Eurovision: the modus operandi of cultural spectacle
As someone living in The Netherlands, the weeks leading up to Eurovision are always national news. Will ‘we’ make it through the finals? Will ‘we’ be able to place first? No, ‘we’ placed 18th this year. And that failure is experienced as a unilateral loss. The performer is castigated no less fiercely than a medieval outcast, a national loser, pthoo, pthoo. Waylon, you were the chosen one!
There is a very nationalistic aspect to Eurovision. It’s a great moment for any nation to market themselves like a living travel brochure. But there’s another layer to it. Eurovision isn’t just a spectacle that connects and energises all of Europe (now including Australia, Azerbaijan, and Israel?) with popular music. Since its inception in 1956, its positive messages about unity have served the development and progress of a postwar Europe and the European Union.[1]
So my main question for this piece is: how does Eurovision allow the definition of a cultural identity, be it by asserting national distinctiveness, Pan-European unity, or highlighting political issues? Is Eurovision a celebration of a love for diversity all Europe shares? Or is it all kitsch, smoke and mirrors, acting as a distraction amidst a Europe sliding into reactionary conservatism? And, hey, does that really matter?
Nota bene: I won’t be talking about the campness and queerness in Eurovision in this article, but I do have a lot of thoughts about that! There’ll be a podcast in the future where I talk about that at length!
The introdction
Eurovision is a product of the European Broadcasting Union, whose mission statement is creating “an output that statisfies the cosmopolitan, pacifist ideal.” It is a confederatory project that seeks to bridge intra-national difference through ‘nonpolitical’ voting for the greatest performance, an exercise in media criticism and political impartiality. Since its inception, the contest’s rules ban “lyrics, speeches, gestures of a political or similar nature.”
But at the same time, Eurovision is an international podium. It is an opportunity unsquandered for individual activism or national boasting. Song lyrics can’t be explicit, however, so they often resort to generalised pablum. It part of the liberal tendency in pop music, offering quasi-meaningful, vaguely personal, hollow platitudes in lieu of true, confrontational statements about anything. Counter to that, however, is the potential to assert.
On-stage acts and background mise-en-scene create a historical, political backdrop. There is a subtext, an underpinning, a certain stratagem possible within the confines of Eurovision. This unmarked premise of European unity, that is, the pretense to political neutrality and the accommodation of the meaningless “everyone, regardless of origin”, has made employable by both the reactionary, nationalist forces of the right and the veneer of liberal progressivism.
The cultural
What makes a Eurovision song a Eurovision song? I think the answer can be found in the songs that are found between the boring pop ballads and the incomprehensible, cubist and avant-garde performances. Although most people watch it for the latter, it’s in the middle-of-the-road songs that gives us an inkling into the formula of most Eurovision songs and what makes them distinguishing.
I’ve been an avid Eurovision watcher since 2009, when Alexander Rybak scored Norway a victory with Fairytale. The song, describing a love as impossible and dreamlike as a fairytale, takes its stage in an imagined Scandinavian idyll. Every actor wears traditional, modest, and stereotypical clothing. The setpieces — the moon, the curved and well-lit buildings, — resemble Hans Christian Anderson’s works. The performance portends as, indeed, a fairytale. It is a looking neither forward or backward to a specific Norwegian national past or future, but it is an upward, unfixed, ‘encompassing’ moment, both based in and untethered to history, media, and reality. It is, throughout the performance that a definition (and a reduction of) ‘Norwegianness’ can be presented, as if the borders of Norway and the edge of the stage are 1) absolute and impermeable 2) the exact same delineation of culture.
The music, too, accompanies the irrendentist qualities of the scene. The arrangement and Rybak, with his voice and little fiddle, produce a sound that is ‘pulled into’ the culturally-marked diorama. While all music at Eurovision is generally radio-friendly and inoffensive, it is its conjunction with a national theme that the sound is given an immanent and distinct identity. We can consider Fairytale a ‘folk song’, a genre generally played with acoustic instrumentation. But ‘folk’ implies a community of some sort, whereas ‘music’ is immaterial and unspecific. Through a song’s lyrics, language, presentation, fashion style, and visual composition, etc., cultural value can be signified. In this case, the value is a specific melancholy for a simplistic European (white) past:
Years ago, when I was younger
Kinda liked a girl I knew
She was mine and we were sweethearts
That was then but then it’s true
Can a pop song really become the signifiers for the myth about national identity? Yes, in the same way that an Italian pasta sauce commercial defines Italian-ness. In these productions of what constitutes as the essence of the national identity, however, there is room for malleability and subversion — more on this later.
