A Song for Europe

Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest

RobertDeam Tobin, RobertDeam Tobin

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351577984
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Media & Performing Arts
• Thema: Music

The world's largest and longest-running song competition, the Eurovision Song Contest is a significant and extremely popular media event throughout the continent and abroad. The Contest is broadcast live in over 30 countries with over 100 million viewers annually. Established in 1956 as a televised spectacle to unify postwar Western Europe through music, the Contest features singers who represent a participating nation with a new popular song. Viewers vote by phone for their favourite performance, though they cannot vote for their own country's entry. This process alone reveals much about national identities and identifications, as voting patterns expose deep-seated alliances and animosities among participating countries. Here, an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines, including musicology, communications, history, sociology, English and German studies, explore how the contest sheds light on issues of European politics, national and European identity, race, gender and sexuality, and the aesthetics of camp. For some countries, participation in Eurovision has been simultaneously an assertion of modernity and a claim to membership in Europe and the West. Eurovision is sometimes regarded as a low-brow camp spectacle of little aesthetic or intellectual value. The essays in this collection often contradict this assumption, demonstrating that the contest has actually been a significant force and forecaster for social, cultural and political transformations in postwar Europe.

Chapter 1

Camping on the borders of Europe

Ivan Raykoff

The Eurovision Song Contest, the annual music competition Europeans love to hate, is a study in contradictions, widely celebrated by its fans and just as widely disparaged by its critics. In 1982 a French minister of culture called it “a monument to drivel,” while Norway’s contestant in 1966 later became her own country’s minister of culture and even hosted the broadcast in 1986. From its inception, Eurovision has seemed to reflect the political zeitgeist of Europe, even to anticipate certain political developments; the first contest, with seven participating West European countries, took place a year before the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which established the Common Market.¹ On the other hand, the show always seems to be somewhat behind the times in terms of popular music tastes and trends; there is little that is innovative about Eurovision songs, and much that qualifies as retro and camp. Indeed, the notion of camp provides a key to understanding the complex relationship between politics and aesthetics evidenced throughout the history of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC).

Aesthetic contradictions are certainly the most prevalent and persistent aspect of Eurovision’s reception. While composers and performers strive for the most appealing original pop song and performance spectacle to win votes from the widest range of viewers, critics endlessly lament the music’s derivative stylings, banal lyrics, gaudy productions, and lowest-common-denominator approach. “The pleasure of Eurovision music has always been its absolute incompetence,” one British reviewer asserts, “undiluted by style, flair, intelligence, wit or even the sniff of a good tune.”² This analysis hardly explains the Europop perfection of ABBA’s “Waterloo,” probably the contest’s most famous winning song, and many other catchy tunes and memorable performers over the decades, but it does articulate the “so-bad-it’s-good” quality that many consider characteristic of Eurovision.

These aesthetic debates owe something to language issues, too. English has become the lingua franca of Eurovision songs, with the greatest number of winning songs overall (including ABBA’s “Waterloo”), even though it is the national language of only two participating countries.³ France has always sung in French (except for Breton once in 1996), and still maintains the policy of announcing its voting results in French. Not surprisingly, a writer for Le Figaro laments the ESC’s lack of linguistic diversity and its imitation of American pop styles, suggesting that Europeans are acting like “members of a subjugated province through music that could not possibly have been more undifferentiated in its variety, speaking a poorly mastered language as if they were 300 million slaves, stringing together only the language’s most rudimentary expressions.”⁴ Spain’s contestant in 1968 insisted on singing in Catalan, prohibited under Franco’s regime, so the government replaced him with another performer who sang in Spanish. Ironically, that song is titled “La, la, la,” and its refrain consists entirely of those innocuous syllables. Eurovision songs have often featured meaningless vocables and nonsense words as a way to circumvent language barriers among participating nations and potential voters. Monaco entered “Boumbadaboum” in 1967, Britain won with “Boom Bang-a-Bang” in 1969, Holland won in 1975 with “Ding Dinge Dong,” and Sweden won in 1984 with “Diggi-Loo, Diggi-Ley.” For many critics, this infantile approach to linguistic diversity also detracts from Eurovision’s artistic dignity.

