# The guiltiest of guilty pleasures - Eurovision 2018



## Weird Heather (Aug 24, 2016)

These days, the Eurovision Song Contest is often a garish spectacle and a train wreck of mostly crummy music, but for some reason I find myself drawn to it. Next week is Eurovision week. The semifinals are on May 8 and 10, and the final is on May 12. Is anyone else here looking forward to it (or perhaps morbidly curious about it)? Do you have any particular favorites this year? So far, I don't, but I haven't really begun to check things out. Maybe I'll just watch the final and see what happens. Of course, I'm hoping that there will be something so bad that it is hilarious; the last two years or so have been a bit disappointing in this regard.

In the United States, it looks like it is being broadcast on Logo again this year. Last year, they had a Eurovision party at a bar in Los Angeles, but I didn't manage to get up there. It might be fun to go to something like that. If they are doing it again this year, I might try to go there if I'm not feeling too lazy.

To start things off, here is one of my favorite horrible Eurovision entries from the recent past: Ireland's infamous entry from 2008 - "Irelande Douze Pointe" by Dustin the Turkey. Warning - this might ruin your ears for good.


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## LezLee (Feb 21, 2014)

I've never missed a Eurovision contest, right from the very first one on our little b/w telly in 1956. It's become one of those things like never listening to The Archers or never having seen Star Wars.
I think the songs were much better in the first 10 - 20 years, now there seems to be more effort put into the presentation and production than the actual music. This year I actually quite like the UK entry!

This is one of my favourites, by Hugues Aufray, France 1964. It came 4th.


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

It has become quite repulsive over the years. The Eurovision theme is the best thing about it. M.A. Charpenter - Te Deum.


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## Guest (May 5, 2018)

It's not much about the dreadful songs any more though is it? It's just about the politics of the voting. Who gets a maximum vote and who gets a _nil points_ often relates more to political relationships than any song, which are quite incidental to the proceedings. I don't imagine the UK will get too many votes from Russia...

And Australia, Israel and Iceland...have they stopped pretending about it being _European_ at last?


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## Kjetil Heggelund (Jan 4, 2016)

No no no, get away! Ok, one I remember from prehistory is Hallelujah. Whatever you can do to have a good time, get on with it, as long as it doesn't cause a murder (FZ). Cheers!


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## Granate (Jun 25, 2016)

OOOOOOOOOH. Eurofans! I've been seriously following the Eurovision Song Contest since 2010. I had been browsing through National Selections since 2012 and been following the rehearsals since 2013. It's a massive TV show and usually the crappiest pop album of every year for me.

Eurovision 2008 is cancelled for me. Freak acts are still a burden for the contest and I'm glad they were gone a long time ago.

There are usually many tracks of countries I love every year, but I usually notice if some years the "crop" has improved or not. My favourite "crops" were the 2012, 2015 and 2017 editions, full of songs I loved. But there are particularly weak years, and I can only think of the 2014 Edition and the current one, 2018. I've only played like three tracks out of 41 in my mp3 and I don't love them as much as the ones last year. I think the level has been quite plateau compared to last year: my bottom tracks are not that bad and my favourites are not extremely good either.

This week, the first and second rehearsals of all contenders have happened, and I have been following the press live reactions while rating Beethoven Symphony recordings. It's rather amusing. This year looks like it's going to be a very open final. No one, not even the bets, can find out which country could win this year because the most hyped countries before the contest didn't have very neat first rehearsals and other countries have taken the lead.

The ones I'm most impressed about for their visual package? Cyprus, France, Bulgaria and *Estonia*. The latter is for now the only one that has given me winning vibes even though it's a lyric performance that has usually been seen in previous contest. However, never with these visual and onyric qualities.














*Drinking Eurovision hater tears*


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

It use to be fun when only 15 countries participated, now it's a freak show.


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

And the whole misery starts tonight, on 6 channels as far as I could see.


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## EddieRUKiddingVarese (Jan 8, 2013)

I liked it more when Oz was not part of it and we could just hang *hit on it without fear of repercussions............


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

The competition has been scarred for life by 

a) the blatant political voting, especially by some of the ex-Eastern bloc countries and ex-Soviet states
b) over-hyped gimmick acts such as the bearded woman from Austria and that ridiculous Finnish heavy metal band
c) too many songs are the kind of lame push-button dance-pop one's heard a gazillion times already.

The innocence which was a characteristic of the show up until the 90s has long since evaporated. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if an invisible coterie of oligarchs stake fortunes on the outcome, greasing certain palms to see the votes go a particular way to ensure they are onto a winner.