The idea that a commodity is a microcosm of culture is the central gimmick behind Eurovision. By no mistake of design, it is also fully what the audience expects from it. In the same way that people view the meticulously staged nature of professional wrestling (kayfabe) as integral to its charm, Eurovision’s sale of abstract, over-the-top spectacle as culture is part of what makes it attractive, not objective, technical quality.
Conversely, this is where a rift between the national and the international aspects can be witnessed. The international — a shared ‘Western’ culture — is synonymous to popular media from America, providing a framework where difference is/should be supplanted by a general, omni-participatory aesthetic-of-commodities that can’t contain any cultural signifiers to speak of, lest it exclude a potential consumer because they don’t directly understand it. What you can hear on the radio is not what you want to see at Eurovision. It’s cute when a country enters with a poppy love song by a young princox, but that’s not what is meant or expected by ‘Eurovision’ — these songs rarely place high, as decided by the audience vote.
What individual states bring to Eurovision is, then, a cultural identity that has been constructed through cherrypicking cultural images and carefully selecting stereotypes. The performance becomes a syncretic myth — an invention of past and present — when the completed message (‘national pride’) is linked to a cultural theme (a folklorised ‘own-ness’). The eclectic representation and self-essentialisation lends itself to the commercial, easily digestible format of Eurovision. It’s banking on the stereotype. The UK is conservative and serious; Italy is romantic and passionate; France refuses to sing in English. This is different than the neuter nature of global pop media. There are a boatload of non-folk acts, but as all songs have to be specifically composed for Eurovision, it is still a type of media that brings geocultural history to the forefront.
The diversity
Because every performance is a ‘stand-in’ for entire countries, we find it represents some aspect of that nation’s culture, even if we have no idea of the other examples. National culture is different from ethnic culture. National culture is a hegemonic project of the nation-state that gives citizens a reason to participate in a shared, collective idea that, through the state, they are one people. That, no matter where you reside in a power field, at the end of the day, you’re a national citizen.
Ethnic culture, by contrast, is idiosyncratic to specific — often marginalised — groups within that nation, but which isn’t canonically represented in state history. Think of Romani people, LGBTQ people, Jewish people, think of The Netherlands’s ex-colonial subjects like the Moluccans, the Javanene, or the Surinamese. These are people with a grand and beautiful history and culture but are not truly recognised in what we might consider the national. There’s a reason why there’s a national history museum and a Jewish history museum.
National and ethnic culture/history are often in direct opposition to one another in terms of which stories get to be told and which people get to achieve a level of dignity. The Netherlands, for instance, has only recently started shedding more light on its role in the transatlantic slave trade (Curaçao, Surinam, The Dutch Antilles) in its historical curriculum, but still happily skips over its deathly oppression of Indonesians or its incarceration of Dutch gay resistance fighters at the end of WW2.
Then, can you believe how potently direct it is when a minority performs for all of their country? For that one moment, this is the national culture: a periphery becoming the core. It is a conscious effort, instructive of how story is instrumentalised; how self-representation has a clear, political function. This year’s Ryan O’Shaughnessy gay love story, Conchita Wurst’s queer ballad to be oneself, Isaiah Firebrace being in-your-face about his Aborginal Australian heritage, to name a few. There is a progressive message in all of these, one of unity and that, at least the optics suggest, erases power difference. For this, I want to focus on Joci Pápai’s ‘Origo’ from 2017, because I really like that song.
The history of Romani people in Hungary is a violent and depressingly racist one. Far-right paramilitary organisations terrorise the countryside to which many families have been assigned to live — this isn’t uncommon for European nations, which tend to force them into villages far away from urban centres or into walled, controlled communities. Only recently has their struggle for civil rights improved. In the same year that the European Human Rights Court condemned Hungarian authorities to protect Roma protestors, a person of Romani descent represented the country in Eurovision. In cases like these, there is a strategy, a timing, a ‘fuck-you’ present.
