It's that time of year again, when I wonder if either of you two watch Eurovision or if it's just me. The 2024 contest will be in Sweden again, which means it will be presented by the glorious goddess Petra Mede.
My favourite of the songs I've heard so far this year is Austria. It's extremely generic, like someone wrote a checklist of everything that's amazing and put it all into one song:
The Dutch entry is generating a bit of buzz as a potential winner; it's the same as Austria's but infinitely wackier:
By all means, post Eurovision songs from previous years as well if you have any favourites.
>>14487 It was looking like a they/them 1-2 at one point, but the shit enbie has fallen down the rankings currently. The juries really, really like Switzerland, which is worrying because I suspect the audience will too and perhaps we don't need to watch the rest of the results.
I oppose Israel's entry as much as anyone (almost), but the crowd booing every country who gives Israel points is a bit lame. And why are they booing the results man? Did they just not like the interval song he got?
Massive showing for the enbies this year. And Graham Norton keeps calling the Swiss contestant "he"! I assume he's going to get eaten alive by Twitter dick-snippers.
Next year's contest will all be pronoun people. And it'll be in Switzerland too. I am not especially optimistic about that one.
I love how you tolerant leftists worship Islamist psychopaths who rape and murder teenage girls and throw gays off rooftops. Have fun at your weekly Jihadi march today?
>>14492 Strange how you pretend to care about the lives of LGBT Palestians when they're being brutalised by Islamists, but when it's Israeli bombs doing to slaughtering it's no big deal? I suspect you don't care about the lives of Palestians in any context, and that you are, in fact, a gormless, bloodthirsty, oaf of a "man" who wouldn't toss a penny to a beggar if he'd just won the lottery, such is your lack of humanity.
The Hamas attack on Israel of was abhorrant. Their idea that it would spark fullscale war with Israel by it's allies Iran and Hezbollah was delusional. However, that doesn't justify Israel's subsequent campaign of genocide in Gaza. A campaign who's unstated yet transparently clear aim is surely to make Gaza so unlivable that the pre-war population are forced to leave. No publically stated Israeli objective looks realistic. It drops bombs on areas that must surely contain it's own kidnapped citizens, of whom it has recovered a mean average of one a month since October, Hamas is badly bloodied but nowhere near destruction and Israelis at home are no safer now than they were in October 2023. I don't see how giving Netenyahu any more time to pick through the rubble and bodies of Gaza change any of this, but feel free to correct me on this, if you can.
I'm completely irreligious and worship noone. However, I take a firm stance against the mass death and destruction carried out by Israel, and especially when it is endorsed by my own government. That's support isn't something Western governments offer to the likes of the Sudanese Armed Forces or the RSF, nor the gang's who've brought Haiti to it's knees and certainly not the revanchist Russians. Russians, it's worth noting, who are making hay of the fact that Europe and especially the US are giving the great majority of their foreign policy time and effort to Israel, all while Ukraine loses more and more territory every day now.
Now, go boil your head, you daft prick.
>>14493 Brave enough to revel in the deaths of thousands of Palestian children, not brave enough to tell someone on the internet to sod off. What a contradiction your life must be.
Anyway, here's the winner since it hasn't been posted yet. It has opera singing and excellent staging, so I can't complain too much; I just don't respect nonbinaryism and this singer has been trying to include it at every possible opportunity. I freely acknowledge that my own prejudice makes me like it less than I otherwise would.
Why don't you do yourself a favour and set yourself on fire for "glorious Jihad" if you care about it that strongly, I am sick and tired of lefty spastics constantly screeching about "muh genoside in Gazza!!1" when they couldn't give a fuck about actual genocides in Armenia, the Chinese genocide of Uighyurs, Saudis murdering people in Yemen...almost as if killing is only bad when "da jooz" do it.
I hope Israel glasses the shit out your beloved Palestine and Hamas are wiped off the face of the earth, along with the smug posh lefty pricks who cheerlead for them.
>>14498 I was >>14491 but not >>14492, so I’m afraid you are mistaken. And I wrote my comment because I am not aware of any openly non-binary acts in any previous Eurovision Song Contests, and now we have two, and it looks like a recipe for success. Lots of acts wore elaborate costumes the year after Lordi won, for example.