Maybe the UK don't produce good enough pop songs to win it any more but you can rest assured that they'll get their fair share of the rough end of the stick where the voting's concerned - perhaps they ought to bale out of the competition in order to avoid even more embarrassment.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

I saw it when it must a see (1968-1980 or so). Some decent songs (ABBA, Mocedades), and frankly there was not much choice in those years (we had 3 TV channels, and of course no internet). Have not watched a minute in recent decades.


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## Sloe (May 9, 2014)

Art Rock said:


> I saw it when it must a see (1968-1980 or so). Some decent songs (ABBA, Mocedades), and frankly there was not much choice in those years (we had 3 TV channels, and of course no internet). Have not watched a minute in recent decades.


3!!!!!!!!!!!! we had 2 TV channels.


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## Granate (Jun 25, 2016)




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## Granate (Jun 25, 2016)

If you are not fans of either the music (a tad cheap, I know, production issues) or TV logistics either (what it's all about IMO), what's up with the two previous winners? Still too cheap for your prejudices?


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## Vronsky (Jan 5, 2015)

Insieme, unite, unite, Europe!


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## Vronsky (Jan 5, 2015)

Rogerx said:


> It use to be fun when only 15 countries participated, *now it's a freak show*.


Excellent description of Eurovision. The first Eurovision I saw was, I think, 2000. I watched on the Internet some of the older performances pre 1992 and they looked far more decent.


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## Weird Heather (Aug 24, 2016)

The first semifinal is over, so things are progressing. I don't have time to watch the semifinals during the week, but I will check out clips of losing entries if I hear that any of them are bad enough to be funny; I wouldn't want to miss something like that.

Like some others here, I prefer the contests from the earlier years. It was never broadcast in the United States until very recently, so my introduction was via YouTube, and the first contest I watched was 1965. My general interest in continental European pop music from the 1950s and 1960s was bound to lead me to Eurovision eventually. Politics and spectacle have been present almost since the beginning, but it feels like the earlier contests were somehow classier than the gaudy spectacle of the recent ones. I watch and/or listen to the early ones because they feature a lot of good music, while I watch the recent ones primarily because they are freak shows. Since I am a great fan of anything that is so bad that it is funny, I feel obligated to keep up with it, always hoping for a masterpiece of musical disaster that might even top the infamous one that I included in my post that started this thread. The last few years have been a bit disappointing in that regard; the contest has been a sea of mediocrity with nothing horrible enough to stand out from the crowd. However, the last two winners were pleasant surprises, in a way - I actually thought they were good.

I'll post a couple antidotes to the cheesiness of recent years. First: Lys Assia - "Refrain" - the winning entry from Switzerland in the first year, 1956. No gimmicks. No spectacle. Just some nice, well crafted pop music.






And my favorite from the 1967 contest: Vicky Leandros - "L'amour est bleu" - Luxembourg's entry. This one wasn't the winner, but it became a huge international hit. Americans who have any exposure to 1960s music should at least be familiar with Paul Mauriat's instrumental version.






I guess we'll see what happens this year. I thought Portugal's winning entry last year managed to recapture some of the class that had long been lost, but it might have just been a fluke. At any rate, it was nice to see Portugal finally win the contest after participating for so long and generally getting nowhere.


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

I haven's seen one minute last night, outside it was way better .


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## Granate (Jun 25, 2016)

@Weird Heather I see I stumbled in a trolling thread about Eurovision instead of appreciating what we have now. Joining "art" and "democracy" (a musical and audiovisual competition ranked by a jury and an TV audience) is never a good idea for those who lived the contest when televisions internally selected their entries for contests of 14 countries instead of 43, when people could only watch 2 or 3 channels in their country, and only international juries rated an entry for its musical appeal. Back then there was no craft about backgrounds, camera shots, visual effects and lighting. Now the contest puts a lot of effort into this because Public televisions, without any profit motive, would like to test those effects to implement them in their own programs.

I was talking to my father about the same. There are a lot of prejudices about Eurovision, but if often happens when you only share the 60s and 70s point of view, when TV and audiences have changed dramatically. Many things can be unterstood about the ESC from the Media and Production point of view. The art is no longer in the music, it's in the cinematic, the camera shots, the use of lightning, etc. *Eurovision is Television.*

This year, you may like to watch the Lithuanian entry for an example of how to elevate a peaceful ballad with the stage lighning, visual effects, and camera shots.










