no one asked for this, pt. 2

do americans hate eurovision? or does eurovision hate us?

Apr 29, 2024

you know the deal — poorly-produced, chattier audio version with the full songs is here. it’s like a guided tour meets amateur radio show that was recorded at 2 this morning. go nuts.

My Eurovision love affair started with unfolded laundry and some time to kill. Tale as old as time, right?

I’d come home to a newly empty 2-bedroom and a daunting pile of washcloths. It was around 9:15, too early to go to bed and too late to start anything else. The kind of shapeless hour that TV was made for. I flicked on the Roku, thumbed past video essays (depressing), Housewives reunions (grating) and Girls episodes (overly relatable). The aimless scroll led me to Peacock, which had a low-quality stream of the first Eurovision semi-final. The thumbnail was a man in a bright green bolero jacket and emo eye makeup. The visual hooked me. The telecast was 2.5 hours. It was a lot of washcloths. I was in.

The 2023 contest opened with a deeply corny video of a little British boy running through Liverpool, screaming at his neighbors that “Eurovision is coming!” Weird place for a Paul Revere reference, but whatever. Since it was produced in tandem with Ukraine (which had won in 2022 but couldn’t host because of you know..the war), the video then cut to Liverpudlians painting their garage doors as Ukrainian flags. The guy from Great British Bake-Off made a Ukraine-themed cake and smirked at the camera. King Charles showed up. This was all in the first two minutes. The washcloths remained unfolded.

I watched the first semi-final in a dull, preverbal wonder. Eventually, thoughts began to form. The logical: “what is this?” The introspective: “do I like this?” The neurotic: “should I like this?” And finally, the American: “why aren’t we in this?”

As gross as it feels, I suspect that most U.S. fans, or even casual observers, have gone through a similar thought process. For Americans, the unhinged fun of the contest triggers some combination of low-grade disgust, wide-eyed amazement and – most notably – petulant anger. It’s the one global party that we are categorically not invited to, and we’re stuck peeking in through the steamed-up windows. We’re not used to being left out. It sucks! We’re the U.S.! We’re supposed to be the center of everything, especially pop music! If Australia gets to be there, we should too – right?

I’m being facetious here – I know that it would make no sense to add the U.S. to Eurovision. Not only are we not in fucking Europe, we’ve also forfeited our right to the contest’s brand of kitschy nationalism by starting approximately 5 million wars and insisting on being the judge, jury and executioner of English-speaking pop culture. An electro-punk treatment of a Norwegian folk song is a heartening, if strange, display of national pride; Toby Keith saying he’ll put a boot in your ass is a chauvinist nightmare. Our patriotism is too sharp-edged and our national identity too diffuse to even agree on a song, much less support it. We’re also boring and hate dance music.

Okay, but even if we can’t participate in the contest, we can at least be integrated into it, right? Again, it is one of the biggest televised events on earth and is widely viewed in a lot of non-participating countries. In terms of global appeal, it’s only beaten out by the Olympics and the World Cup. 2023’s contest had more than 162 million viewers – that’s about 40 million more than the 2024 Super Bowl. If a network could tap into a fraction of that in the U.S. market, they’d have a major hit on their hands.

But creating an American version of the ESC – or even ginning up U.S. interest in it – has proven nigh on impossible. Former NBC and Universal Music chairman Ben Silverman started developing one in 2006, building off of his successful adaptations of BBC hits Big Brother and The Office. He continued to push for the American Song Contest throughout the 2010s, but it fizzled over and over. He’d later comment that it was the one across-the-pond property that seemed to resist translation.

Silverman didn’t elaborate on why he had so much trouble adapting the ESC for American audiences. But this is MY stupid newsletter, so you get to hear MY stupid theories on it. I think that Eurovision works precisely because it isn’t American – not only in its reflection of the linguistic diversity and old-world ethnic identities of Europe, but in its very structure. It presents a mirror-realm version of pop culture that just doesn’t mesh with our expectations and values around pop music. Our persistent indifference to it lays those often-unspoken expectations bare.

