20/20 Eurovision
Europe's favorite talent show ain't what it used to be. But neither is Europe.
Did you watch Eurovision this year?
I didn’t watch Eurovision this year.
I’ve never watched Eurovision. I’m pretty sure I became only vaguely aware of the music competition around 2007 or 2008, and only because Ukraine - the only true democracy in Europe (even though they cancelled their elections this year) and our noble and stalwart ally in the fight against fascism… wait, no! Is it communism? Hold on... why do we hate the Russians, these days? Is it… is it racism? Homophobia? Asexualphobia, maybe? Look, I lost my Current Year Issue Du Jour almanac that tells us laypeople what the fat cats want us to be mad about and who to be mad at on every given day of the year, so, like, if someone could take a picture of those pages out of their book and send them to me in the DM’s… that’d be great. I want to make sure I’m shouting I HATE RUSSIA BECAUSE THEY EAT FISH AND ONIONS ON PIZZA! and not I HATE CHINA BECAUSE TIKTOK! at today’s Two Minutes of Rage.
Anyways, and perhaps ironically, I only heard about Eurovision in 2007 because of Ukraine’s entry, which was of a drag queen singing what I think is mostly gibberish to an admittedly catchy beat in what I can only call the Slavic predecessor to Gangnam Style. The Russian government also got their trusikis twisted in a knot because, even at the time, there was a whole lot of animosity between the two countries, the Donbass, and they issued a statement in which they said that they believed that the title lyrics - Lasha Tumbai - was actually meant to say Russia, Goodbye, because if you said it really, really fast over and over again… well, I can understand why they might come away with that impression, but I also think they’re looking way too into the lyrics of Ukraine’s Dollar Store, off-brand Elton John.
I was pretty sure that it didn’t matter because, well, why would a bunch of goofy Europeans in goofy costumes singing goofy songs matter?
Well… it does.
With the inaugural competition held all the way back in 1956, and continuing annually ever since - save one particular year, though you get no prizes if you guess which one - the original idea behind Eurovision was a riff on a national Italian music competition called the Sanremo Music Competition, which began in 1951. Though the original participants were limited to those firmly west of the Iron Curtain1, as the communist freeze across the East thawed, more and more of Europe was welcomed to participate. Even the definition of Europe was loosened to include the Caucus republics, Australia, and even Israel, and the annual number of participants has swollen from ten or twelve to well over thirty, with over fifty-four countries across the world having participated at least once.
The idea is simple - every year, participating countries submit a song performed and written that year by their most talented, robust, and charismatic musicians. Those that qualify through means unknown to me proceed to the live competition, where their live, televised performance will be voted on by both a panel of judges and the audience, with the song that receives the most votes going to claim the vaunted title of… okay, well, there really isn’t a title, but the winner gets some bragging rights in the Euro-Sphere and the privilege of hosting the next year’s competition.
But I’m not sure if anyone, even the Euro-folk, really care all that much about it anymore. Like every once great institution and staple of entertainment, Eurovision seems to have, as the kids would say, fallen off. Frankly, outside of 2007’s Ukranian drag queen kerfuffle, I’ve only ever heard about it… twice? Maybe three times?
One time was when Moldova submitted a song that had this bit in it, which also went viral and became a meme.
And the other time I can recall was in 2014, when Austrian drag queen - noticing a pattern? - Conchita Wurst won the competition, which was a big deal because… well, look at the guy.
It may seem strange today, given that you can’t walk into a cosmetic store like Ulta or Sephora without being greeted by over-enthusiastic man aping Wurst’s look, but a drag queen with tastefully groomed facial hair and expertly applied cosmetics was pretty much unheard of and legitimately transgressive in a way that it just isn’t today. For a hot minute, the media was trying to spin it as a victory for trans-people… even though Wurst - real name Thomas Neuwirth - is not and has never claimed to be a transwoman. Just a drag queen. Who’s main claim to fame is not shaving.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t actually think the song he sang was bad - overwrought, yes, corny, definitely, but, hey. It’s Eurovision. High Camp is the order of the day. Some of these acts - if you couldn’t tell by the few we’ve already looked at - are so fucking camp that John Waters would probably tell them to tone it down a bit.
But, outside of those two flare ups, I’ve never heard about Eurovision much. But I’m also, as the Brits would say, a schtewpid American who frew tha tea in tha ‘arbor, so, to me, Europe is kind of like Vegas - what happens there, stays there.
Except when it doesn’t.
But, seriously - Eurovision is not a big thing in the Colonies. Most Americans, I reckon, don’t know when it happens, and don’t care even if they do. Even across the pond, the cultural importance of the event seems to be fading as it loses its mass appeal to the every-day European. Which is strange to say, given that the program boasted it’s highest-ever ratings and online engagement in 2023. But I never heard less about Eurovision than I did in 2023. Usually, I see my Euro-oomfies on other sites get a little giddy when it comes up, or lamenting what Eurovision used to be and what it’s become, but that year? None. Zip. Nada. Not so much as an umlaut was uttered in my corner of the cyber-sphere.
