no one asked for this, pt. 1

a eurovision preview extravaganza

Apr 22, 2024

This piece is incredibly long, so I made an audio version too! Very poorly produced but *does* include the full music tracks :)

It’s embarrassing to say that any piece of media saved your life, but it’s hard to find a particular example worse than Eurovision. The annual European song contest is a garish, useless and silly institution. It’s a strange, mass-culture glitter machine spewing soft power anthems, and presents a strained vision of rainbow globalism dressed up in down-the-middle dance music. It’s objectively bizarre to a U.S. audience, and my conversations around it tend to result in blank stares and clipped apologies. But due to fate, misfortune, or some low-grade cognitive decline, I’m obsessed with it despite – or perhaps due to – its flaws.

Here’s a pitch for the American and uninitiated: imagine if the Super Bowl halftime show totaled 8+ hours, was only partially in English, didn’t include any recognizable celebrities (except Madonna, once, and Flo Rida, briefly), and also featured a dark current of intra-European politics and corporate media jockeying. Imagine removing all the signifiers associated with pop music from pop stars themselves, creating king-for-a-day mega-productions from artists who will never be heard from again. Does that not sound like the pinnacle of entertainment? Why are you leaving? No, wait, come back! Don’t you want to have something like this stuck in your head for the next six months?

Okay, I’ll admit that trying to explain the joys of Eurovision in logical terms is a fool’s errand. It can be simultaneously enjoyed as a Cocomelon-level rush of pure stimulation and a postmodern deconstruction of music itself, a showbiz spectacle and the battlefield for shadow-puppet proxy wars. It has highs, lows, and more fog machines than should ever be allowed in polite society. The semi-finals kick off in Malmö, Sweden on Tuesday, May 7, and I highly recommend jumping on the bandwagon. But in order to get the full experience, some homework is required. If you need a guide – an arbiter of taste for the contest that has none – I think I’m up to the challenge.

Here it is: a three-part series that attempts to a) act as a primer for ESC newbies, b) run through this year’s songs, and c) tease out my own relationship with the contest – something that I am still a bit baffled by.

Each issue will cover about a dozen entries, sorted alphabetically (this time, we’ve got Albania through France), and feature a big honkin’ essay to provide further context. I haven’t written the other two yet, but god willing, they’ll be shorter than this one. An audio version is also available on Spotify through their soon-to-be-obsolete Music + Talk format, so enjoy it while you can.

Since this is the internet and everyone’s supposed to be an expert, I’ll start with a disclaimer: there are plenty of Eurovision scholars and data nerds out there. I’m not one of them. On a scale of 1-10, I hover around a 6: devoted enough to confuse most (straight) Americans, barely literate compared to the rest of the world. My fandom comes from the heart rather than the head – maybe the genitals a little bit too. Basically, I have no critical authority and you have no reason to trust anything I say.

But one of the unique delights of the contest, at least from a continental remove, is that the rules of criticism don’t really apply. A country doesn’t win by bringing the best act. It wins by playing the goddamn game. Eurovision reduces music and stagecraft to pieces on the world’s most convoluted, heavily-sequined chessboard. Any definition of “good” art gets thrown out the window, replaced with a matrix of popular opinion, running order, linguistic choices, stage gimmicks and the all-important ratio of camp to kitsch. And sometimes – some glorious times – an actually good song makes it through.

probs the most famous ESC acts on the US market: ABBA, a very young Celine Dion and, regrettably, Måneskin

Please, do not interpret this as another American taking cheap shots at what other critics have called the musical equivalent of a malarial infection and “the Cheeseball Olympics of pop music.”

As I said before, I am obsessed with the brazen cornball energy of the Eurovision Song Contest. The discovery and eventual embrace of it changed my life for the better, providing the inane soundtrack to a deeply turbulent period and offering a way forward. I might write up that story in a subsequent issue, but frankly, I’m still trying to make sense of it myself.