In ESC-world, artistic authenticity doesn’t matter. The contest kicked off in 1956, before the idea of the pop star-as-celebrity solidified. It has maintained an anonymous, Tin Pan Alley approach to songwriting ever since. Even when performers write their own songs – and these days, many of them do – they are still explicitly acting as vehicles of something bigger. The songs are functional, not expressive. We can’t delude ourselves into thinking they were making ✨art for art’s sake,✨ or that there was anything effortless about the endeavor. And there’s nothing Americans love more than self-expression and delusions of effortlessness!

Then there’s the anti-American nature of the music itself. Let’s go back to the basic premise of the contest: in order to garner votes, these songs need to have an obvious and immediate emotional effect. There’s no such thing as a Eurovision entry that “rewards repeat listens,” because repeat listens aren’t the point. Subtlety is useless; instead they resort to extremity and schmaltz, which “rots faster than other ingredients in the musical pantry,” according to critic Carl Wilson.

Wilson’s 175-page treatise on his complicated relationship with the music of (1988 ESC winner) Céline Dion is a key text in modern pop music criticism, and is sometimes credited as accidentally creating the whole “poptimism” movement. But it also has a lot to say about Dion’s brand of global schmaltz – and Americans’ knee-jerk hatred of it.

Here’s the tl;dr: “schmaltz” is the Yiddish word for rendered chicken fat, but it developed into a slang term for anything over-the-top or maudlin among Central European immigrants in 20th-century vaudeville theaters. It’s “an unprivate portrait of how private feeling is currently conceived,” according to Wilson. It’s a mutually-reinforced swirl of try-hard and cringe, according to me. It is ruthlessly unchill and somewhat impersonal, an oversaturated depiction of an emotional extreme. It’s Céline Dion, it’s Michael Bolton, it’s that one time Fergie sang the national anthem and added 200 extra notes along the way. Much like obscenity, you know schmaltz when you see it – and preferably, that’s not in public.

Schmaltz stands at odds with the guiding values and dominant narratives of American pop culture. Our rugged, unhelpful individualism makes us praise the cool, the effortless and the (seemingly) authentic above all else. We love stories of struggle and redemption, and are excellent at telling them. Look no further than the came-from-nothing narratives of hip-hop and country music. Or look at American Idol, which is the closest analogue we have to Eurovision, in terms of scale and (one-time) cultural dominance. Idol isn’t about songs or their immediate emotional impact. It’s about individuals and their long-term stories. Producers go to great lengths to give every contestant their own rags-to-riches tale, showing us their hometowns, families, and mid-rehearsal breakdowns. Not so in Eurovision – while information about the contestants is readily available, it’s not included in the telecast at all. All you get is a name, a cluster of songwriting credits, and a quick video of the performer smiling in their home country. Americans require a meta-narrative for their artists – a larger story to latch or project ourselves onto. Eurovision provides none, and no amount of pyrotechnics, children’s choirs or key changes can close that gap.

Okay, I’ve gotten far enough afield – I was about to bring up Taylor Swift’s insistence on meta-narrative and how she could use a little schmaltz these days to get her out of the prose-poem-Jack-Antonoff hell realm she’s trapped herself in, but I can’t handle the Pandora’s box that could open up. Let’s get back to the American Song Contest, which finally saw the light of day in 2022 after years in development hell. Ben Silverman joined forces with longtime ESC producers Christer Björkman and Ola Melzig for an 8-episode NBC series.

Quick sidebar on Björkman and Melzig: they seem to have made it their mission to broaden the Eurovision fanbase worldwide. They have a semi-sketchy production company called Voxovation, which is apparently working on Indian, Asian, Latin American and Canadian versions of the contest, as well. I WILL be showing up at their Santa Monica offices shortly with a pitch deck and a dream shortly.

American Song Contest seemed like a natural translation of the Eurovision concept: every U.S. state and territory sent a representative song, and there was an equally insane voting system that balanced a televote and juries. The promotional materials made a big deal about how Americans love their home states and needed something to bring us together in these…sigh…unprecedented and divided times. Snoop Dogg and Kelly Clarkson signed on to host, and NBC put a ton of marketing muscle behind it. And…it was a spectacular flop.