I think it might have been because the winner was too normal to make headlines. Sweden took home the winner’s trophy for the song Tattoo - a very bold title that’s only been used for, like, two dozen other songs - sung by Loreen, who has a simple performing name, a simple song title, and, outside of her grotesquely, impractically long nails, isn’t someone you’d think much of if you passed her on the street. If I was seated at a Stockholm cafe for my daily fika2 and she sat down at the next table over, I’d probably be more interested in my prinsesstårta than her. Not because she’s, like, hideous, or anything - she’s just pretty normal.
As you can see, she looks like Princess Jasmine run through a Giga-Chad filter, so you probably don’t need to be told she isn’t ethnically Swedish3. But she is a Swedish citizen.
Which is more than Switzerland can say for their past representatives. You know who the Yodeling Clock-making Chocolatiers-cum-Bankers tapped to perform their song in 1988? Oh, no one special - just a no-name twenty year old who’s only claim to fame was playing at local shows in a place that wasn’t Switzerland.
Don’t recognize her? Yeah, well, I didn’t at first, either. But you probably recognize her here.
Yeah. Celine fucking Dion. Who, uh… well. Let me check real quick.
Well, well, well… I wasn’t aware Quebec had inexplicably and suddenly become a Swiss canton. Curious.
Okay, okay - so, there’s nothing that explicitly says that a performer has to be from the country they’re representing. The song has to be written by people from that nation, but the performer can be anyone. I think. But I still think it’s poor form to have someone who isn’t from your country represent you. Even if it is someone like Celine Dion, who, at the time, was an unknown quantity who was something of a minor teenybopper star in her native Quebec that was about to blow the fuck up.
She wasn’t the only big name to get her start with Eurovision, either.
In 1970, Irish singer Dana won the competition with the song, All Kinds of Everything. Never heard of Dana? Me neither. But I have heard of the guy who came in fourth place, because he went on to become one of, if not the best selling Latin artists of all time.
Even if you haven’t lived around large populations of Spanish-speaking immigrants and diaspora, I reckon you’ve heard the name Julio Iglesias before. He’s kind of a big deal. Like, everywhere. He’s actually the best-selling international artist in China, which makes about as much sense as this guy being the most popular recording artist period in several Arab countries.
According to ABC News, this was the song of choice by Iraqi civilians the night that American tanks rolled into Baghdad. I think I’d be bumping another track, since, despite what the name might lead you to believe, it predates the invasion of Iraq by a good three years and was very much a song that existed at the time.
Maybe this is uncouth of me to say, but it just seems a bit more apropos for a night where F-16’s are screaming overhead, you just watched your neighbor’s house get reduced to a fiery heap of slag, and you’re probably running down the street like Andre 3000 in the music video.
And you’re in Baghdad as bombs are falling on it, but I’m getting off topic.
Anyways, Julio Iglesias and Celine Dion are just two of several big names to perform in Eurovision. Englebert Humperdinck4 - yes, that’s a real person - Mary Hopkins, Bonnie Tyler, Olivia Newton-John - all of them represented England, at one point or another. Pop duo t.A.T.u. represented their home country, the nasty evil no-no Nazis of Putinland, in 2003, back before we decided that Russia was no longer allowed to take part in civilized society. They have, like, the worst name for a pop duo ever, but, well…
Maybe it’s just the fact that I associate this song with the mid-2000’s, before I became the bitter, jaded, and cynical curmudgeon I am today, but I like it. It goes hard, I’m afraid. I’m not sure how popular they really were in America at large, but I remember their music being pretty ubiquitous on the English-language internet at the time, and, perhaps buoyed by Russia’s constant presence in the headline, seem to be enjoying something of a resurgence in the Anglosphere.
In 1987, Umberto Tozzi represented Italy, and, even though you’ve probably never heard of him - I hadn’t until I noticed his presence on the Spider-Man: Far from Home soundtrack - he’s a household name in several European countries with over seventy million albums sold, which is more than Paul McCartney, Simon & Garfunkel, Journey, and fucking Prince.
And, yeah - it’s no When Doves Cry, but it goes hard, too, I’m afraid.
Oh, and it’s probably worth mentioning that 2023 wasn’t the only time Sweden won Eurovision. Eurovision 1974 was the first time anyone outside of Scandinavia ever saw these four garishly dressed singing Swedes.
And, since I know that you know the lyrics to a good half of their catalogue5, I don’t have to tell you that 1974 wasn’t going to be the last time anyone beyond Sweden heard the names Agnetha, Benny, Bjorn, and Anni-Frid, either. Hell, they turned up at Eurovision this year, since the competition was held in Sweden, and it was also the fiftieth anniversary of their original win with perennial banger, Waterloo. Which, while a well-respected classic, isn’t even in the top ten ABBA tracks. I mean, it’s the very last track on ABBA Gold. Don’t try to tell me, as so many others have, that it belongs up there with Mamma Mia and Dancing Queen. Because it doesn’t.
But, I didn’t come here to quibble about ranking ABBA’s discography. You get the point. Eurovision used to be a pretty well-respected competition that launched the careers of some of the best-selling artists and groups of all time, and featured even more. Even if ABBA were the only contestants that ever went on to meet any modicum of success, I’d argue that alone would make Eurovision’s impact on popular music, both in Europe and, by proxy, America, pretty damn big. Even if you’ve never sat your Yankee ass down and watched the competition before, you’ve certainly listened to at least one artist who’s participated.