>>14499 >>14501 I've (>>14494) been out walking the Staffordshire countryside all morning, so you've not spoken to me at all today so far.
However, I'm glad you mentioned Armenia. I have a distinct memory of that being one the first things I brought up when speaking with a pal of mine not long after the October 7th attacks. My point being that noone had really raised much of a fuss when the Azeris had expelled thousands of Armenians just months earlier, and that it wasn't inconceivable that the same thing could happen to the Gazans now. Clearly it hasn't quite gone that way, but nevertheless there has been a muted reaction to the chaos and slaughter from most senior politicians.
As for the Saudis I've got no time for them. Not only has their conduct of the war in Yemen been true to the modern Arab way of warfighting, that is to say recklessly incompotent, but last year it was reported that they had used mortars to attack migrants: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-66545787 And besides even that there's the myriad domestic issues from the rights of women and minority groups, not to mention a recent news story from the BBC about the use of lethal force to make way for the government's pie in the sky city building projects: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68945445
Regarding what's happening to the Uighyurs it's undoubtably vile and cruel. However, I'm rather less informed on it, maybe due to the scarcity of English langauge sources, I couldn't say. What I would say is that it seems strange for you to pick and choose which specific eskimo population's rights you care about being violated. It seems it only matters to you when it fits into a wider political context you can use to piss and moan about something, or rather someone. As, I would assume anyway, that eskimos living the remote the Xinjiang province are probably at bit more, shall we say, nineteen-eighties in their worldviews than most Western Europeans. However, I wouldn't for a moment suggest herding them like cattle into special camps is an appropriate response to that. It appears like you would agree, but if the Chinese government started bombing them en-masse that would be okay? Because of their regressive social attitudes? I don't know, I find your point here difficult to fathom.
As for allegations of me being "posh" the £8.50 I have in my bank account should put pay to suggestion. And nothing else, I might add. But perhaps I'm mistaken and the Tories have opened up the threshold for being "posh" in attempt to expand their voting bloc, not unlike how the Emperor Commodus once opened up Roman citizenship to expand his taxable population. He was a mental cunt who everyone hated as well.
But back on topic, you can hope Hamas are wiped out all you like. That doesn't seem remotely close to happening though, even with the great mass of HE munitions Israel have launched into Gaza. If it did seem a likely outcome you could make an argument about the neccesity of the carnage inflicted, but it simply isn't the reality on the ground. Recent experiences of Western militaries in Iraq and Afghanistan tell us these "shock and awe" tactics will likely lead to more young men being radicalised, swiftly becoming willing fighters against the invading and occupying forces. Any suggestion that the IDF are fighting to bring the hostages home isn't even worth addressing by now, as that claim rings hollow even on the streets of Tel Aviv.
Look, I could keep landing body blows on you all day over this. I could bring up the absurdity that the UN is in cahoots with Islamists and mention that even Joe Biden, a lifelong supporter of Zionism, is uneasy with Israel's actions. I could go into why Netenyahu is only continuing the war to save his own politican career, attempting to drag out the conflict so that people forget how much he's to blame for October 7th. I could even ask why the West Bank is suffering so much more right now, despite being completely insulated from Hamas. However, it's not worth it, because you don't want to learn or think or second guess yourself, you just want to piss and moan and whinge. But if that's all you want to do, please, have some decency and try to do it about the little things, not the ruination of lives and the obliteration of innocents that's happening right now in Gaza. It's creepy, it's undignified and it's deeply unpleasant.
>>14507 The key difference with the Armenians is that they were the ones doing the occupying, rather than being occupied. Apart from trying to open up a corridor to Nakhchivan, which is that bit of Azerbaijan on the other side of Armenia, and the odd border skirmish, the Azeris haven't AFAIK been attacking Armenia proper.
Speaking of Armenia, I might be going on a date with an Armenian lass soon. I know nothing about her country other than they had the world's third most famous genocide, so it'll be pretty easy for me to trick her into doing all the talking and not make myself look bad; and she's an anti-idpol communist, which greatly impressed me because I genuinely never thought I would meet a woman to whom that description applies.