It hurts me to see you because I'm the first to feel ashamed about freak entries and mock about show acts like Elina's La Forza. Their take on Operatic pop is baffling, but I can forgive it when I see a neat 3 minute video with everything visually in order.

It took me a lot to understand how Opera worked, and how to approach the genre. Now I'm into it because I knew the plugs to pull off (suspension of belief and visual attention).


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## EddieRUKiddingVarese (Jan 8, 2013)

An Aussies gunna win it and were not even part of Europe


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## Casebearer (Jan 19, 2016)

It has been crap for decades. Last time I liked it was when 



won it together with a few others. That was when I was 10.


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## Casebearer (Jan 19, 2016)

And this was one of the other three winners in 1969. What class it had back then.


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## Sloe (May 9, 2014)

I liked Moldavia:


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## EddieRUKiddingVarese (Jan 8, 2013)

I wanted the Cook Isl to be in this year


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## Weird Heather (Aug 24, 2016)

The 1969 contest was a fun one - a lot of good songs and multiple tied winners. I liked the ones that Casebearer posted.

Referring to Granate's post, I fully admit that I have a 1950s/1960s mindset when it comes to Eurovision, but if something good comes out of the recent contests, I'm not going to argue with it. As I mentioned, I very much liked the winners in 2016 and 2017, and there have been a few others I have liked over the last five years or so. Although I hope for something impressively terrible because I can always use a good laugh, I'll definitely be happy if there is something of high quality. I suppose any Eurovision thread is bound to become a bit of a troll thread because it is such an inviting target. However, even as I complain about it, I also love it. This is, after all, the only live television event that I ever watch. (I'll respond to the songs that you recommend after I have seen the final on Saturday - I don't like to preview the entries because it is fun to encounter them for the first time during the final. If there is anything worth watching that didn't make it to the final, I'll check those out later.)

As for the visual elements of it, I agree that there can be some real talent and artistry to this aspect of the contest, but the best stage effects in the world can't save mediocre music, just as a great staging can't compensate for an opera that is musically weak. Once the contest is over, the visuals mostly fade from my mind (unless something is unusually funny or strange), but it is the music that sticks with me. Again, this must be my 1950s/1960s mindset at work. Incidentally, I'm also perfectly happy to make fun of or complain about opera when I encounter something that calls out to be mocked, even though I love the art form, and this goes in general for any art form that I like. I supposed I have a hard time taking anything too seriously.


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## Casebearer (Jan 19, 2016)

Most of what the Dutch have send in is utter crap but 2013 was different. We had Anouk with Birds, an utterly beautiful song that became ninth but should have won easily. Eurovision sucks.






Song starts at around 2 minutes.


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## Casebearer (Jan 19, 2016)

2014 was more or less the same story. The Common Linnets should have won over this Austrian beard.


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## techniquest (Aug 3, 2012)

Of course it's crud; pure over-the-top, camp as a row of tents, fixed (probably) crud. But I enjoy it for that. I don't expect to hear anything even approaching reasonable yet alone good, so when I hear a song I quite like (e.g France & Slovenia), it comes as something of a bonus.
It's a waste of time trying to look too hard at Eurovision or try to seek out and analyse it's musical qualities; take it for what it is - rubbish, and either sit back and enjoy or ignore it completely.

By the way, I think they might have accidently given away that Australia are going to win it during one of the interviews in the second semi-final. I hope I'm wrong, although a text sent in by a viewer described the performance as 'a drunken aunt dancing at a wedding', which was hilariously spot-on :lol:


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## Weird Heather (Aug 24, 2016)

techniquest said:


> By the way, I think they might have accidently given away that Australia are going to win it during one of the interviews in the second semi-final. I hope I'm wrong, although a text sent in by a viewer described the performance as 'a drunken aunt dancing at a wedding', which was hilariously spot-on :lol:


If this description is accurate, I can't wait to see it. It sounds like it will be good for a laugh. (I haven't had time to watch the semifinals; I'll just watch the final tomorrow and then catch up later on anything interesting or impressively horrible that didn't make it to the final.)

For those who are in southern California, I have heard that a gay bar in Los Angeles is having a Eurovision party. It is Akbar, located at Sunset Blvd & Fountain Ave. If I happen to wake up early enough and decide that I have the energy to go there, I will check it out, but it is unlikely to happen since I just got back from a San Diego Symphony concert and I'm tired. I'll probably end up watching the contest at home as usual. I figured that I would do one or the other, but not both, and Bernstein's First Symphony ended up taking priority over a Eurovision party.