The point is that I love this shit, or at least am consistently fascinated by it, which might be the same thing. Still, I feel the need to disown and downplay my delight at every turn. I spent the first 500 words of this essay doing my best impression of a silver-tongued hater. I stand by all of the points made about the essential stupidity and conservatism of the contest, and I’m actively counting down the days until it begins. It’s vulnerable and terrifying to love something in public. I suspect the impulse to keep raw enjoyment at arm’s length reveals something about my home nation’s fucked-up relationship to taste. But I’ll cover that next week. Fair warning, though – the Bourdieu PDFs are locked and loaded.

Now that I’ve explained myself a bit, I’ll try to explain Eurovision. Feel free to scroll to the song review sections if you’re already well-versed.

At the most basic level, the Eurovision Song Contest is an annual televised competition that’s been organized by the European Broadcasting Union (an alliance of public-broadcast channels that’s not associated with the EU) since 1956. According to the EBU, it was founded to “bring Europe together” in good-natured competition after World War II. It’s intended to be entirely nonpolitical, but since it’s literally a contest between nations, that standard has proven a bit tough to uphold. We’ll cover that in a sec. First, more logistics:

Every participating broadcaster sends an original song, three minutes or less, to be performed live. How this song is picked is up to them: some countries have televised national finals that ladder up to the contest, and others opt for internal selection. Once the national representatives are chosen, they set out for the host city for the most wind machine-laden week of their lives. All of them hope to return to their home country with a giant, microphone-shaped trophy and the honor of hosting the next year’s contest. Well, not all of them. Some countries allegedly tank their own chances of winning because they don’t want the hassle of hosting the following year, even though the champion does have the option of forfeiting hosting duties. Germany is accused of this a lot, because its entries are consistently terrible – a next-level cope if I’ve ever heard one. But no matter what result the delegation is aiming for, they’ll need to go through hell – or at least three nights of broadcast television programming – to get there.

There are two semi-finals, held on a Tuesday and Thursday. All countries – this year, there are 37 – perform in the semis. A public vote whittles the field down to 24 for Saturday’s grand final. Most years, the “big 5” (UK, Germany, Spain, France and Italy) and the host country skip the semis because their national broadcasters significantly contribute to the telecast’s operating budget. This year, that’s not the case. The big 5 will be performing in the midweek shows – though they’re still guaranteed a spot on Saturday.

The grand final has a borderline-dadaist voting system that combines an American Idol-style televote with the opinions of appointed national juries. The two voting bodies for each country award 1 through 8, 10 and 12 points to their favorite songs, and both the public and jury votes are totalled up to determine that year’s champion. There are obvious rifts between the taste of the juries (old fashioned ballads with serious subject matter, the Oscar-bait of Eurovision) and that of the public (shit like this).

A few things to keep in mind: in both the jury and public vote, as the hosts remind us frequently, countries cannot vote for themselves. They can, however, vote for all of their geographic neighbors and political allies, which has led to decades-long voting patterns based on physical proximity and immigration trends. Allegations of bloc voting actually led to the creation of the current jury system; in 2008, western European countries complained that they were being unfairly beaten out by their former-Soviet neighbors and insisted on adding a more “impartial” layer of judges to counteract any deliberate vote-pooling. In reality, the western nations’ songs just sucked at that point, and xenophobia runs deep! But again, this contest is not political, supposedly.

The voting structure creates what I call the Who’s Line Is It Anyway effect, where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter. The fact that it’s tweaked every year only adds to the confusion. If it’s your first ESC experience, just remember that the broadcasting companies take it incredibly seriously.

Why? Well, because winning is good and people like doing it. Also, the winning country gets to host the next year’s contest, which can add the equivalent of about one billion U.S. dollars to its tourism business and – especially for non-EU participants – signal a level of acceptance into the “Western world” that may have felt out of reach beforehand. This study showed that people tend to feel more satisfied with their lives when their country ranks highly in Eurovision. I suspect this is more of a correlation than a causal relationship, and the authors state the same, saying that “ESC success could be a proxy of favourable socioeconomic conditions, which in turn can create ‘Euphoria’ (Sweden 2012) and positively influence life satisfaction and mental health.” There are song-based puns throughout the whole study – highly rec. They go on to say that “performance in the contest may be perceived as a judgment – by an international audience – of nationally defining characteristics, which are commonly part of the performance, even if they are sometimes hidden behind glitter and cheeky ‘Wild Dances’ (Ukraine 2004).”