Yet, that impact, it seems, is dwindling. Outside of middle-aged theater kid on Twitters… no one seems to be talking about this year’s Eurovision. And, if they are… well, they’re not saying anything good about it.
The Eurovision competition of 2024 was always going to be contentious, divisive, and make someone, somewhere unhappy. On the left - where the overwhelming majority, if not totality of people who still care about Eurovision lie on the political spectrum - the proceedings were tainted by the participation of Israel.
Israel has participated in Eurovision since 1973. In only six years after their introduction, they had two artists take the top spot. They’re not exactly unknown to the competition, nor does it seem that their participation has ever been all that controversial, even during the other years they were dropping bombs on Gaza. Hell, they had another winner only a few years back in 2018 with the singer, Netta, who, um…
Hm. I think people should have been protesting Israel’s participation in 2018, too, albeit for different reasons than today.
I think she’s best described as the Israeli equivalent of Lizzo. She’s big, she’s obnoxious, she’s got a very high opinion of herself, and has a penchant for revealing, skin-tight outfits, to which I also have the humbly request that you send me a gift-basket with fresh fruits and gift cards for not posting a picture of her in a neon yellow one-piece that conforms to her every curve. All of them.
You’re welcome, by the way.
This year, however, they went with a more conservative (and respectable) pick and tapped singer Eden Golan the country, and under great scrutiny.
Needless to say, her going out on stage waving the Star of David did not exactly go over well with some people.
Golan’s name alone is contentious since she shares her surname with a hotly contested stretch of land that was once Syrian territory that has since been annexed by Israel after the Six-Days War in 1967. Even though Golan appears to be her legal surname, many were quick to assume that this was some passive-aggressive jab or a psy-op by Mossad to spit in the face of protestors across Europe, who were very, very vocal about their opposition to Israeli representation in the competition.
Golan was also facing something of a double-whammy of criticism since she’s not just Israeli - she holds Russian dual-citizenship and spent most of her childhood and adolescence in Moscow. Russia wasn’t even allowed to participate in Eurovision. They’ve been blackballed since the “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine began.
I’m not saying it’s right. I’m not saying it’s wrong. As I’ve said every time the topic of Israel, Gaza, Hamas, and the Jews as a whole comes up - it’s not my lane. I’m not writing Zionist apologia, I’m just stating the facts about Israel’s participation in the contest as they are. This article is not about Israel, Palestine, Zionism, or anything in that general wheelhouse, so, I ask you kindly, if you have strong opinions on the matter one way or another, to please leave them at the door, because we are not here to discuss that.
But I will say that I do see the argument that it’s hypocritical to allow Israel to participate while they’re up to their knees in a foreign bloodbath while banning Russia for ostensibly the same reason.
There are allegations that the Israeli government, er… spent some shekels, shall we say, to influence the governing board of Eurovision to slip Eden Golan in there. Accusations of nepotism - and Zionism - ramped up to a fever-pitch when Golan ranked in the top five of each round, even winning the first of the competition.
And I don’t actually buy that. Because she was not riding on the support of the judges that were supposedly being bribed.
Like I mentioned earlier, there are two brackets to Eurovision’s voting - the votes cast by the appointed judges, and the votes cast by the audience. At the final round of voting, the two are synthesized into one final number that’s used to determine the ultimate winner. I’m not sure - even many articles I read while doing research said that the voting system was rather esoteric. Interestingly, the bulk of Golan’s support came from audience votes, which propelled her to finish in fifth place overall.
Of course, some were quick to claim that the votes were rigged. Were they? Well, given how byzantine the voting system works, it wouldn’t be hard to jimmy with it and have most be none the wiser. But I also kind of doubt it.
I think that, if Golan did garner support from the wider Eurovision-watching audience that was compromised by the less politically active, more run-of-the-mill, everyday, go-along-to-get-along Europeans, I think it was likely caused by a mix of two things.
For one, I’m assuming that the bulk of the Eurovision audience and European population, by and large, hasn’t internalized Middle Eastern Geo-Politics as the hill upon which they are going to die. They were going to watch Eurovision, regardless of whether or not Israel was or wasn’t turning Palestine into a parking lot at the moment.
Conversely, the lion’s share of people protesting Eurovision, if not the overwhelming majority of them, were never going to watch or engage with the contest to begin with. You can’t really offer a protest vote in something if you weren’t going to participate in anyways.
It’s a lot like what happens in the world of video games every time a new title drops that features a female character that’s even remotely appealing to the eyes. Recently, a Korean game called Stellar Blade released to much controversy, because people who don’t play video games were mad that the protagonist looks like a minxy k-pop girlie, and at this point, any time a video game character has a BMI south of 40 and a face that hasn’t been walloped with the ugly stick, some gaggle of losers are going to kvetch about it.
The zinger, though, is that Stellar Blade… still moved a lot of copies. Why? Because the people mad about the fact that the main character wasn’t built like Lizzo or Netta were never gonna buy the fucking game to begin with. So, for all their bluster, it didn’t move the needle of the game’s sales any more than the protestors against Eurovision influenced Golan’s participation in it.