With a few exceptions, the 56 entries were too similar (one can only hear so many country songs from beautiful blonde women before they want to blow their brains out), and the essential silliness of Eurovision was more or less nonexistent – only one song, Wyoming’s “New Boot Goofin’”, seemed to capture the spirit of the main contest. The producers clearly tried to find diverse entries, highlighting a K-pop artist in Oklahoma, a Ugandan immigrant in Indiana and, weirdly, celebrity guests like Jewel, Macy Gray and Sisquó representing their home states. But it still turned out bloated and bland, failing to draw even current-day American Idol viewership numbers, and was canceled after one season. If Kelly Clarkson, single-handed savior of daytime television, can’t fix your entertainment property, there’s clearly a deeper problem.

So, we know the American aversion to Eurovision runs deep – but it does show some signs of thawing, at least from a fan perspective. The contest was first broadcast in the U.S. in 2016, when Logo TV bought the rights to the grand final. Logo televised it for the next two years, playing to the queer elements of the fandom with commentary from drag queens Michelle Visage and Shangela and former Queer Eye star Carson Cresley. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, audience-wise, and only topped out at 74,000. Logo’s rights lapsed, so Netflix snapped them up 2019, planning to pair their livestream of the 2020 contest with the Will Ferrell/Rachel McAdams vehicle Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.

This musical comedy, created in partnership with the EBU, had apparently been in Ferrell’s back pocket since the late ‘90s, when he became a fan of the contest via his wife, Viveca Paulin. The fact that Netflix only gave it the green light after securing rights to the main contest does make me pull out my tin-foil hat, though. The movie is basically an ESC primer, and was definitely meant as an on-ramp for American fans.

In one sequence, the fictional Icelandic selection committee explains the whole whoever-wins-hosts-the-next-one dynamic and someone blurts out “But Iceland has never won! Not in the contest’s 60 YEAR HISTORY!” There are also mentions of English-language songs always winning, everyone hating the U.K.’s entries, etc. etc. There was clearly a larger plan here to build the contest’s profile – a plan that was foiled when the 2020 contest was canceled due to the pandemic.

Netflix ended up releasing Fire Saga in June 2020, and it seems like the movie had some impact on American perceptions; it was one of the most-streamed movies on the platform that month (which isn’t saying much, considering the Tiger King of it all) and Will Ferrell’s most successful role in years. Most people I talk to are aware of the contest via the movie, not the other way around. But Netflix wasn’t in it for the long game, I guess. It sold the U.S. rights to Peacock in 2021, which still holds them. This essay is not Peacock spon, I swear, and I’ll provide a full rundown of viewing options in the next issue – but if you’re an American viewer, the Peacock stream is still the most accessible.

In the years since Fire Saga, Eurovision has been creeping into the national consciousness with increasing regularity; entries from Iceland and Armenia have become viral hits, and 2021 winner Måneskin became a household name in the U.S. – though mostly due to a searing Pitchfork review and a New York Times piece that was only slightly kinder. When the EBU added a “rest of the world” category in the televote last year, U.S. fans contributed more than any other country, with Canada coming in second.

So – is now the time? Will Eurovision follow Premier League soccer and Formula One racing as a late-breaking American obsession? Or does something in our national taste-formation refuse to comprehend its unique combination of earnestness and inanity? As I said, when I first encountered the contest, the judgment kicked in before the American-ness did. I’m beginning to suspect that discomfort is the most American thing of all. WHY?? That’s for next week 🤭

🇩🇪 GERMANY - ISAAK, Always on the Run

Type: OTHER [boring mountain-core]

My Very Objective Score: ⭐

It feels unfair to kick Germany while it’s down. The country finished dead-last in the last two contests, and hasn’t made it out of the bottom five since 2018. Their entries likely wouldn’t make it to the grand final if they weren’t grandfathered in via the Big Five. So I’ll try to say something nice about this song: it’ll work really well in a Subaru commercial one day. “Always On The Run” is the sonic equivalent of a Target-brand flannel shirt. But at the very least, it’s aware of its failures. ISAAK howls that he is “nothing but the average,” playing the “game that can’t be won” and eventually seems to break the fourth wall fully, begging the audience to tell him who he’s fighting for. Germany, ISAAK! You’re fighting for Germany! That’s the whole point! Even though this sounds like a neutered child of The Lumineers and Noah Kahan, its pathetic energy at least saves it from the blind idiocy of the U.K.'s zero-point entry from 2021, “Embers.” Tell that to ISAAK – and maybe call a wellness check on him while you’re at it.