‘Origo’ is an elegy that combines world music, Hungarian folk songs, and Romani culture. Pápai’s voice booms with a soul-chilling morosity, intertwining with the violinist like they are opposite sides of the same sound. The fiddle is a staple of Hungarian folk music, and the distinct way that Pápai delivers his words represents the heart of his own people. What we see on stage, however, is definitively about Romas. From his jacket, to the dress of the dancer, to the milk can he uses as a drum — all are ciphers of his culture that he is metonymically bringing to the stage as ‘Hungary’. He, a Romani man, is Hungary.
A translation of the fourth verse:
Why did you lie to me
You said my colour didn’t matter
You knew my eyes were brown
And they will never change
And a sliver of the rap part:
Through it, I made great crowds soak
You hear my melody and already know my name
The road is long, there are scars on my back
The tears of thousands are streaming down my guitar
It is a composite of culture that, given its sociopolitical context, is one of the more genuine and honest messages that can be found in Eurovision. It is about love and difference and resentment, told from an ethnic perspective that has endured centuries of violence and insufficient reconciliatory efforts, beautifully deciding that it has had enough.
The national culture of Hungary presented at Eurovision becomes synonymous with ethnic, Romani culture. This is a powerful statement against what (Hungarian) national culture is, because it does not incorporate Romani facets into its canon. Here, we see a use of Eurovision as an effective subversion of European nationalism, not a celebration of it.
The optics
So Eurovision is also the perfect set-up to celebrate or to subvert national culture. But there have been instances where a country elects to celebrate another country’s national culture. The Netherlands is the best at doing this: in 2014 we had The Common Linnets with ‘Calm Before The Storm’, a slow country ballad. One of the singers, Ilse DeLange, is known for her very forced Southern American accent. In 2016, we had Douwe Bob with ‘Slow Down’, another country ballad. And this year, we had Waylon with ‘Outlaw In ‘Em’. Oh, Jesus Christ.
The song is one big love letter to the nostalgia of Americana. It mentions whiskey, makes allusions to gun culture, and glorifies the romanticised ‘American’ way of rebellion as a healthy disposition to ‘shake things up’. And, you know, that’s the basis of country rock music. It’s about the South and its long highways, the Harley Davidson that for some reason has a feminine name, the defiant pride to fight back when the odds are against you.
Of course, the genre is stipulated by a history of racism. Waylon partook in an aesthetic that he views as ‘being American’. He idolises it, thinks it’s cool. That’s fair: he’s Dutch and claims to have no real knowledge of American racial dynamics and history — he responded that he is a “simple farmer from Apeldoorn” in response to allegations of racism. But even when he first presented his song in April, people have been telling him this would be musical suicide. For good reason.
To sing about being an ‘outlaw’ is to draw from the same cultural vein shaped by racial segregationists, outspoken pro-Confederate activists, and virulent white supremacists. Johnny Rebel openly supported the KKK and David Allan Coe has a song called ‘Nigger Fucker’. It invokes this ‘American soul’ without deeper thought and care into potential dogwhistles. The song contains no alternatives or disruptions to its foundational bigotry, it doesn’t subvert it from within, it simply is a 1:1 reproduction of that sound without knowing what it means.
What makes the song even worse is the performance. Four black men surround Waylon as he sings, playing fake guitars alongside him and making wild, aggressive, crumping gestures. It’s shocking, the choreography uncomfortably reminiscent of the minstrel show, a racist performance type where white folk put on blackface and ridiculed African-Americans. That, combined with the grimy history of outlaw country music makes for controversial optics, something that Eurovision implicitly allows. Not because it can’t intervene, but it can’t act on songs that are ‘open to interpretation’ — and Waylon himself has ostensibly no idea of the darker implications. He’s just celebrating his wild side.
Another example of this is, I have to talk about her, this year’s winner: Netta with ‘TOY’. It’s the soundtrack to being a weeaboo. Her blatant appropriation of Harajuku-style dress, the blatant misuse of the maneki-neko, the weird way she sings about ‘baka boys’. It’s just embarrassing in a “wow I just looked at my DeviantArt from 2004” way. It essentialises Japanese media culture, far from any ethnic or national culture, as an array of commodities without deeper cultural or historical significations — just like Waylon does. To Netta, Japan is her consumption of it: anime, gyaru fashion, and J-Pop. It’s offensive, it’s orientalist, it’s a horrible song.