Hell, if you want to see where their convictions are at, the English contestant - one Olly Alexander, who will get to shortly… sadly - signed a letter on behalf of the LGBT activist group, Voices4London, denouncing the actions of Israel and, while I’m not certain if he did or didn’t join the chorus of voices calling for their expulsion from the contest outright, the sentiment is certainly there. Later, he was one of nine participants that called for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Which, uh… did it work? How did it go? Is that whole invasion of Gaza thing still going?
Yeah. Sorry guys. Looks like Netanyahu didn’t listen. I know, I know - shocking. I mean, he didn’t listen to the President of the United States, or the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, or literally anyone else calling for a ceasefire, but… yeah, man. I really thought he was going to listen to a bunch of Literally Who’s from London, too.
Anyways, Alexander was highly pressured to exclude himself from the competition, as was every other participant in the contest. Despite numerous participants highfalutin talk about support for Palestine, the show went on. Unfortunately.
Alexander was soon on the chopping block with his own cohorts, as over 450 queer artists worldwide under the banner of Queers for Palestine soon drafted their own demand for him to withdraw his participation, because, somehow, performing in a contest where there’s one Israeli contestant among thirty-something others makes one complicit in an entire country’s actions.
Again, to the detriment of my eyes and ears, Alexander proceeded to participate anyways, but, given the reaction his performance received from the English public… well, I have to imagine he regrets not capitulating.
What I’m saying is that, if these artists truly, honestly, genuinely felt as if Israel’s participation in the contest was such a moral affront… why did they participate?
Oh. Right.
There’s a lot of talk by participants like Alexander, who received no shortage of criticism for their role in the contest, about wanting to bring people together with music, which makes sense. It’s a fucking singing competition. It’s like the Olympics - it shouldn’t be a political flashpoint. It’s friendly, international competition where people throw various balls at each other or lift weights or run really fast.
This whole political turmoil surrounding the event, to me, is a perfect encapsulation of the sheer lunacy enveloping the West where everything has to be political, and nothing can just be, anymore. I understand that, when nationalism comes into play in any form, things are liable to turn ugly, and fast. The aforementioned Olympics are often used as proxy battlefields between rival nations - look no further than the 1980 Miracle on Ice, when the American hockey team defeated the heavily favored Soviets, which became a legendary event in which the victory was not only a matter of winning a gold medal, but maintaining national pride for both teams. There’s also a great argument to be made that, in a way, modern sports acts as a substitute for international or even regional, intra-national conflict in many cases, and a safety valve in which mounting civic pressure can be released. Perhaps the only thing keeping the populations of Philadelphia and New York from declaring jihad upon one another is the annual Eagles/Jets game. I can’t say, and, really, it’s a conversation for another time.
I’d also say that accusing the participants of Eurovision of being complicit with crimes committed against the Palestinian people because of the presence of one Israeli competitor is tantamount to accusing the athletes that participated in the Beijing Olympics of being complicit in the crimes committed against the Uighers, or that anyone who participated in the 1980 Moscow Olympics was as guilty of Soviet war-crimes in Afghanistan as the Russian soldiers committing it. Hell, by that logic, you could make the argument that any athlete that competed in the 2004 Salt Lake City Olympics was totally on board with what America was doing in Baghdad and Kabul at the time.
Perhaps its impossible to divorce politics from these sorts of events. I don’t know. But, personally, I’d like to see a return to these kinds of things being more akin to an international talent show than political cudgels and existential, ideological, trans-national battlegrounds. I guess what I’m saying is it would be nice if we could have a return to some thin semblance of normalcy. Now, I know, I know - that’s a fucking ludicrous idea, in today’s political climate, but… an ape can dream.
And I don’t think I’m alone. It’s not just a return to apolitical normalcy I feel as if I and many others are craving.
I also think that the votes cast for Golan were, in a way, protest votes. But not a protest against anything that had to do with Israel. While I’m sure some people voted for her just to spite the protestors and the controversy of her inclusion, I also think there’s an argument to be made that a vote for Golan was, in a way, a vote for normalcy.
See, Golan is… well, she’s not exactly my type, but she’s what I would call conventionally attractive. She’s thin. Even if you don’t think she’s pretty, per say, she doesn’t activate your gag reflex like some of her competitors, either. She doesn’t lean into the gender-bending, androgyne antics that so many of the other contestants harped so heavily on this year, and many preceding years.
The song she submitted to the final round, Hurricane, is a thoroughly unremarkable piece of pop music. But that’s the rub - it’s unremarkable. It’s plain. It’s normal. You can turn on any car radio in America, tune into a Top 40-slingin’ pop sloppa, and hear a dozen identical songs sung by a dozen different identical pop singers within twenty minutes.
It’s so bog-standard that, if it was represented visually, it’d look like the state of Louisiana. Because, y’know - bogs. You get it? You get it.
Let’s compare and contrast with some of the other competitors she was going up against.