This touches on another key aspect of Eurovision: national branding. For emerging or politically-embattled countries, a good showing at the contest can act as a marker of genuine progress – or a cynical distraction from unsavory realities.

for instance, they’re trying to distract us from their plan to kill swedish prime minister olof palme

For example, after Azerbaijan won in 2011, the country jumped at the opportunity to subvert its undemocratic, politically repressive image. The Aliyev regime freed high-profile political prisoners and kickstarted construction on a new stadium in Baku by forcibly evicting dozens of residents. When dissent rose, the Azeri authorities cracked down on protesters, journalists and NGOs – basically committing more human rights violations in order to show the rest of Europe just how tolerant and open their country was. Not political!

Let’s get back to the music, though. When I first approached the contest, I thought I had a decent idea of what a “standard” entry sounded like – a soaring, major-key ballad with lyrics vaguely gesturing toward love and peace and a chorus that gets stuck in your head after half of a listen. Basically, the song from the Will Ferrell movie, with varying amounts of Eiffel 65 mixed in. That’s not quite right. While those peace-love-fjord weepers and straightforward Eurodance tracks still show up, the assumption that they will succeed is a bit antiquated. The contest has gotten more self-aware in recent years, and the question of what a Eurovision winner should sound like is a surprisingly open one. In my opinion, most contemporary entries can be slotted into one of five categories:

The Swedish Bulldozer

A hooky, electronic pop song bolstered by 4,000 songwriters and a gigantic stage budget. Of the Eurovision archetypes, this one sounds most akin to American pop music, with an icy precision that’s unique to the Swedes and a charming dedication to meaningless English lyrics (“I’m taking it cool,” etc.). Sweden’s undeniable knack for pop music, both inside and outside of the contest, means that this type of song is usually held as the gold standard – to many fans’ chagrin. On the one hand, these songs are bops. On the other, they seem overly tuned to an Anglo audience, and can feel a bit boring and mechanical as a result.

The Genre-Mixing Novelty

Entries that turn the camp dial up to 1000, usually integrating surprising genre and linguistic elements along the way. Last year’s great rivalry was between Sweden, which brought a self-serious Bulldozer, and Finland, which offered up a rap metal-meets-hyperpop, Finnish-language sugar rush that featured demonic ballroom dancers and Human Centipede-inspired choreo. The contrast was…notable, and when “Cha Cha Cha” overwhelmingly won the popular vote (not to mention my heart), it seemed to indicate a broad appetite for weirder alternatives to Sweden’s brand of manicured perfection. Copycat entries are inevitable this year, but honestly, they’re so entertaining that I don’t mind.

Dua Lipa Reject

I’m doing this genre dirty by inserting Poland’s universally-despised entry here, but in my opinion, these songs are the true villains of Eurovision (other than Israel, but we’ll get to that). They’re just as synthetic as the Swedish Bulldozers, rendered with about 60 percent of the skill, and are usually accompanied by music videos that double as tourism advertisements. This is a go-to sound for countries that seem to have run through their entire musically-inclined population already, and maybe the only artistic product that would be made better by AI.

Old-Fashioned Chanson

These are the tooth-gnashing, key-change-laden relics of mid-century Eurovision, generally delivered by frowning, painfully handsome gay men. France and Italy love sending these, and grandmothers across Europe love voting for them. They’re hardly innovative, but they’re also not trying to be, and they usually opt for simple staging that places the vocal performance front and center. If your eyes aren't a little bit misty after one of these things, you need to get your vitals and/or SSRI prescriptions checked.