The dualism of Eurovision is that, as a platform, it creates room for both racist spectacles and positive self-representation, and they’re both ‘Eurovision’. It’s colourblind in the way that is unproductive. Every song is a reflection of a culture-turned-commodity and shouldn’t be dug into for politics — that only emphasises difference, not the togetherness, right?
The message of unity subsists of a superficial celebration that erases ethnic identity, cultural history, and real differences in lifeworlds. The ‘unity’ it provides is the opportunity to perform on the same stage, not the equalising justice that would materialise this ideal. It is, at the end of the day, a commercial instance that takes equality to mean ‘theoretical access to commodities’. It’s a Coca Cola commercial — everyone gets to buy them. Now we’re all the same, because we drink Coca Cola.
The liberal fantasy believes the possibility to employ a marginalised narrative constitutes as a total victory for the marginalised This is partially true: the space needs to be there and has to be receptive of them in order to let them occupy it. The resulting performances stand out and are valuable because of the reality that batters these groups on the daily, not in spite of it. It’s important that we get these stories, because they are cultural victories, but they are a momentary reprieve at best, and should always a reminder of the neverending effort necessary to achieve what is being idealised. Just because stories are being sold back to the marginalised doesn’t mean they’ve stopped being oppressed.
Precisely this hypocritical, marketable, storytelling kind of way, so closely linked to the grand performance and performativity, gives Eurovision the capacity to artfully acknowledge using indirect aphorisms the crises that Europe ‘has to deal with’. Take France’s performance of this year, ‘Mercy’. It was partially inspired by ‘the story of a Nigerian baby born in a refugee camp’. It parallelises popular discourse about the refugee crisis: the effect is highlighted and it’s terrible, but its causes and culpability are topics that are (literally) danced around. “We should do something! But what? Well…” There’s no real message, just a shrugging sentiment of ‘je me regrette’.
Mercy uses the story of others and co-opts it into a national narrative. It’s attempting to construct a cultural myth out of the provision of international and humanitarian aid, even though France has a very bad track record of offering anything to refugees. It’s lionising and lying about the country’s role in the refugee crisis, while refusing to name any of the perpetrators or the culpable. ‘Mercy’ isn’t about the plight of refugees, it’s using their plight to get those douze points on Eurovision.
The results
Eurovision doesn’t engineer social change, nor should we expect it to. Conchita Wurst did not homophobia, and César Sampson being the first black person of colour to represent Austria did not end racism, a country with a far-right, Islamophobic government.
At the end of the day, it’s a stage. A stage is a platform that can be used, as so many nations have. Jamala asserting Ukraine’s post-soviet independence from Russia in 2016 with “1944”, Genealogy calling attention to the global denial and indifference of the Armenian genocide with “Don’t Deny.” It’s a complex situation, giving national sentiments an outlet and giving them the power of statement. Most countries don’t bother, others seize the opportunity.
We watch Eurovision explicitly for these excesses of national pride and avant-gardist performances. The spectacle is meant to be apolitical, is meant to be sold as such, even when it employs cultural narratives. We marvel at the costumes and roll our eyes at any song that calls attention to the refugee crisis. Not because we don’t care, but because we know it’s so blasphemously inauthentic and performative. We all know that Eurovision is a paradox: Europe is getting more and more xenophobic and authoritarian, but here are four hours of performances that pretend it’s all good and lovely. It’s become more and more hypocritical in the past decade, but that doesn’t take away its enjoyment.
Eurovision is about the aesthetical over the political, which is exactly why it’s so entertaining and accessible. It is fundamentally an event without narratives and without goals. It clings to love as an idealism which is getting harder and harder each year, but it’s primarily about putting on a show and making a party. Eurovision doesn’t want acts to be protest songs or calls to revolution, that’s not what it purports to be, but sometimes things slip through the cracks and those moments are the greatest. Or when we get goofy costumes.
That’s the surreal thing about entertainment: it has the luxury of pretending not to be political. We just have to be sure of how it is.
[1] Dean Vuletic, Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest (Bloombury, 2018)