Here’s Finland’s competitor, Windows95man, which… is a name I actually like a lot. But unfortunately, his name fails to live up to his thoroughly unpleasant persona, which I can only describe as Finnish Trailer Trash married with Half-Assed Rave Couture. The only thing he’s missing is scads of ugly, cheap, scratcher tattoos - or as I call them, bathroom stall graffiti tattoos - and he’d be identical every other idiot in Seattle who’s adopted the long, greasy mullet-and-mustache combo. His song was called No Rules, which was basically Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, but worse in every respect. To show just how many rules he doesn’t care to follow, Windows95man ripping off his denim booty shorts and running around in flesh-colored tights, all while singing in a horrible, dollar-store impression of Rammstein’s Till Lindemann’s gravelly growl.
Classy.
It was more annoying than anything, and the only thing it really offended was my ears. It was about as safe and tepid as a song called No Rules could possibly be, even if he did have his pants off.
Not to be outdone, England submitted a truly heinous number, both visually and audibly, by the aforementioned Olly Alexander, which, I have to say - don’t ever trust an Olly. Oliver’s are already on thin ice, but anyone who goes by Olly after the age of twelve? Avoid.
His song was called Dizzy - an obnoxious piece of trash that made me feel dizzy from just how gratingly annoying it was - and the accompanying performance was that of Mr. Alexander flailing around a set representing a grody bathroom, surrounding by scantily-dressed men making very obvious advances at him in what any sane person would recognize as something someone would only do if they meant to sexually assault a person. I hate to post this picture, but you really have to see it to believe it.
Classy.
Mr. Alexander claims that the set was not a bathroom. Rather, it was described thusly.
Post-apocalyptic dystopian boxing gym locker room, aboard a spaceship hurtling toward Earth through a black hole in 1985.
Which - yeah. No. You’re not fooling anyone, pal.
If it’s an anthem for anything, it’s for the act of cruising, which is a well-known activity in the gay community when one visits a grimy public restroom and, uh… well, you can probably assume exactly what follows. I don’t think I need to explain why the finer details of such an act are as lurid as they actually, legitimately dangerous to both the health of the participants and, more importantly, the health of the general public, as raunchy, bareback boot-knockin’ in public restrooms is an absolutely phenomenal way to spread all manner of diseases that sane people most definitely do not want to have.
Even in today’s social climate, which usually rather permissive of this type of thing, this number was horribly received. I saw numerous members of the Rainbow Bloc on Twitter disavowing it, since this is not the kind of behavior anyone with any sense - I reckon even those who indulge in it - want to be publicly associated with. Even in the English tabloid rag, The Daily Mail, contributor Nana Akua published a piece in which she tears the entire performance apart, going so far as to title the piece, Our seedy Eurovision entry that simulates a sex act in a toilet makes me embarrassed to be British. If the reactions to this number of Twitter were anything to go by, she was far from the only Brit to hold such a sentiment.
While England finished in thirteenth place out of twenty-six, even that seems far too high for the amount of public disdain this one garnered.
The one particular performance that really got under people’s skin, however, was the one put on by the representative of England’s Hibernian neighbor.
When you think of Ireland, what do you think of? Green, rolling hills and bucolic ruralism? Shamrocks? Fair, red-haired, freckled-speckled beauties? Catholicism? Pageboy caps? Crippling alcoholism? Potatoes and famines? Maybe even Riverdance?
Nope. You know what I associate with Ireland now?
Demons.
Classy.
This repulsive little puke, who took the prize for Most Abhorrent Participant from cruisin’, boozin’ Olly Alexander and ran away with it, is called Bambi Thug. The dumb name alone should have disqualified her from participating in the competition, and polite society as a whole. If you’ve read anything about the competition, I’d reckon it’s been about this brace-faced goblin’s outright demonic performance. And I mean that literally demonic, as the entire thing was steeped, stewed, and slathered in occult iconography and made to mimic a demonic summoning ritual that ended with some tattoo’d creep crawling out and getting way too handsy with the singer for a competition that, ostensibly, is family-friendly. Oh, and the number was called Crown the Witch, prominently featured a crown of black thorns, and generally threw in all the iconography one might in a Baby’s First Book on the Occult, right down to the Triskelion symbol plonked right on her forehead. I have a feeling that Thug only copped it because it’s associated with Celtic Neopaganism and a tenuous connection to demonology, wholly unaware that the symbol predates the Celts by several thousand years and variations of it can be found in cultures as ancient as the proto-Indo-Europeans and as distant as Japan.
I really do not want to spill more ink on Ms. - sorry, Mx. Thug, since she or it or whatever is apparently the first non-binary participant in Eurovision, I think, maybe, kind of, sort of, not really - than already has been, as all of that ink, in my opinion, is wasted on her. It’s what she wants. She wants people to hand-wring and wig out over her shitty little Dollar Store Crowley shock-rock bit. She, Olly Alexander, Windows95man, and the rest of them thrive on this kind of attention. I reckon because their parents didn’t hug them enough as children, or they didn’t like going to church, but instead of going to counseling they’ve decided to make their hang-ups and mommy/daddy issues the rest of the world’s problem to deal with. They want to get the hackles of the old fuddy-duddy church ladies and Evangelical fundies up. They relish it. It’s their bread and butter. There’s very little substance to their artistry, if it can be even called that, so getting people riled up is literally all the have.