Ethno-Bop

Songs that blend traditional instruments, vocal techniques and/or melodies with modern production technology. There’s a big spectrum to this genre – last year’s Moldovan entry laid the ancient pagan imagery on thick, almost to the point of self-parody (“dense leaf forest/I think I’ve found my bride”), but more forward-looking entries like Czechia’s used folk aesthetics to comment on current issues in their nation or region. On a musical level, my mileage varies on these, but they’re intriguing conceptually, and expose my brain-dead American ears to sonic palettes I’m unlikely to encounter otherwise.

There are other, more minor strains that run through the contest: the war-torn resistance song, the Måneskin clone, the indie pop bauble, the Portuguese, etc. But those are the biggies, in my humble opinion. When digesting a Eurovision song – and we are going to digest a lot of them – it might be useful to think about what genre it fits in, and what its subsequent performance says about the contest’s current values.

Speaking of values…let’s talk about Israel. Its inclusion in the contest has been questionable since it began participating in 1973, but this year, it casts a particularly dark shadow for obvious reasons.

I want to state this in no uncertain terms: by allowing Israel to compete, the EBU is cosigning genocide. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it took one day to boot them from the contest due to protests from other national broadcasters. Six months have passed since Israel launched its scorched-earth offensive in the Gaza Strip, more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, and no similar move has been made. The comparison between these two situations is not perfect, and I could spend another 1000 words running through the nuances. But the contrast between these two reactions speaks volumes about which lives are valued in the Western world, and which are all-too-easily cast aside.

Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, has a distinct history of using Eurovision to legitimize the country in the eyes of Europe and distract from its humanitarian record. For example, when Kan produced 2019’s contest in Tel Aviv, it included footage of illegally-occupied Palestinian territories in tourism sizzle reels, making no mention of their contested status. One could make the argument that this is par for the course at Eurovision – see the Azerbaijan example above, or honestly, the actions of Azerbaijan over the last year. But in this case, the branding attempts feel particularly egregious.

Many activist groups have called for a boycott of the contest, in line with the larger boycott of Israeli exports, in order to prevent the country from “artwashing” their attacks in front of millions. I considered boycotting, as well. Honestly, I don’t think anyone who supports Palestine can fully justify watching this year, considering Israel’s participation. I’m not going to pretend that continuing to watch is somehow the right thing to do. It’s probably not. But I’m choosing to minimize the damage by watching critically, downplaying Israel’s involvement as much as possible, and resisting any attempt to distract or rebrand the assault on Palestine – in addition to taking actual, non-ESC-related action on a daily and weekly basis. For that reason, Israel’s entry will not be included in these roundups. I’m not claiming that my “platform” (ew) is somehow important – I know it’s not – but I feel it’s the least I can do.

Okay, sorry for this massive intro. Eurovision may be tacky, grating or straight-up evil, but it is never, ever boring!

🇦🇱 ALBANIA - BESA, Titan

Type: Dua Lipa Reject sun, Swedish Bulldozer moon, Enthno-Bop rising

My Very Objective Score: ⭐

Wish I loved anything as much as Albania loves a knockout female vocal and a red-and-black color scheme. I don’t hate this song, but I am saddened by the fact that it was reworked into English after the Albanian-language original, “Zemrën n'dorë,” won the country’s national final. The new version is slicker and will translate to a better stage performance (nixing the string section was a good idea), but it sounds like a latter-day Sia track made exclusively for H&M dressing rooms. The original wasn’t great, but it at least sounded Albanian. This feels formulaic and is unlikely to stand out against a whole crop of mid-tempo female-empowerment ballads. I do appreciate BESA’s horse girl schtick, though. While live animals are not allowed at the contest, they don’t have any rules against War Horse-style puppets! Just an idea, Albania. Call me.

