Eurovision Song Contest

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      Eurovision, Celebrating the Sounds of a Postpandemic Continent

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      A dancing finger, chained demons and a victory for Italian rockers. But Eurovision, the largest music contest in the world, is more than just weird.ROTTERDAM — The Italian band Maneskin celebrated its 2021 Eurovision win by the rock ’n’ roll playbook, with bare chests covered in tattoos, champagne spraying and the thuds of fireworks exploding.The win was a close and deeply emotional one, with the band’s song, “Zitti e Buoni,” or “Shut Up and Be Quiet,” edging into first place in an exhilarating vote that was ultimately decided by the public. Maneskin barely beat France’s Barbara Pravi, and her chanson “Voilà.” After the victory, an Italian reporter was sobbing as tears streamed down his face.Capturing what many felt, he said the victory was a fresh start for Italy. “It was a very difficult year for us,” the reporter, Simone Zani, said, talking about the devastating impact of the coronavirus. Explaining through his tears, he said, “We are from the north of Italy, from Bergamo,” an Italian city with record numbers of Covid-19 deaths. “To be No. 1 now, this is a new start for us, a new beginning.”“It was a very difficult year for us,” said the Italian reporter Simone Zani.Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York TimesEurovision, the largest music contest in the world, is a campy trifle to some, but it celebrates Europe’s cultural diversity and is a reflection of the times we live in. For many outside Europe, the attraction of Eurovision can be hard to comprehend. But a key reason the 200-million plus audience is watching is that there is no cultural mold for the event. Anything goes, and diversity is highly encouraged. The global entertainment business may be dominated by U.S. pop culture, but at Eurovision, 39 different countries can showcase their ideas of music and pop culture with no industry rules other than a three-minute song limit.And, a shocker perhaps for a U.S. audience, the three-hour show is completely commercial-free.So Germany, the political leader of the continent, sent in a song against hate, with the artist Jendrik playing a diamond studded ukulele while being accompanied by a dancing finger. Tix, the singer for Norway, has Tourette’s syndrome. He was dressed in a gigantic fur coat and wearing angel wings, while being chained to four horned demons. “Remember guys, you are not alone,” he said to everyone “suffering” in the world.The three singers of Serbia’s entry, Hurricane, may have sported the big hair look of American groups of decades past, but despite seeming as if they had bought up most of the hair extensions on the continent, they sang their song, “Loco Loco,” in Serbian.Maneskin barely beat France’s Barbara Pravi, and her chanson “Voilà.” Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty ImagesPiroschka Van De Wouw/ReutersDean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty ImagesIn fact, four of the top five winning songs of this year were sung in languages other than English. “There is clearly a thirst for more originality and real meaning,” Cornald Maas, a festival commentator for Dutch Public Television for over 15 years, said of the victories for songs presented in their national languages.Europe, he said, had been looking for a song celebrating newfound life. “The winning song isn’t a restrained ballad as you might expect after corona,” Mr. Maas said, “but instead it’s an exuberant plea for authenticity, a call to ignore meaningless chatter.”The show on Saturday in the Ahoy Arena in Rotterdam showed a glimpse of life as we knew it before the pandemic, and a future in which the virus might be under some form of control.Many in the audience were wearing orange outfits, the national color of the Netherlands, singing along, dancing and hugging — and drinking. Alcohol was for sale and it was clear that some of the flag-toting celebrants had indulged. The entire audience of 3,500 was obliged to show a negative coronavirus test, taken under an elaborate testing plan paid for by the government. Members of the different delegations sat in a special zone in the middle of the arena on couches, where they had to keep socially distanced but still got up and danced around.The crowd went wild every time Nikkie de Jager came onstage. Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York TimesThe shining star among the presenters was Nikkie de Jager, from the Netherlands who has a well-known YouTube makeup channel, Nikkie Tutorials. The crowd went wild every time she came onstage or even walked past the corridors.In normal times the Eurovision circus attracts tens of thousands of fans who turn the organizing cities upside down, taking over bars and clubs. This year the event was divided into several physical bubbles to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.During the two weeks of rehearsals, artists would meet only in one common room, where several countries had organized a table tennis contest, in which Italy also performed quite well, Samya Hafsaoui, a Dutch official, said.Two members of the Icelandic act, Dadi og Gagnamagnid, ended up quarantining after contracting the virus, meaning that their song, “10 Years,” about a successful marriage, couldn’t be performed live. The singer Dadi Freyr, and other group members, watched from a hotel room as the results came in. Standing in for the missing performers were dolls wearing the band’s outfit, topped with iPads showing their faces. Despite the recorded performance, Iceland landed fourth place.Duncan Laurence, who had won for the Netherlands in 2019, also contracted the virus and wasn’t able to perform during this year’s finals as is the tradition. The event was canceled in 2020.The entire audience was obliged to show a negative coronavirus test. Here, visitors pose for a photo before they enter the arena.Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York TimesArtists only came out for brief socially distanced news conferences. Ms. Pravi, the French singer-songwriter, held lively conversations in the days before the final, waving hands and arms and mixing French and English. Ms. Pravi said she never makes any concessions, and the same was true of her song, “Voilà.” She said, “My ‘parcours’ shows this,” referring to the French term for career path.Ms. Pravi comes from an international family of singers and painters. Her maternal grandfather is the famous Iranian painter Hossein Zenderoudi. Her song dusts off the French chanson, recalling singers like Edith Piaf and Serge Gainsbourg.Some had criticized her, calling her style of singing out of fashion, but Ms. Pravi strongly disagreed. “You don’t need to make concessions in music,” she said. “You can be absolutely yourself, doing the music you like, say the words you want and being the woman you want to be. And now I am here at Eurovision, the biggest contest in the world.”Early Sunday morning Ms. Pravi was seen in the dimly lit press center speaking to French reporters who couldn’t believe that their country had come so close to victory, after having achieved almost no Eurovision honors since their victory in 1977.Damiano David from Maneskin celebrated at the press conference after Italy’s win.Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York TimesAs the Italian rockers of Maneskin took off their shirts to celebrate their victory, the singer James Newman, the United Kingdom’s entrant, was nowhere to be found. His song “Embers” had received zero points from both the national juries and the international audience. “It’s Brexit,” said Meg Perry-Duxbury, a Briton living in Rotterdam, sitting next to me in the arena. “Europe doesn’t want us to win.” She herself was supporting Cyprus (another song featuring devils) anyway, Ms. Perry-Duxbury said. “So whatever.” More