🇬🇪 GEORGIA - Nutsa Buzaladze, Firefighter

Type: Ethno-Bop sun, Dua Lipa Reject moon

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐

If you’ve ever woken up in a cold sweat and wondered to yourself “what if Katy Perry’s Roar had a few more mixed metaphors and a half-assed Caucasian breakdown?”* the Georgian delegation has great news for you. “Firefighter” is a perfectly mid, vaguely inspirational tune about a woman who is running through ashes and rising like a phoenix and putting out the fire…all while down on her knees! Sure, it might be unfair to make fun of garbled English lyrics – this is Eurovision, after all – but these are some RhymeZone.com-level choices. And in the end, it’s always more interesting to hear a native-language performance than yet another play on the unholy trinity of fire/higher/desire.

Staging could save this one, and Nutsa’s raw diva energy might secure the “mother is mothering” contingent just enough to kick her into the final. But based on Georgia’s choice to go with 15-foot-tall ghost hands as the dominant motif for last year’s entry and somehow still ending up with something boring, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Don’t worry about Nutsa, though – she’s assured us that even when the windows are burning, she’ll keep running like tiger.

Fun side note: Nutsa Buzaladze actually did have a pretty extensive run on last year’s season of American Idol, where Katy Perry herself repeatedly told her, basically, to calm the fuck down and be a little more subtle in her performances. Lucky for Nutsa, though, the only thing more averse to subtlety than Katy Perry is Eurovision.

*yes, “half-assed Caucasian breakdown” will be the name of my forthcoming memoir.

🇬🇷 GREECE - Marina Satti, ZARI

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

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐

It would be too easy to just write GREEK ROSALÍA over and over, so I’ll try to be more articulate here. Marina Satti allegedly rejected more than 150 songs after she was chosen to represent Greece this year, saying that she wanted something that represents the “‘new’ Greece going beyond Greek stereotypes.” That exacting process paid off – “ZARI” pushes beyond contemporary into straight-up futuristic, and delights in its mix of traditional instrumentation and chaotic, computerized distortion. In the video, Satti appears to kidnap an American-looking tourist from the Athens airport and lead him through ancient ruins while lyrics about fate and heartbreak curlicue around a pulsing vocal sample. There’s a dance break, there’s a chorus, and you think you know where it’s all going. Then, about 2 minutes in, the song takes a complete left turn (you’ll know it when you hear it) into a screeching breakdown. In the video, she traps the tourist in her backseat, then does donuts in an empty parking lot. He looks terrified; she’s cackling. Several seconds later, a montage of disposable-camera photos flash by – Satti and the tourist out on the town, clearly having resolved their differences. The man smiles awkwardly, telegraphing how I think we’ll all feel when this number comes to the stage: exhilarated, confused, maybe a little scared, but never doubting that Satti is 1000% in control. The video ends with a shot of the Parthenon and maybe-satirical postcard reading “Dear Europe, I am sending you much love from Greece, the birthplace of democracy, philosophy, philoxenia and a bunch of other long words,” so if I don’t see a bunch of backup dancers dressed as Delphic oracles with selfie sticks, I’m going to be disappointed.

🇮🇸 ICELAND - Hera Björk, Scared of Heights

Type: Old-Fashioned (but not chanson) sun, Dua Lipa Reject moon

My Very Objective Score: ⭐

Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for the winner of Eurovision, 1996! “Scared of Heights” is a midtempo, vaguely gospel-flavored disco track that sounds so dated, it’s honestly impressive. What Silk Sonic did for ‘70s soul, Hera Björk is doing for ‘90s step aerobics soundtracks, and we have to give her some credit for that. This song sounds like it should be heard through a wall of those big 90s glass blocks in the steamed-up basement of a crumbling YMCA. It sounds like an over-chlorinated pool. Honestly, my first reaction was “people are still allowed to make these?” Turns out they are! Björk (not that one) is a returning artist for Iceland, having last represented the country in 2010 with a song that felt retro even then. I highly doubt that she’ll get past the semi this year, and she seems to agree – at one point, she sings that she’s “been here before and never got it right.”

