Eurovision

Now that this year’s Eurovision contest is officially over, I have some final reflections on tracking the competition for the past month.

First, I’m pretty appalled by how much money gets spent on this contest. I know the contest is a hugely popular long-running tradition in Europe and the host countries have a lot of pressure to provide an entertaining show, but it is incredible how much money must get put into this elaborate production. Between the enormous stage with the huge amount of lighting displays to the props, costumes, and those digitalized Russian nesting dolls, all of which will most likely never be used again, to the amount that must have been spent on security and organizers, it’s insane how expensive it must be to put this together. In this article from the Moscow Times, an estimated 24 million euros ($32.3 million) was spent by Russia to host the production. I’m sure some of that was earned back between tourist revenue and ticket sales. From the tickets section of the Eurovision website, tickets for the dress rehearsals cost from 7-40 euros (approximately $9-$54), tickets for the semi-finals cost 18-445 euros (approximately $24-$600), and tickets for the final cost 22-667 euros (approximately $30-$900). That’s ridiculous, especially considering the economic state of many of the participating countries. I’m disappointed that so much money goes into a contest that doesn’t even feature generally good music.

Secondly, I’m still fascinated by how political this contest is and how seriously Europeans take it. Watching how countries voted was just a continuation of seeing how politics is infused into this competition. Depending on which country was being presented, it was relatively easy to predict to whom they were going to award their top scores. Even though the incorporation of jury voting was in attempts to break up the traditional voting blocks, overall countries with positive political and cultural affiliations still tended to vote for each other. Likewise, countries with negative affiliations tended not to vote for each other. While this makes a lot of sense, it’s still interesting to take note of, especially with the contest being one between pop songs.

Third, I still find it really interesting how countries choose to represent themselves in terms of music and performers. Many of the entries were pretty much mediocre europop songs with English lyrics, some of which had no noticeable cultural or musical ties to the country they were representing. Granted, it is a hard balance to reach, to come up with a song that is appealing to a wide audience that is still representative of a country’s music. However, it’s unfortunate that the strategy taken up by many countries is to ignore cultural ties and to just go with a flashy song that could be from anywhere, just to win. While it’s understandable that this has become the trend and that countries do this in hopes of winning, it’s disappointing from an ethnomusicological stand point because it would be a much more interesting contest if Eurovision was more of a display of the different kinds of music all over Europe. To be fair, some countries do make valiant efforts to incorporate folkloric elements into their entries to give them ties to the country, though I still think it would be interesting to see what the contest would be like if the focus was more on submitting good musical acts to show the variety of culture in Europe.

Overall, I had a real love/hate relationship with this contest. Having never been that invested in the contest, I had never given Eurovision that much attention until this year with the class project. At first I was really fascinated and entertained by it, enjoying how ridiculous it is. However, after watching the semi-finals and finals I was also really put off by the extravagance of the production and plethora of bad music. I admit that I enjoyed watching the final rounds of performances because it is so unbelievable and over the top, though stepping back from it, I really can’t believe how much goes into each entry, not to mention the overall contest. While I’m not sure if I’ll be keeping up on future Eurovision contests, I do think it will be interesting to see how the contest develops. I wonder if entries will become even more homogenized, or if countries will start to sway from formulaic entries in favor of more musically representative entries. I also wonder how future entries can even start to top the extravagance of this year’s contest (though I’m sure they will inevitably will). I’m sure in another 50 years the contest will have changed considerably, just as it’s changed over the last 50 years, though it’ll be interesting to see what kinds of changes those will be.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 4:01 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.