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      Who Will Win Eurovision 2021?

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      Who Will Win Eurovision 2021?Alex MarshallReporting on Eurovision ����[embedded content]San Marino: Remember Flo Rida, the rapper? Well, San Marino’s Senhit does, and has gotten him to travel to Rotterdam, and even quarantine, to guest on her entry. What will Eurovision fans think of an American muscling in on their contest? More

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      How to Watch Eurovision 2021

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      Even in a normal year, the competition’s unique traditions can be confusing to newcomers. Here’s what you need to know.LONDON — The Eurovision Song Contest is the world’s biggest music competition: a fiercely competitive, always surprising, sometimes surreal Olympics of song. Broadcast live across the world, the competition has taken place since 1956, making it one of the longest running television shows of all time. More

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      Second Time Lucky? Eurovision Hopefuls Try Again.

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      Eurovision acts are known for being one-hit wonders. Can this year’s contestants, most returnees from the canceled 2020 event, break the stereotype?LONDON — When the Eurovision Song Contest was canceled last March because of the coronavirus pandemic, Vasil Garvanliev, North Macedonia’s entry, was distraught.“My whole life, I’d been working my butt off to get there and my journey didn’t even take off,” Garvanliev, 36, said in a telephone interview. “I was devastated.”For Garvanliev — and the event’s hundreds of millions of fans — Eurovision is far more than a glitzy, high-camp song contest. “It’s the Olympics of singing,” Garvanliev said.Last March he sat on his bed feeling depressed, he remembered, before picking up a keyboard to try to console himself. He started picking out a gentle melody on the instrument, then lyrics popped into his head. “Wait, it won’t be long,” he sung, “trust your heart and just stay strong.”“This song came out of me,” Garvanliev said, “and I thought, ‘Holy smokes, I have something beautiful here.’” Of course, “I didn’t know it’d end up being for this year’s Eurovision,” Garvanliev added. “I didn’t even know I’d be asked back.”For Eurovision 2021, the arena will be at 20 percent capacity, and no dancing will be allowed. Pool photo by Niels WenstedtBut in January, after an eight-month-long agonizing wait, Garvanliev was invited to perform at this year’s competition — one of 26 returning acts from Eurovision 2020. Scheduled for May 22 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2021 is likely to be the strangest edition of the contest ever held — a high bar, given past winners have included Abba and Lordi, a Finnish heavy metal act whose members dress as monsters.The arena will be at 20 percent capacity, with just 3,500 people in the audience cheering the contestants on, while remaining seated to lessen the risk of coronavirus spreading. The event is officially part of a series of Dutch government trials to see how to run large events in a safe way. The contestants will all have made prerecorded versions of their songs in case they catch Covid-19 and are unable to perform.But perhaps the most unusual aspect is that all the returning contestants will be performing a different song from the one they had planned for the 2020 event. In a competition known for one-hit wonders, who disappear from view almost as soon as the contest ends, this year’s contestants have to prove they don’t fit that pattern.“This is our difficult second album,” Garvanliev said, referring to the phenomena of bands struggling to match their early success. He hoped his 2021 song “Here I Stand” wouldn’t fall into that trap.The entrant facing the biggest challenge in capturing last year’s magic is Dadi Freyr, Iceland’s act, with his band Gagnamagnid. Last year, Freyr was the favorite to win thanks to his song “Think About Things,” a catchy disco number about his newborn child.By the time Eurovision was canceled, the song’s video had been watched millions of times on YouTube. Soon, it was going viral on Twitter and TikTok too, after families started performing variations of the video’s dance routine while stuck at home in lockdown.“It changed my life, that song,” Freyr said in a video interview. Before the pandemic, Freyr generally only got booked for shows in Iceland, he said. Suddenly he was selling out tours across Europe.“I’ve probably had one of the best pandemics,” Freyr said.Freyr’s entry this year is another catchy disco track called “10 Years,” this time about his marriage (“How does it keep getting better?” he sings in the chorus). He felt he had to keep the track similar in style to “Think About Things,” since Icelanders had voted for a fun disco tune to represent them at the competition, he said. It still took 12 attempts to come up with a new song he liked, he added.The track’s so far not gone viral, but Freyr said that didn’t bother him. “I didn’t go to try and recreate the success, because I know it’s impossible to predict something like that,” he said. “Luck has to be part of it.”Four other Eurovision returnees said in interviews that they found the pandemic to be the biggest hurdle to writing a new hit. “For the first three or four months of the pandemic, I just didn’t do any writing at all,” said Jessica Alyssa Cerro, Australia’s entry, who performs as Montaigne.“I sort of got to November and was like, ‘Hmm, I should probably start working on that Eurovision song, huh?’” she added.Jeangu Macrooy, the Netherlands’ entry, said in a telephone interview that he similarly struggled. “I was getting no inspiration — I was just sitting inside,” he said.Then, in December when he was trying to write entries for the contest, a host of thoughts and feelings around George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement started bubbling up inside him.Soon he had conjured the lyrics to “Birth of a New Age,” an uplifting track about being “the rage that melts the chains.” Macrooy said he hoped it would speak to everyone standing up for their rights now, whether people of color, L.G.B.T.Q. people or the otherwise marginalized. The chorus of “You can’t break me” is sung in Sranan Tongo, the lingua franca of his native Suriname in South America.“It’s an ode to people claiming their space and saying, ‘I deserve respect and deserve to be accepted for who I am,’” Macrooy said. “I couldn’t have written it if I hadn’t lived through 2020,” he added.He’d recently been dreaming of people dancing to the track, he said, “so if that doesn’t happen at Eurovision, it’ll be awkward.” (The event’s current coronavirus safety rules prevent dancing.)For Montaigne, such dreams are now a thing of the past. She recently found out she would not be traveling to the Netherlands to compete, after Australian officials decided her attendance was too much of a coronavirus risk. Instead, Eurovision fans will have to watch the backup performance of “Technicolour,” which she recorded in March.Montaigne said she was fine with the decision, especially because she knew the pandemic was far from over in the Netherlands, with thousands of new cases of coronavirus currently being reported every day. “It would have been so bad if I was the person who brought coronavirus back to Australia, where we’re sitting in stadiums, having a good time dancing and touching each other,” she said.Even without attending, she still has a story to “tell my grandkids about,” she said. She’s the only Eurovision contestant ever to have missed the event twice because of a pandemic. More

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      Eurovision Song Contest Disqualifies Belarus Over Political Lyrics