Here’s the thing - it’s lame. It’s aggressively lame. There’s no real point to it other than to just piss people off. And not in a fun, tongue-in-cheek way that the shock rockers of old like Alice Cooper or KISS might have done, who I’d argue were in on the joke, in a way. They didn’t take themselves seriously. They knew what they were doing, and they didn’t make any bones about it. Cooper, for all his posturing, is a devout Christian and not particularly quiet about it, and KISS, after a while, leaned into the fact that they basically became a glorified kid’s band.
I’d argue that, even a band like Ghost - which is led by Tobias Forge, an avowed Satanist - take themselves with a pinch of tongue-in-cheek self-awareness of how patently absurd and overly theatrical their entire bit is. That kind of schlocky, late night horror B-movie pastiche energy they drape themselves in is exactly why I think they’ve been so successful.
And, don’t misunderstand me - I’m not saying that’s a good thing. I’m a Christian. I don’t think that even tongue-in-cheek Satanism is a good idea or should be promoted; demons don’t particularly care if you worship them ironically. But what I am saying is that Ghost’s act is infinitely more successful than any of the acts at this year’s Eurovision are or ever will be. Both Ghost and Thug come off as melodramatic Satanic dinner theater. But to Ghost, there’s an element of self-awareness to their theatricality where it feels as if they aren’t pretending that they’re anything else, while Thug is getting high off sniffing her own farts, convinced she’s creating high art.
Moving on from the Irish gremlin, here’s the winner - Nemo, who’s a no-name singer from Switzerland who won with - shock upon shocks - a totally lukewarm, tepid pop number about being yourself and not conforming to the rules and bluh bluh bluh, you’ve heard it already, you get it. I think he’s non-binary or gender non-conforming, too, but I’m not sure and, also, I don’t really care. It’s self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, self-masturbatory narcissism. Pretty much all of these people stand on the roof of the House that Gaga Built. There’s literally nothing they do or say that she didn’t already do and say in Born This Way.
Did I already mention he’s self-professed non-binary individual? Because he is. He really, really wants to hammer that point home. All of them do. There’s a lot of gender non-conforming individuals that participated this year and have participated in Eurovision, and most of them love to bandy about how they’re shattering societal expectations or pushing boundaries of conventional gender roles as if they’re some sort of artistic, avant-garde luminaries that are doing something that’s never been done before.
The reason it comes across as tedious, tired, and tawdry as it does is because… they’re not. And anyone who’s ever listened to popular music knows they’re not. To make the claim that Nemo is some how breaking the norm, especially in the world of popular music, is completely disingenuous.
All the gender-bending androgyny is hardly controversial, anymore. It’s already been done. By who? Oh, you know. No one special. Just…
The one. The only... Boy George. Again - these posers owe him a debt of gratitude, and I imagine they must go to bed at night tormented by the fact that they’ll never make a song that can even hold a BIC lighter flame to Karma Chameleon.
Oh, and I almost forgot - androgyny and blurring gender conventions was kind of the aesthetic of two of the best selling recording artists of all fucking time.
These people seem to forget - perhaps conveniently - that they’re teetering on the shoulders of giants that already blasted through the glass ceiling. Giants that were several standard variations above the mean in terms of musical skill and artistry than anyone that performed at this year’s Eurovision. If Bowie and Prince were playing in the Major Leagues, this current crop of dipshits aren’t even in the minor leagues - they’re just banging rocks together and drooling all over themselves.
As a reader of mine, Lemon6, said in a note about similar antics pulled by Kim Petras and Sam Smith when they were acting like children that just discovered that blasphemy was a thing during the release of their collaboration called Unholy very eloquently stated -
High Fructose Corn Syrup Epic Bacon Atheism.
I could literally not have put it any finer than that.
All of the performances were as artificial as high fructose corn syrup, as inauthentic and juvenile as Reddit’s obsession with epic bacon and narwhals, and, most importantly, it was wholly sterile, toothless, and wasn’t transgressive. Not like Bowie. Not like Prince. Not like Ghost or Alice Cooper or even fucking KISS.
Why? Because in the time when all those acts were coming up - Ghost excepted - they were transgressive for the time. There were clearly defined societal boundaries pertaining to gender, aesthetics, religion, sexuality, so on and so forth, and when they performed, they were butting up against them. Look at Motley Crue in the 80’s.
Seems tame today - and it is - but you can bet in the 80’s that parents were fucking disgusted that their young men were putting on lipstick, teasing their hair, and getting tatted up to mimic these drug-addled degenerates.
But, the world that Crue, Bowie, Prince, and so many others came up in was radically different from today’s. In those eras, they were pushing against boundaries and good taste - boundaries that have been trod over, erased, and all but forgotten, and good taste that seems like a long distant memory. There were, in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and even the 90’s, lines drawn in the sand that all of these acts willingly stepped over. There’s a reason the androgyny of Bowie and Prince were so scandalous for their time, and a reason that the shock-rock antics of Alice Cooper and Kiss and others like Ozzy Osbourne had church ladies clutching their pearls.