Has classlad found his soulmate at long last? Place your bets.
>>14527 You might be wrong on the Kebabs. Every Armenian I've met in the UK studied in Istanbul and had family (via marriage) in Turkey and Northern Cyprus. It might be partly an economic pull but I think most people just don't really have the energy for it.
I like how Eurovision, a contest about putting all that shit behind us, invariably goes political after 5 minutes. They should just let songs be political and then we can have drag-queen fights on stage.
I watched the first Eurovision semifinal just now, and my three favourite songs were all ones which were intensely reminiscent of dance music from around the year 2000: Belgium, San Marino and Cyprus. I love dance music from around the year 2000, but Belgium and Cyprus did not even make it through to the final. What a bloody disgrace.
And in the second semifinal, tonight, my beloved Ireland didn't go through. Probably because it was too weird. It's a song about Laika the space dog, so automatically unimaginably sad, but in the song Laika stays alive and has a big party on her spaceship. I like big and adventurous ideas, but this upbeat disco anthem is undeniably very jarring to listen to.
Also, the woman has a very weedy voice, which can't have helped her chances. Certainly the other weird songs from Latvia and Lithuania went through to the final, to the shock of everyone. And Israel qualified, like they did last year, so perhaps we will have huge amounts of angry and vitriolic booing again on Saturday.
>>15268 >And Israel qualified, like they did last year, so perhaps we will have huge amounts of angry and vitriolic booing again on Saturday.
That's the hope.
>>15275 We need to sort out our own selection process. Italy makes an event of it arguably bigger than Eurovision itself while we consistently select the worst acts possible.
>>15276 I can kind of see why someone thought last year's UK entry might do okay, but I am at a loss to explain Remember Monday. We're the nation that gave the world Brat summer, and no one seems to remember Sam Ryder.
>>15277 >We're the nation that gave the world Brat summer
I'm confused, is that meant to be a good thing? Is that meant to be some kind of benchmark of good pop music?
As far as I can tell that album struck gold by resonating exactly the right kind of vibe to make a specific demographic of annoying prick 29 year old girls on Twitter embrace it as a central part of their identity. That's the kind of beyond merely music cultural sniper shot it's hard to drum up in a Eurovision entry.
Brat was only outsold by Taylor Swift's album, which no one actually cared about, and was critically aclaimed the world over. I've ranted before about how it was the battle of Austerliz (I wrote that before they started singing Waterloo btw) for PC Music, and that sound is chock-full of Brits. This was my wider point, that the sound that conquered pop music last year was fundementally a British one, and that shite that sounds like it was reheated from 2012's most unremembered list, IE, Remember Monday, is a poor showing from us. I'm not saying we should just Do Brat At Eurovision, because Danny L Harle worked on last year's entry and it was a bit shit. What I am saying is that we can make a big, Eurovision-style song that has a distinct identity.
And if you think So I is a bad song you might be dead inside, soz.
You can tell when the crowd is booing the jury votes because the cameras cut directly to the artist's reaction. Lithuania just gave 12 very predictable points to Latvia and there were no crowd shots, because it's just good-neighbour guff that almost ignores the songs themselves. Latvia was very interesting, being basically Enya, but I couldn't bring myself to vote for it.
As it happens, I gave two votes to Luxembourg, two to Austria, one to San Marino and one to Germany.
>>15291 I don't want to go all /pol/ (the 4chan one) and say that Austria has saved Europe, but it definitely saved Eurovision. They'd have been able to fill their arena easily with Israeli Eurovision fans, but so many acts would boycott it that the whole experience would be abysmal.
So that's now two years in a row where an operatic song has won it. Meanwhile, Estonia's opera song from a few years ago (seven, it turns out! Good God!) continues to be inexplicably overlooked. La Forza would obliterate any song in this year's contest, but in 2018, it only came eighth. And it was beautifully staged as well:
>>15292 I have seen it pointed out that Kaarija ends the performance by shouting, "Europapa!", which is of course the song that got banned last year. There's probably quite a lot to read into that if you were that way inclined.