🇦🇲 ARMENIA - Ladaniva, Jako

Type: Ethno-Bop

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐

As a tax-paying resident of Glendale, California, with not one but two Armenian-language preschools on my block, I do worry that a decapitated pig’s head will show up on my doorstep if I say anything bad about this entry. I’m writing this on my porch, and the black Escalade driving past seems to be moving awfully slow…but I’ll be brave. I like the vision here – a high-energy folk melody with Armenian-language lyrics about being a loud, unapologetic woman in a traditional culture. In concept, it slays, and Ladaniva’s lead singer Jaklin Baghdasaryan will probably bring the house down in the live show. But something’s missing sonically. To my ear, the folk music and electro-pop elements fail to cohere as much as I want them to. By the sixth round of “la lai la lai la,” it starts to feel like you’re 4 minutes into a bar mitzvah hora and wish they’d turn on “Party Rock Anthem” again. I’d look to Russia’s 2021 entry as an example of what the Armenian delegation seems to be shooting for. Ultimately, they miss the mark. But again, I fuck with the vision! And I’ll do 5 hail marys at Mini Kabob as penance.

🇦🇹 AUSTRIA - Kaleen, We Will Rave

Type: Swedish Bulldozer sun, Dua Lipa Reject moon

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐

Remember “Planet of the Bass?” Well, after their Edgar Allen Poe tribute act failed to live up to expectations, Austria seemed to take that video as a template for 2024. There’s a touch of Fame-era Gaga and early Ke$ha in Kaleen’s stage presence, and her hard-partying aesthetic and slight vocal snarl add some grit to an otherwise straightforward dance track. She obviously knows what she’s doing performance-wise – she’s been a backup dancer, choreographer and creative director for major acts since 2018. But there’s only so much that I can say about a song that spends 75 percent of its runtime repeating the line “when the darkness comes and we can’t be saved, we rum-di-dum-da we will rave.” Delightfully brainless.

🇦🇺 AUSTRALIA - Electric Fields, One Milkali

Type: OTHER (Renaissance-core)

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐⭐

Let’s get it out of the way – it’s weird that Australia is in the contest when it’s 8,700 miles (sorry, 14,000 kilometers) from mainland Europe. No, it doesn’t make sense, and yes, British imperialism is involved. But after being vaulted into the heavens by Electric Fields’ 90s-inspired house track, I can forgive all that. Okay, maybe not the imperialism part. Also, I’m not going to let them off the hook for “spill the tea on reality.” On the most cynical read, this song borders on RuPaul contestant-core, but the combination of the metaphysical lyrics (“we kiss and matter dismantles,” a mention of the golden ratio), Zaachariaha Fielding's laser-focused vocals and representation of Aboriginal culture via the Yankunytjatjara language (only spoken by 600 people!) makes up the difference. There’s also a didgeridoo sample somewhere in there, which rocks. My initial notes read: “excellent in a “Disney closing credits” kind of way,” and I stand by that. I’ve probably listened to this one of my own accord more than anything else in the batch.

🇦🇿 AZERBAIJAN - FAHREE ft. Ilkin Dovlatov, Özünle Apar

Type: Ethno-Bop sun, Old-Fashioned Chanson moon

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐

I lied in the last entry. Of the 13 songs here, this is the one I’ve listened to most, but not because I like it. I find it really confusing. It starts as a standard, R&B-inflected pop ballad – something left on The Weeknd’s hard drive in 2015 – and then kicks into a soaring Azeri-language chorus about a minute in. The pre-chorus is gorgeous, and FAHREE’s voice has this moaning, hypnotic quality that scratches a very specific groove of my brain. But it kind of falls apart after that, with a sudden handover to mustachioed mugham singer Ilkin Dovlatov and an overemphasis on a swelling B-movie string section. I think staging could make or break this one’s chances of moving to the finals, and Azerbaijan’s track record there isn’t great. Dovlatov’s dramatic entrance is funny in the music video, but I don’t think it’s on purpose, and the two performers come off like oil and water in the live footage that’s currently available. The only solution I can think of is making them kiss, but I doubt the Azeri government would be cool with that.

🇧🇪 BELGIUM - Mustii, Before the Party’s Over

Type: Swedish Bulldozer (derogatory)

My Very Objective Score: ⭐

Gay Imagine Dragons. I’m sorry! Takes forever to get going and feels like it’s the wrong tempo the entire time. Sounds like it was written for a Bond movie about 007 getting stuck in a casino-based polycule, and rejected for being too on-the-nose. Maybe I’ll eat my words when I see the live production, but I hate this song, I hate his dumb little hood, and I really hope he doesn’t bring the humping-the-stage thing to the live show. Next.

