off any clothes, of course, because Eurovision is strictly cheesy. Neither political or oversexy entries are allowed. For example, System of a Down was supposed to perform this year for Armenia, but they wanted to sing about the 1915 genocide, and there's no faster way to irritate your neighbor countries than to say nasty things about them during Eurovision. Georgia had to withdraw this year from the competition because their song "We Don't Wanna Put In" was determined to be too anti-Russian (for a contest being held in Moscow).

Overt sexuality is clearly not the answer, because Norway won on cuteness. He's actually from Belarus, which has only made it to the Eurovision final once. Maybe Germany should stop importing Americans (like this year) and start getting political refugees to learn the violin.