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.
Interesting one this year. Israel have brought an obvious winner of a song, but we'll have to see how politics will affect the vote. Croatia are the bookies favourite with what is basically a novelty number. As a personal favourite, I'm going to have to say Armenia, but I don't think they'll do well.
>>14452 I must admit, I was absolutely astounded when Israel got through the semifinal. Who’s been voting for them? Do gays just hate eskimos that much? You’re right that it’s a good song, but so was Poland’s and they didn’t get through.
I really hope Israel get shat on. If they get a sympathy vote I'll be gutted.
Also, Olly Alexander's song is pretty drab. I can't put my finger on why, but I'm really unimpressed with it. I think perhaps it's missing a touch of energy and passion, especially for a song that seems to be about instantly falling for someone.
>>14457 The Dutch entry has been suspended from the final and is currently expected not to perform, due to a backstage “incident” which is believed to relate to his pro-Palestine views. That doesn’t really count as Israel getting “shat on” quite yet, but it’s more than happens most years.
>>14458 I've heard rumours that he might have been provoked by some obscene comments about deceased family members. Though in fairness if someone made some nasty comment about my dead nan, you bet I'm wishing October 7 on their family.
Seems like it's Will Smith and Chris Rock all over again.
>>14460 I think people are considering it a double standard that Russia were disallowed from the competition in 2022 due to the invasion of Ukraine (where presumably the Russian act had nothing to do with the country's military actions); while Israel are allowed to compete despite their military committing war crimes. I suppose you could argue the Russian situation was different, as Ukraine also compete in Eurovision which might have made for bad vibes. Either way, there's precedent for excluding morally questionable nations, and it's up for debate whether excluding Israel this year would be right/wrong.
>>14460 She's representing Israel. Israel is conducting a genocidal war against Gaza and giving an even freer hand than usual to the violent indignities being carried out in the West Bank, which is what you're, currently, representing when you bear the flag of Israel. Besides the fact it coincided with the one year the UK rocked up with a decent song and performer, I didn't begrudge Ukraine their sympathy votes in 2022. Ukraine's win repsresented solidarity and support for a country going through Hell. In comparison Israel's government is threatening the International Criminal Court, it's military has made casualties, dead and injured, out of 1-in-20 Gazans, all while failing to achieve a single stated objective and it's citizens block aid convoys and illegally occupy Palestian lands and homes. The images a few seconds into the video below are what I think about when I see Israel's blue and white flag, and that's the flag Eden Golan is representing, these are the morals and ethics she's representing.
>>14462 Don't you think Eden Golan is a psuedonym to infuriate anti-Zionists? Eden as in the Garden of Eden where YHVH created paradise. Golan as in the Golan Heights which Israel is occupying in their bid to expand. They literally want to create a Garden of Eden in the Golan Heights by winning Eurovision. It's blatant.
So him sitting with a towel on his head during the press conference while Eden Golan was interviewed, and then angrily shouting "Why not?" when she was told she didn't have to answer a question about whether Israel's inclusion in the contest might endanger the safety of the other contestants, must just have been a coincidence.
The Italian coverage accidentally broadcast the results of their national semifinal vote, which they aren't meant to do, and Israel got nearly 40% of the votes while no other country got more than 10%. There is also a conspiracy theory based on the fact that the Eurovision Song Contest's biggest sponsor is Moroccanoil, a hair products company based in, no, not Morocco, but...Israel. So they would certainly not want the Israeli entrant to be banned, and they are in a position where they could put pressure on the organisers.
>>14466 >The Italian coverage accidentally broadcast the results of their national semifinal vote, which they aren't meant to do, and Israel got nearly 40% of the votes
Fuck me, we're getting hasbara'd. What a load of shite. How many kids do you have to kill to get a fucking reaction out of people?
>>14463 It's clearly an arch-Zionist name. I looked to see if it was a stage name, but apparently here grandfather changed his surname, so no, that's not the case. Still, it is a bit like representing the UK and being called John Bull (boy's name) or Ulster Unionist (girl's name).
Russia were excluded from the contest, but it was a hollow gesture - all the Russian broadcasters had withdrawn from the EBU of their own volition, which made Russia ineligible to compete. It was like telling someone that they're sacked when they've already quit.
>>14466 >after an allegation of intimidation was made to Swedish police by a female member of the production crew.
So in short, a bit of casual genocide is fine as long as you're not rude to the stagehands?
>>14467 >I looked to see if it was a stage name, but apparently her grandfather changed his surname, so no
Bloody hell. She has Russian-Israeli citizenship, she lived in Russia for 12 years, only moving out in 2022 after they invaded Ukraine, and in 2016, she performed in occupied Crimea. She really is the enemy of everyone.
>>14468 >all the Russian broadcasters had withdrawn from the EBU of their own volition
That isn't quite how it happened. There were rumours of three Russian members withdrawing, presumably at the direction of the government, but they had not given formal notice of this to the EBU, who then suspended them. At the time of the 2022 contest, they remained suspended, and a few weeks later they were formally expelled and banned, so they won't be able to simply resume their membership if and when relations normalise.
>>14474 Think of the decade or more from childhood to teenager to young adult attending dance lessons, competing with hundreds of others for a place at a prestigious academy then the apotheosis of your career is "churned butter sexily for 3 minutes on stage".
https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/breaking-netherlands-breaks-silence-joost-32787855 >The official page of the Netherlands’ Songfestival, which sends acts to Eurovision Song Contest, has broken its silence on Dutch act Joost Klein being disqualified.
>The[y] have said the incident which led to Joost being disqualified followed the performer being filmed when he had “repeatedly indicated” that he did not want to be.
>Explaining why Eurovision officials have refused to let Joost take part in the final on Saturday, the statement read: “An incident occurred after last Thursday’s performance. Against clearly made agreements, Joost was filmed when he had just gotten off stage and had to rush to the greenroom.
>"At that moment, Joost repeatedly indicated that he did not want to be filmed. This wasn’t respected. This led to a threatening movement from Joost towards the camera. Joost did not touch the camera woman.
I guess the Dutch Eurovision crew aren't the most impartial source, but if they're telling the truth, that's completely mental. He probably is a bit of a wonky-minded guy (a bloo bloo bloo, don't film me after my performance, waaah - and that's before we get to the fact he seemingly performs with his eyes shut) but how threatening can a gesture really be? Did he Force-strangle her like Darth Vader?
>>14480 It sounded better alive and it got a big reaction from the live audience, I think. The latter might just be because the Anglo-Saxon massive has traveled in force, I don't know.
>>14481 I imagine that was because it was a very homoerotic performance, which would go down very well with the type of people who'll watch it live. I think Finland are my new number one.
Called it. It's Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One again, fucking Hell.
Also as a certified HELL ENJOYER I'm forced to choose Ireland at number one, with Switzerland second and Estonia third.
Also this is what the Guardian's liveblog-bod said about Finland's entry, I can't make head's or tail's of it:
>I hate this. It’s like 2024-era Ricky Gervais doing a Eurovision entry and then going “Ooooo I’m so edgy they wouldn’t let me have the Windows logo and I’ve put a load of burden on everybody else around me in the staging for my genitals not to appear on live TV”. I absolutely loathe it. It will no doubt do well with edgelords.
>>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.