I’m not saying it’s right. I’m not saying it’s wrong. Personally, I think there’s an argument to made that, for as much as I like the music of Prince and Bowie and so many others I’ve listed, they’re partially, if not directly responsible for the situation we find ourselves in. I’m just stating the simple fact that, for their times, these acts were, in a word, transgressive.
In a society where all of the boundaries have been erased and there is no common consensus of good taste, none of these Eurovision acts come off as legitimately shocking, or transgressive in meaningful way. Windows95man can grunt and groan about what a wild and free spirit he is, breaking all these rules… but what set of rules is he really breaking?
What they claim to be rebelling against? The boundaries they bandy about pushing? The ceiling they claim to be breaking through? It’s all been done. It’s all been done better. Not just that, but what they’re pushing is the reigning order of the day. There are towns across the west where every shop on the high street or main drag has pride flags with every stripe and color to represent even the most outlandish and fractional populations of the Rainbow bloc. There’s nothing transgressive or boundary-pushing about being non-binary when that isn’t just accepted, but encouraged and rewarded, by the powers that be.
With that, all you have left is a bunch of melodramatic, self-congratulatory theater kids indulging in histrionics, reveling in what little controversy they can still stir and looking to get ass-pats from their degenerate cohorts, raging against some oppressive political and social edifice that doesn’t exist anywhere but inside their own imagination. It’s performative, it’s toothless, and it’s completely, utterly hollow and self-indulgent.
Is it dangerous? Absolutely. The kind of behavior these people are promoting are not healthy, for society or for the individual. The wages of sin, after all, is death. Should it be promoted? Absolutely not. If you’ll humor my own personal belief in the preternatural for a moment, regardless on your own, if there are demons and other spiritual entities of ill-repute, I believe one of the most under-discussed threats facing many today is flagrant and reckless indulgence in the occult as if it’s some harmless child’s science kit. Invoking the demonic, whether you really believe in it or not when you do, is not like making a baking soda volcano or cooking up a potful of Non-Newtonian fluid; once those spirits are invoked, they are not easily dismissed, and once those doors are opened, they are not easily closed, and none of it is as easily dealt with as cleaning up a mess with a paper towel and going about your life. Make no mistake - I’m not trying to be dismissive of people who are concerned with what they saw, especially in Bambi Thug’s performance. When people see legitimate physical and spiritual danger in the kind of behaviors promoted by performers like this, they have a valid reason to be concerned.
But I also believe that the best course of action is to ignore these people7.
They want controversy. They want eyes on them. They want all the old folks to gasp and clutch their pearls and watch their monocles pop in jaw-dropping shock as they squirm and spaz on stage and play with imagery and symbolism that would be low-tier for even remedial Occultism 101 class at a community college.
So - don’t.
I’m not saying ignore it. Unfortunately, it’s not always an option, since its being injected into even the most minute facets of life all around. But you can always laugh. Mock them for being the dorky theater kids playing dress-up that they are. Move on. These people - almost all of them - are pathologically histrionic. They don’t just want attention, they need it like they need air or water or food. And if you don’t give it to them, they’ll do one of two things - shrivel up and disappear, or continue to act out until they implode in on themselves and burn out entirely. Either way, they’ll cease to be a concern. Anything else will only validate them, not only in their eyes, but anyone else watching. For example, if there is some rebellious teenager that finds themselves smitten with Thug’s performance, watching people wring their hands and tut-tut over it is only going to make Thug, by proxy, look cool to them. They’re going to emulate what they see because they, too, seek attention, and by playing into Thug’s game, they’ll be mislead into thinking that the best way to get it is by also getting themselves covered in scratcher tats, dressing up like a demon, and so on and so forth. If all they see is people laughing at the absurdity of Thug’s performance? They will probably think twice before they get the Triskelion stamped between their eyes.
Just as I was going to edit this piece for release, I saw
post a note pertaining to a feminist art exhibit, in which kids that appear to be twelve or thirteen were taken to such a thing, exposed to some morbidly-obese, middle-aged woman flashing her two-tons-of-fun and whole-ass hoo-ha at them, though it appeared to nearly be self-censored by her own enormity. As ghastly as the sight was, none of the children look as if they’re actually shocked, disgusted, or even all that bothered by having Jabba the Slutt flash them. I mean, when I was thirteen, yeah - I was on Limewire seein’ all sorts of shit, it probably wouldn’t have fazed me all that much, either. Unfortunately. The point is, the kids look unperturbed. If anything, the one kid making eye-contact with her just has this look of exasperation on his face, like, C’mon, bitch. Really? It’s gross on a number of levels, which is why I won’t show the whole image here, but I will show the kid’s in question.
I will show the comment Prester John’s Revenge left in regards to another user calling the event/image child abuse.
He’s exactly right. Now, I will say - and I believe Mr. Revenge would likely agree with me - that whoever brought these kids to something like this should be pilloried and then beat with a rubber hose until they can’t remember their names, but the point is that the boy’s dismissive snickering, smirking, and total dearth of even the slightest mote of shock, offering the fat woman nothing of scorn and ridicule and rendering her nothing of what she hoped to get… well, I have to think she probably went home and sobbed into a Home Depot orange tub filled with Triple-Super-Ultra-Mega-Giga-Death-By-Chocolate Chocolate Chunk Ben and Jerry’s.