Geography further complicates the ESC, especially since 1973 when Israel began participating in the contest even though it is not usually considered part of Europe. In fact, any member of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) is eligible to compete, including Mediterranean nations such as Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.⁵ This wide geographic scope is partly a legacy of French colonialism in North Africa and British involvement in the Middle East, geopolitical factors still influential during the EBU’s formative years.⁶ Of these non-European countries only Morocco has participated in the contest (once in 1980). Lebanon’s first foray into Eurovision would have been in 2005, but it was forced to withdraw because of laws requiring the national television network to censor any Israeli participation.⁷

Eurovision’s most tormented contradiction is the highly political nature of an event supposedly devoted to the neutral and nonpartisan goals of unity and cooperation through shared musical culture.⁸ “The Eurovision Song Contest is not a political event,” organizers of the 2005 competition insisted, “it is like the Olympic Games: we come in peace, and we hold the contest in peace. We have to be above politics!”⁹ Nevertheless, both blatant and subtle political aspects have been evident throughout the contest’s history.¹⁰ Greece withdrew from the 1975 contest because Turkey was making its Eurovision debut; the following year Greece presented “Panaghia mou” (My homeland), a song protesting the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.¹¹ In 1969 the contest was held in Madrid, but Austria refused to participate in protest of Franco’s regime. In 1982, during the Falklands War in Argentina, Britain hosted the contest and Spain contributed a tango. “Eurovision is legendary as an arena for settling diplomatic scores, venting ethnic grievance, baiting national rivals and undermining governments,” writes another British commentator, following his country’s tendency to regard the contest as largely an exercise in Continental intrigues.¹²

The early history of the EBU itself highlights this contradiction between political factors and apolitical ideals. On the one hand, membership and voting rights in the EBU were accorded only to national broadcasting organizations (such as the BBC in Britain, or Italy’s RAI), not to national governments. According to an official history of the EBU, this distinction “was supposed to prevent the kind of political interference by individual countries which had poisoned the atmosphere in the last years of the IBU [International Broadcasting Union, founded in 1929 as a kind of ‘League of Nations’ of radio broadcasters, but compromised by Nazi control during World War II] and the OIR [Organization Internationale de Radiodiffusion, which became the broadcasting union for Communist East European nations]. The EBU did not want politicians, but pragmatic experts.” On the other hand, ideology was still a significant motivation during the 1950s, EBU’s formative years: “The breakneck speed with which television soon started to develop gave everyone the feeling of belonging to an avant-garde—not only technologically, but also politically—tackling European cooperation in a friendly atmosphere and getting results at a time when politicians still hardly dared dream of an effective European Union.”¹³ The development of Eurovision illustrates media technology’s relationship to modernity and democracy, and how it can serve as a catalyst for political transformation.

Eurovision’s political associations have only intensified in recent decades. The democratic revolutions of 1989 in eastern Europe inspired new enthusiasm for the ideal of European unity and integration, and, not surprisingly, many participants in the 1990 contest exploited the political moment with songs about the fall of the Berlin Wall: “Brandenburger Tor” (Brandenburg Gate) from Finland, “Keine Maurern mehr” (No more walls) from Austria, and Germany’s own song “Frei zu leben” (Free to live). The winning entry that year was Italy’s “Insieme: 1992” (All together: 1992), a song looking forward to the Maastricht Treaty and the new European Union. “Europe is not far away,” the lyrics promise, “it’s no longer a dream and we’re no longer alone.” Ironically, the 1990 contest was held in Zagreb, where the show’s hostess proclaimed that “Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra, the string section and the wood section all sit together,”¹⁴ but by 1992 that ensemble of nationalities had disintegrated into a protracted civil war. Another case of civil strife may have resulted in Ireland’s unprecedented string of Eurovision victories in 1992, 1993, 1994, and 1996. Many fans considered this winning streak to be Europe’s rebuke to Britain and a sign that Ireland’s future would come through its ties to the continent beyond the British Isles.