🇭🇷 CROATIA - Baby Lasagna, Rim Tim Tagi Dim

Type: Genre-Mixing Novelty sun, Ethno-Bop moon

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐

This song has been at the top of the betting odds for most of the season. It was recently knocked off by Switzerland, but still holds an 18 percent chance of winning, according to the bookies. I’ll be honest – I don’t understand why it’s been so dominant. To me, it feels like a sanded-down Käärijä clone. If the buzzing metalcore instrumentals aren’t enough, the puffy sleeves make the comparison obvious, and it even follows the same basic narrative as “Cha Cha Cha”: man is stressed, man drinks, man loses his inhibitions and dances away the pain. The message is a bit more family-friendly here; rather than blacking out on piña coladas after a long week, Mr. Lasagna is having one last night in his hometown before he leaves to become a “city boy.” It’s a sweet concept, and has more depth than meets the eye. Lasagna (real name: Marko Purišić) was inspired by seeing many young Croatians leave the country for better jobs, and somehow, he does express the fear of being complicit in national brain drain without sacrificing fun. The lyrics feel a little too self-consciously memeable to truly recreate the lightning-in-a-bottle chaos that made “Cha Cha Cha” so special, though, and based on the existing live footage, Lasagna seems to lack the charisma and savvy staging of his Finnish forefather.

🇨🇾 CYPRUS - Silia Kapsis, Liar

Type: Dua Lipa Reject sun, Swedish Bulldozer moon

My Very Objective Score: ⭐

No one can say that Cyprus doesn’t try. Ever since the country came in second in 2018, they’ve been deploying the standard ESC strategies with increasing desperation. Last year, the delegation shelled out for a track from Jimmy “Joker” Thörnfeldt, the superproducer who also wrote Sweden’s winning entry, and hired an Australian Nick Jonas look-alike to wail inside a literal ring of fire. This pushed them into 12th place in the grand final, which seemed to cause them to employ the exact same strategy this year – at a lower price point. They hired a 17-year-old Nickelodeon star, also from Australia, which will mark the sixth year in a row that a non-Cypriot represents the country. And they saddled this poor girlie with a song that’s been kicked around the ESC world for a few years, written by Thornfeldt’s K-Mart equivalent, Dimitris Kontopoulos. Here's the demo that was almost sent by Greece in 2023, and there’s some proof that the song showed up in Russia’s national final right before they were booted from the EBU for invading Ukraine – see, this shit runs deep! It’s an eminently bland DJ Snake ripoff, complete with flatulent bass blasts and a music video featuring a young woman staring at a pile of almonds, which is supposed to say something about feminism. Staging will almost certainly feature a big dance break, and I will almost certainly end up lip-syncing it to myself in a bathroom mirror at some point this summer. I am only human. It’s still a shitty song.

🇨🇿 CZECHIA - Aiko, Pedestal

Type: OTHER (Rodrigocore)

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐

One of my favorite elements of Eurovision is the ways that it reflects the larger movements in global pop. Whenever a new superstar shows up, a few delegations try their hand at riding the trend. The mid-2000s were packed with Gaga wannabes, and the Billie Eilish clones started showing up around 2018, bringing a handful of whispery, minimalist entries with them. This time, it seems like Olivia Rodrigo opened the door for Aiko’s raucous, scuzzed-out power pop, which gives the song’s self-love message a rabid energy that sets it apart from this year’s other girl-power entries. This is the kind of song that I might choose to listen to outside of the ESC context, which means it won’t score well, and I’m tentatively excited about the staged version here. While Aiko’s punky femininity will be a welcome respite from the parade of latter-day Bebe Rexhas, her live vocals have been inconsistent (to put it kindly), and I wouldn’t be too surprised if she biffs it in the semi and is never heard from again.