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## Belowpar (Jan 14, 2015)

Stop this nonsense!


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## Norman Gunston (Apr 21, 2018)

Should I give it a go?


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

I saw someone describe the Eurovision Song Contest as the Paralympics of music............


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## Sloe (May 9, 2014)

Casebearer said:


> Most of what the Dutch have send in is utter crap but 2013 was different.


Even when you send a song by the creator of Father Abraham and the Smurf song?


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## ZJovicic (Feb 26, 2017)

Just watched the thing and here's my opinion of the songs:

*1. Italy - 9.2 (12 points)
2. Israel - 9.1 (10 points)
3. Czechia - 9.0 (8 points)
4. Cyprus - 8.6 (7 points)
5. Ireland - 8.5 (6 points)
6. UK - 8.4 (5 points)
7. Moldova - 8.31 (4 points)
8. Germany - 8.3 (3 points)
9. Netherlands - 8.29 (2 points)
10. Hungary - 8.25 (1 point)*
11. Finland - 8.2
12. Australia - 8.1
13. France - 7.9
14. Bulgaria - 7.85
15. Sweden - 7.81
16. Norway - 7.8
17. Lithuania - 6.9
18. Estonia - 6.8
19. Spain - 6.5
20. Denmark - 6.475
21. Serbia - 6.45
22. Albania - 6.3
23. Slovenia - 5.8
24. Portugal - 5.7
25. Austria - 4.9
26. Ukraine - 4


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## Weird Heather (Aug 24, 2016)

A good sort of weirdness won the contest this year. Israel's winning entry was certainly strange and, for me, was easily the most memorable entry in the contest, but there were a few others that I liked better. This performance could have easily fallen into the "so bad that it is funny" category (and for some people it probably does), but I can't classify it that way because I thought it was actually well done. Netta is a charismatic and talented performer, and she was fun to watch. I suppose that, if you are going to do something strange and different, you should try to do it well. I probably would have voted for Estonia or Spain if I lived in a participating country, but I can't really argue with this win - it seems to be a good fit for contemporary Eurovision.

I wonder... what is the story behind the walls of waving maneki neko? That caught my eye simply because it was something I never would have expected to see. I guess, with Eurovision, anything is possible.

I'll comment on some of the others later when I have more time.


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## EddieRUKiddingVarese (Jan 8, 2013)

Should they start a EuroClassicalVision and then let all the non European countries enter...........

Not sure how Israel would go voting for Wagner


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## Casebearer (Jan 19, 2016)

How do Australians and Americans look at this EuroVision song contest. I guess that - apart from the often crappy music - they are also somewhat jealous of the enormous diversity of countries, languages and cultures in such a small continent. Please admit it!


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## Norman Gunston (Apr 21, 2018)

Casebearer said:


> How do Australians and Americans look at this EuroVision song contest. I guess that - apart from the often crappy music - they are also somewhat jealous of the enormous diversity of countries, languages and cultures in such a small continent. Please admit it!


Short answer, No .


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

*Eurovision 2018 - Julia Samoylova - I Won't Break - Russia*

(Such a beautiful imperfect face... The song failed to qualify for the grand final.)






From 2017 in Kyiv... As a child, Samoylova began losing function of her legs due to spinal muscular atrophy and has used a wheelchair since childhood. In 2017, she was banned from entering Ukraine for three years for violating Ukrainian law while entering Crimea in 2015, a region that was annexed by Russia in 2014. This prevented her from taking part in the Eurovision Song Contest 2017.


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

I haven't read every post so it's possible someone has beaten me to this. I know that my geography is not all it could be but I'm struggling to place Israel and Australia in Europe. Perhaps there has been a seismic shift in world politics that I slept through. We should be told!


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

I was in Sweden during the last couple of days, and the amount of dead-serious, overblown attention this otherwise sensible nation gives to the show never stops to puzzle me.

Now it´s time for some Pettersson, and then a bit of Stenhammar .


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## Vronsky (Jan 5, 2015)

Does anyone remember this performance from Montenegro in Azerbaijan? Rambo is one of my favourite pop musicians, Zappa from the Balkans.


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## Judas Priest Fan (Apr 27, 2018)

I watched the show in the background while my wife was watching it.

For me the Israel song was by FAR the worst. I lost all faith in mankind when they won. 

For me, the Estonian woman was very impressive, even though I normally don´t like this kind of music. But, what a voice she has!

As a metal fan, I also liked Denmark


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