🇮🇪 IRELAND - Bambie Thug, Doomsday Blue

Type: Genre-Mixing Novelty

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐

There’s another ESC subgenre that I forgot to include, which I guess I’d call…demonic? Astarothian? Pazuzian? Whatever hellish descriptor I decide on, “Doomsday Blue” is a prime example. Bambie Thug, whose name feels a little racially charged in an American context but is probably fine everywhere else, takes the nu metal-meets-glam aesthetic of Rina Sawayama circa 2020 to its logical extreme, then drags it through a few Irish graveyards for good measure. Their song opens with a literal hex, wishing the worst on an ex-lover in a breathy falsetto while Slipknot-style screams pierce the backing track. The chorus abruptly jumps into a flowery, acoustic lament, and the song alternates between those two – Tim Burton verse/Sofia Coppola chorus, goth gf/indie bf, I guess – without much connective tissue. The production in the studio version is finely-tuned enough to unify the two extremes, but I worry that won’t translate to the arena sound system, and that ol’ Bambie will end up looking more musical theater than Mephistopheles. But if provocation was the goal for Bambie, who is nonbinary, they’ve already won. After they were chosen to represent Ireland, a well-known Catholic priest actually gave a sermon about the country being “finished,” saying that “the poor devil can neither sing nor dance.” Joke’s on you, Father McInerney, turns out they can!

🇮🇹 ITALY - Angelina Mango, La noia

Type: Swedish Bulldozer sun (complimentary), Dua Lipa Reject moon

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐⭐

I loved Italy’s lush cumbia track before I realized that the chorus translates to “the dance of boredom” – and then I loved it even more. Angelina Mango (silly name, sorry) shifts effortlessly between gum-snapping brattiness and an opera-house belt that seems to be edging toward tears. She approaches the chorus with a dead-eyed charisma, talking about how goddamn bored she is while steel drums, buzzed-out synths, and a whole-ass string section swells around her. It’s an ode to weapons-grade unbotheredness, a “Dancing On My Own” for the lonely and listless. I’m not going to reveal my full rankings until next week, but I will tell you that I’ve set a Google Flights notification for Rome, May 2025.

🇱🇻 LATVIA - Dons, Hollow

Type: Old-Fashioned Chanson sun, BORING MOON

My Very Objective Score: ⭐

A song that dares to answer the question: “what if Hozier wasn’t hot?” Turns out we don’t like the answer. I really hope he brings his little dollar-bin Blue Man Group onstage, though.

🇱🇹 LITHUANIA - Silvester Belt, Luktelk

Type: Swedish Bulldozer (neutral)

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐

Lithuania is the only Baltic state that hasn’t won Eurovision, and I’m beginning to suspect it doesn’t want to. It’s not that this song is bad. If you want to know what it’d sound like to run through Vilnius in the Blade Runner universe, this does the trick. It’s a dark, industrial dance track with shades of early Billie Eilish, and I’ll bet you $30 right now that the staging will involve a large field of lasers and some sexy dancers in gas masks. But it’s a little too slick to make a real impression – it sounds like it would fit on a Spotify playlist called like “Late Night Coding” or “Locked In At The Library,” and fades into the background very easily. Considering that it’s going to be followed up by the all-too-memorable Ireland in its semi-final, I wouldn’t get attached.

🇱🇺 LUXEMBOURG - TALI, Fighter

Type: Dua Lipa Reject sun, Swedish Bulldozer moon

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐

Luxembourg is back in the contest after a 30-year absence (their last entry was in 1993), and they really decided to show up with…this. “Fighter” has the same Latin-America-by-way-of-Ibiza vibe as Italy’s entry, which makes sense because both were written and produced by Dario “Dardust” Faini, another ESC mainstay. Everything about it feels like a safe choice: the superproducer, the alternation between English and French, the inspirational yet unspecific lyrics. I guess it wouldn’t make sense to assume that a country would come out the gate with something amazing after three decades away, but they could have at least figured out something more interesting.