🇩🇰 DENMARK - Saba, Sand

Type: Swedish Bulldozer

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐

Very brave of Denmark to send a song whose chorus is mostly the word “SAND!” in the Year of our Lisan al Gaib Paul Atreides. This has to be on purpose, right? Maybe the real thing SABA doesn’t see coming was Paul’s choice to marry Princess Irulan, and the real thing slipping through her hands was her faith in him as the Kwisatz Haderach. Honestly, imagining this song as sneaky Dune fanfiction is more engaging than listening to the song itself. “Sand” is competent and well-sung, but will likely be forgotten – unless the Danish delegation fully commits and puts SABA in a 30-foot version of the AMC popcorn bucket.

🇪🇪 ESTONIA - 5MIINUST x Puuluup, (nendest) narkootikumidest ei tea me (küll) midagi

Type: Genre-Mixing Novelty sun, Ethno-Bop moon

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐⭐

A couple of things to note off the top. One, the title translates to “we (really) don’t know anything about (these) drugs,” which is a masterclass in parenthetical comedy. Two, I think the talharpa part here qualifies as ska? Listen to those first 15 seconds and tell me you couldn’t skank to it. An entire doctoral thesis has been written on post-Soviet Estonia’s use of Eurovision to define itself as a singular nation; by that measure, it seems like they have reached the stage of nation-building where they can get a little silly with it. Here, we’ve got four Estonian rappers telling an imaginary policeman that they, well, (really) don’t know anything about (these) drugs, and that they can’t be drug users because they’re too broke. My favorite poorly-translated lyric: “Intoxicating substances we avoid ‘cause we’re not rich/In the backroom of the hut, there are only IPAs on the table.” The combo of subject-matter silliness, folk-music aesthetics and an all-too-memorable (and very skank-adjacent!) dance makes this song a perfect encapsulation of the contest’s unique charms – just not quite enough to merit repeat listens.

🇫🇮 FINLAND - Windows95Man, No Rules!

Type: Genre-Mixing Novelty

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐

This performance opens with a 38-year-old man crawling out of a denim egg in a Windows 95 t-shirt (censored due to a copyright complaint) and no pants. It closes with (spoiler warning) a pair of jorts floating down to meet him, and then spewing fireworks. I’m pretty sure there’s a sample of an eagle screeching in the chorus. If Estonia and Croatia’s entries ride the line between joke entry and serious contender, this one jumps straight over it – wearing those flaming jorts, of course. Everything is so keyed up that it verges on performance art, and honestly, that’s not out of the realm of possibility: Windows95Man is the alter ego of visual artist Teemu Keisteri. According to the Centre for Finnish Media Art, his early works include “One Man and a Swamp,” which features him falling into a swamp, butt-naked, and “Finnish Guy Dancing,” which also spotlights jorts. Clearly, he has some favorite tropes, and I have a sneaking suspicion that this song is part of his larger conceptual project. Or he may have pulled off the shitpost of the century. The only thing that would make this more interesting is if the song was actually…good. It feels like a thrown-together speedrun through 90s signposts, which is maybe the point, but it’s ultimately too uneven to support the artistic message it’s trying to send – whatever that is.

🇫🇷 FRANCE - Slimane, Mon Amour

Type: Old-Fashioned Chanson

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐⭐

This song is…very French! A pained meditation on lost love, a man begging his runaway lover to reviens à Paris, the word rendezvous…it’s one baguette and turtleneck sweater away from unintentional satire. And yet! The combo of stripped-back chanson and sad-boy pop that revs into a spittle-spewing mental breakdown fuckin works. Slimane’s shocking vocal range and wounded sense of sincerity keep it out of Pepé Le Pew territory, even as he steers right into the melodrama, jumping from a pained purr to an unhinged shriek within 3 minutes. It’s an incredibly solid entry, but does feel a little conservative on France’s part – more of a showcase of what they do well than a serious contender for the top position. But if Slimane’s vocal power translates into the live context, I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw him (and his little diamond vest) somewhere in the top 5.

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