Recent Eurovision victories by Estonia (2001), Latvia (2002), Turkey (2003), and Ukraine (2004) demonstrate the arrival of a “new Europe” on the cultural and political stage. Indeed, the 50th ESC, held in Kiev in May 2005, was a significant event for Ukraine. Just a few months earlier, a popular uprising had overturned the country’s disputed presidential election. The Orange Revolution rejected the apparent victory of Moscow’s favored candidate, claiming widespread fraud and voter intimidation in a rigged election facilitated by the state-controlled media. Supporters of the pro-western opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, camped out in Kiev’s Independence Square by the hundreds of thousands. Six days later the Parliament and Supreme Court invalidated the poll results and ordered a new election, which was won by Yushchenko.

The Orange Revolution highlighted the significant geopolitical challenges Ukraine faces as it evolves away from its eastward ties to Russia and its Soviet past towards western-style political, economic, and social reforms, perhaps eventually membership in the European Union as well.¹⁵ Thus the plan to host Eurovision in Kiev six months after the revolution was a highly symbolic opportunity, especially because a song associated with the protest was chosen to represent the country. “Razom nas bahato” (Together we are many) had become the unofficial anthem of the Orange Revolution. Its lyrics include protest chants referring to the rigged election: “Falsifications, no! Machinations, no! … Yushchenko is our president, yes, yes, yes!” Another line says no to ponyatiyam, Russian mobster slang for a “gentlemen’s agreement,” referring to Russia’s unfair influence over Ukrainian politics. “We aren’t cattle, we aren’t goats, we are sons and daughters of Ukraine!” refers to an offhand insult by the prime minister about the throngs of protesters in Kiev.¹⁶

A few weeks before the contest, however, Eurovision executives decreed the song to be “too political” and demanded revisions.¹⁷ The band complied, rewriting the song’s specific revolutionary references; the line about cattle and goats became “What you wanna say to your daughters and sons.” An added verse in English declares, “We won’t stand this, revolution is on, ’cause lies be the weapon of mass destruction!” (apparently a reference to American foreign policy and the war in Iraq, which would seem to contradict efforts at being apolitical). The new version concludes with the refrain “Together we are many, we can’t be defeated!” echoed in Russian, Polish, Czech, German, Spanish, and French too. With “Razom nas bahato” Eurovision achieved depoliticization and globalization in the same stroke, transforming a street song of local protest shouts into a multilingual and non-referential slogan for just causes anywhere—but it placed only 19th out of 24 in the competition.

While Eurovision seemed to mark the end of a revolution in 2005, it indirectly started one in 1974. The same year “Waterloo” won for Sweden, Portugal took last place with the song “E depois do adeus” (After the goodbye). Military generals who were plotting to overthrow the country’s authoritarian dictatorship decided that the song’s debut broadcast on national radio would be the signal for the beginning of the coup, which led to the famous Carnation Revolution. While there was no literal connection between the uprising and the song itself, its lyrics seem to reflect the social and political situation in poetic terms. The song begins, “I wanted to know who I was, what I’m doing here, who has abandoned me, whom I forgot.” It continues with typical love song sentiments and an enigmatic lesson: “Leaving is dying, like loving is winning and losing.” The following year Portugal’s song “Madrugada” (Dawn) expressed the optimism born of the country’s revolution:

I’m singing about the people who have just discovered themselves

And raise their voices to celebrate,

I’m singing the praises of the land that is reborn,

There can’t be enough songs like this.

Of course, countless popular songs describe love and desire, or breakup and heartache, but the Eurovision context can lend a political connotation to familiar amorous sentiments. During Franco’s regime, some Spanish entries employed romantic references as subtle metaphors for freedom and reform. “En un mundo nuevo” (In a new world, 1971) promises “At the end of the road all the dreams that you have inside will come true … if you fill your life with love and peace in a new happy world.” Jan Feddersen wonders, “Didn’t ‘En un mundo nuevo’ thus anticipate, or promote, or even subversively call forth the new democratic era in Spain?”¹⁸ The following year, “Amanace” (It’s...