🇲🇹 MALTA - Sarah Bonnici, Loop

Type: Dua Lipa Reject

My Very Objective Score: ⭐

Once upon a time, there was a song called “SloMo.” “SloMo” was Spain’s entry in 2022. It was originally written for Jennifer Lopez, and then was given to the Cuban-Spanish singer Chanel. In the grand final performance, Chanel started off wearing very little clothing and somehow ended in even less. It walked a fine line between sexy and sexual – between “slay mama” and “I need hand sanitizer” – and did it successfully because both the song and performer were so self-assured. But when it placed second that year, a lot of countries seemed to take the wrong idea and think the “sexy lady + sexy song + nothing else” formula was a winning one. All that to say, “Loop” is horny to the point of discomfort. I don’t want to hear about your Maltese honeypot, Sarah, though I’m sure it’s very nice.

🇲🇩 MOLDOVA - Natalia Barbu, In The Middle

Type: Ethno-Bop

My Very Objective Score: ⭐

This one is hard to say anything about. The fact is, Moldova’s delegation does not have the resources that other countries do. They didn’t even produce a music video for this song, instead sending in footage from their national final, which looks like a high school choir concert. When you compare this video to even the low-ranking acts at wealthier national finals like Melodifestivalen (Sweden), Benidorm (Spain) and Sanremo (Italy), it’s obvious that the tensions running through Eurovision go a lot deeper than song choice. All that said, I feel like they could have done more with what they have here. Considering the obvious budget constraints, I don’t know why they decided to make the staging reliant on five women standing perfectly still? And then pulling out violins? To play for 15 seconds? Norway already did the surprise-violin thing in 2009, and they also had weird twin backup singers and a guy doing six backflips in a row. You’ll never beat the Scandis at their own game, Moldova! You should know that by now!

🇳🇱 NETHERLANDS - Joost Klein, Europapa

Type: Genre-Mixing Novelty

My Very Objective Score: ⭐⭐⭐

When I was in Amsterdam in December, I got drinks with a Dutch friend and one of her classmates. The conversation drifted to Eurovision, and I asked if they had any predictions on who would represent the Netherlands in 2024. “Joost?” one said. Both laughed. They gave me the rundown: Joost Klein is a goofy rapper beloved by Dutch college students. He’s vulgar, irony-poisoned, and generally seen as a cool guy – in other words, the opposite of a Eurovision entrant. He’d launched a campaign to represent the Netherlands a few months before, and everyone had taken it as a joke. Less than a week after that conversation, the Dutch broadcaster announced that Joost was their pick.

I bring up this story because it’s indicative of the confusion that everyone seems to feel about Joost’s presence at the contest. No one can tell if he’s taking it seriously, or just taking the piss. “Europapa” doesn’t make that any clearer. The first minute is an obnoxiously upbeat celebration of the EU’s open border policy – yes, really – that mostly consists of Joost listing off all the things he can do in various European countries. He can visit his friends in France! He can take a walk in Vienna! All of this is delivered in a B-52s lilt, and in the video, he wears a giant, pointy-shouldered suit while standing in front of the EU flag and plays a Rock Band guitar in front of a classically-Dutch windmill. It seems like he’s winking at the camera, taking the excesses of the contest to task…and then it really shifts. The windmill catches fire, the music slows to a few plaintive chords, and Joost delivers a monologue about his late father. It’s disorienting, to say the least, and very hard to place in the joke/serious song dichotomy. Perhaps it could be…both? Perhaps it doesn’t matter? Is this how one wins over both the jury and the popular vote? Did the Netherlands’ answer to Lil Dicky finally figure it out?

We’ll see, I guess – Joost hasn’t been including the music video’s Very Serious coda in his live performances so far, instead opting for stage-dives and mosh pits. If he’s able to pull that off in Malmö, he should get a prize all its own.