This kind of mockery and derision won’t work for all of these agitators, naturally - there are always idiots in the world who are naturally drawn to this sort of behavior - but, for as atomized and disconnected as society has become, societal and community pressure is still an immensely powerful force. Everyone wants attention. We’re social creatures, after all. But no one wants to be laughed at. No one wants to be ridiculed. No one wants to be ignored. And if we do exactly that when we see these morons flail around demanding our eyes and attention, hoping to see you shout, My word! and faint with the vapors, you deprive them of the one thing they want.
To bring this back to Eden Golan and the vote for normalcy I previously mentioned, I’ve seen a lot of Europeans both here on Substack and elsewhere lament the decline of Eurovision as a family-friendly program held in the spirit of amiable competition and good nature into a hyper-politicized and lurid spectacle of sexual deviancy and debauchery.
I think that people have grown weary of it all. They’re tired. Even those who are lukewarm politically and spiritually are tired of having it all thrown in their face, day in and day out, and, more than anything, exhausted with being told by the powers that be to validate the antics of BPD-afflicted theater kids like Bambi Thug and Olly Alexander under threat of being labelled any number of ad hominems. Look back at Nana Akua’s think-piece in The Daily Mail - even two or three years ago, I do not think such a scathing opinion about what many would defend as an expression of queer sexuality would have flown. I’m sure she’s still being accused of homophobia for saying what she said, but the fact she was allowed to say it in such a public forum tells me that the tide is shifting, even if it is gradual.
And, that all being said, if you’re one of these casual viewers that’s just done with the spectacle, and all you have left to vote for a coked out Finnish-raver running around without pants on, an Irish wanna-be occultist pretending to summon a demon, a Swiss twink wearing a skirt, and a rather plain and unremarkable Israeli singer… which among them is the logical choice?
You can vote against the reigning regime of Eurovision in two ways - the first and most obvious way is to just not watch it or engage with it at all. The second is, if you absolutely must watch (which I don’t recommend), to vote for someone like Eden Golan and make it clear that you want to see more acts like her and not Bambi Thug or Nemo.
To conclude, let’s return to the winner, Nemo. I think the odds of us ever hearing about him again are rather slim. So far as I can tell, the last person to win Eurovision and enjoy mainstream, widespread success beyond their home country besides Celine Dion in 1988 was in 2021, when the Italian rock band Måneskin took home the Glass Microphone. Even then, Måneskin was already successful and internationally known, so I’m not sure they count. By and large, the winners of Eurovision, especially as of late, rarely go on to break big abroad. I have my suspicions that Nemo will not be breaking this trend.
But when he was presented the winner’s trophy, the thing broke in his hand within seconds, splitting in half.
Being made of glass, the detached bottom half - much heavier than the top - sliced clean through his hand, resulting in a deep laceration through his thumb and palm that required a delay in the proceedings for medical attention before he could give his victory speech. This is after Bambi Thug crowned him with her wreath of black thorns, which you can see by his leg after it fell off in the image above.
I’m sure that it was an accident caused by a shoddily made trophy that was put together by the lowest bidder. But, at the same time, it’s hard not to see it as something more. There’s a lot of talk about the re-enchantment of the world. A friend and I have made much discussion of returning to what we call a medieval mindset, where we acknowledge that there are forces at work far beyond our understanding, and they interact and communicate with humanity in strange and unorthodox ways.
If there is a message, whether spiritual or simply metaphorical, to be found in the image of a skirt-wearing man, pretending to be some sort of scientifically incongruous third gender, wreathed in a mockery of the divine, nursing a slash across his palm and a ruined thumb - the very appendage that gives us the agency not afforded to most creatures - split open by a shattered trophy bestowed upon him as a reward for his vanity… well, what do you think it might be?
Interestingly, Tito-era Yugoslavia was allowed to participate, since Tito and the Soviets were at loggerheads for most of his reign, and Yugoslavia was a leading member of the Non-Alignment Movement that (nominally) refused to ally with either America or the Soviets.
Just for the record, one of the chief reasons for American society’s agonizingly slow burn-out is the lack of a fika, tea time, siestas, smoko, or any other European concept of chilling the fuck out in the middle of the day.
She was born to Moroccan Berber immigrants to Stockholm. Just in case you were curious.
The second-most important career move in Humperdinck’s career behind providing the music for this scene in Bullet Train, which, if you haven’t seen, click the link and watch now for the best two minutes put to celluloid film since the beginning of the COVID-era.
No? Just me?
I would tag them, but Substack apparently does not like their handle whatsoever. Sorry, Lemon.
I know some will say that we have a duty to save these people, in whatever form or shape or manner that may take. To those people, I will say that your heart is in the right place, but it’s not our job to save them, whether it be from themselves and their own deviant behavior, or something darker and more esoteric. I reckon most of them don’t want to be saved, or even believe that they need to be saved from anything. You can’t rescue someone who doesn’t want to be rescued, and trying to do so will often only result in them dragging you down with them.
All very true. There’s nothing more tiresome than someone trying to be transgressive by poking the corpse of hegemonic cultural Christianity.
I was very on board with this article until you got Karma Chameleon stuck in my head.