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      The song’s lyrics were found to violate the competition’s rules in what critics called an endorsement of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko’s crackdown on antigovernment protests.The long-running unrest in Belarus has spilled over into this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, with organizers ejecting the country from the competition for songs found to have repeatedly violated rules barring political content.The country’s original song entry, “Ya Nauchu Tebya” (I’ll Teach You) by the band Galasy ZMesta, was criticized by opposition figures who assert that lyrics such as “I will teach you to toe the line” endorsed the President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko’s violent crackdown on antigovernment protests. Eurovision fans started an online petition asking organizers to make Belarus withdraw from the competition.This month the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the international musical spectacular, wrote to Belarus’s national broadcaster, BTRC, saying that the entry was not eligible to compete in the musical talent show in May this year in the Dutch city of Rotterdam.“The song puts the nonpolitical nature of the contest in question,” the broadcasting union’s statement said.Belarus was given an opportunity to submit a modified version of the song, or a new tune. But after evaluating the replacement, the union said in another statement on Friday evening that “the new submission was also in breach of the rules” and that Belarus would be disqualified.Belarus was gripped for weeks by large-scale protests last year after Mr. Lukashenko claimed a landslide victory in what many Western governments said was a sham election in August. His security forces then brutally cracked down on mass demonstrations.Both songs that the eastern European nation entered for Eurovision this year came under criticism for what many viewed as pro-government lyrics and imagery. The band that performs the songs, Galasy ZMesta, was also found to have what could be interpreted as an anti-protest message on its website, taking aim at people who “try to destroy the country we love and live in,” and adding, “we cannot stay indifferent” toward them.Eurovision’s rules state that the event is nonpolitical and that “no lyrics, speeches, gestures of a political, commercial or similar nature shall be permitted” in the contest.Belarus started competing in Eurovision in 2004 and has fielded an entrant every year since, so it knew what it was doing in entering songs that contained political messaging, said Oliver Adams, a correspondent for Wiwibloggs, a widely read site for Eurovision news.Although the coronavirus pandemic halted Eurovision’s 2020 grand finale, more than 180 million people watched the contest in 2019. As the world’s longest-running annual televised music competition, it has amassed a highly dedicated following of excitable fans.The contest, which started 65 years ago, cemented its place last year as a cultural phenomenon with a Netflix movie gently mocking its eccentricities and obsessive fandom.Countries’ being pulled up for submitting tunes with political undertones in Eurovision is rare, but has happened before. Georgia entered the song “We Don’t Wanna Put In” for the 2009 contest that was held in Moscow, but organizers rejected it for containing obvious references to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, including the wordplay in the song title. Georgia withdrew from the competition that year but denied that the song contained “political statements.”This year, Armenia also withdrew from Eurovision. Its public broadcaster attributed the decision in part to the political fallout from the conflict with Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.“This isn’t the first time that political tension has found its way into the Eurovision-sphere,” said Mx. Adams, who uses the gender-neutral courtesy title in place of Mr. or Ms.“These outer-Eurovision bubble problems do seep their way into the contest sometimes,” he added, “but ultimately they’re never going to break it apart.” More

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      Eurovision Song Contest Guaranteed for 2021 Return Regardless of COVID-19 Situation

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      The 2020 event, which was originally set to take place in The Netherlands, was called off in May as the coronavirus spread around the world, but each contestant got invited back to perform a new song.
      Sep 19, 2020
      AceShowbiz – Eurovision Song Contest chiefs have confirmed the event will “definitely” return next year – even if Europe is still on lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
      This year’s event from Rotterdam in The Netherlands was called off in May as the coronavirus spread around the world, with each contestant invited back in 2021 to perform a new song.
      On Friday, September 18, organizers announced that the European music extravaganza will “definitely return” on May 22, 2021, outlining four different scenarios in a statement posted on the Eurovision website.

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      If the pandemic subsides and a vaccine is made available, the contest will be hosted as usual from Rotterdam’s Ahoy Arena, with a full audience and media contingent in attendance.
      The second scenario would again feature a full contest, but with a limited socially distant audience and limits on the size of delegations and press teams.
      In case travel restrictions are implemented, a third plan would result in artists performing from their own country if unable to travel to The Netherlands, as well as, again, a socially distanced audience and limits on press and delegations.
      Should The Netherlands be in lockdown, the contest will be hosted from the Ahoy Arena without an audience, but with each act performing via video link from their homeland.
      A definitive decision on the contest format will be made early in 2021.
      It arrives after the 2020 Eurovision contest, which was supposed to be held in Rotterdam, Netherland, was canceled due to the coronavirus. Confirming the sad news back in May, the organizers said in a statement, “We would ask people to bear with us while we work through the ramifications of this unprecedented decision and patiently await any further news in the coming days and weeks. all the host broadcaster team in the Netherlands and our 41 Members who have worked so hard planning this year’s event.”
      “We are all as heartbroken as they are that the Eurovision Song Contest will not be able to be staged in may and know that the whole Eurovision family, across the world, will continue to provide love and support for each other at this difficult time,” the statement concluded.

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      Eurovision Contest to Exclude 2020 Songs From 2021 Competition

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      Though ruling out the songs entered into this year’s canceled show from next year’s, European Broadcasting Union notes that countries could still send the same artist.
      Mar 23, 2020
      AceShowbiz – The songs that were entered into this year’s cancelled Eurovision Song Contest will not be eligible for the 2021 show, organisers have confirmed.
      In a statement shared on the official Eurovision Twitter page earlier this week (begin March 16), it was confirmed that the event, set to be held in Rotterdam in the Netherlands in May, had been called off, due to “the uncertainty created by the spread of COVID-19 throughout Europe”.
      On Friday, producers released a statement confirming that songs that were entered into the 2020 event cannot be held over to next year’s event.
      However, European Broadcasting Union (EBU) officials have said countries could still send the same artist they had hoped would represent them in what was to have been the 65th edition of the show.
      The announcement came as the EBU confirmed plans to “honour the songs and artists” chosen to perform this year with an online event, telling fans in a statement: “We have been overwhelmed with the love that the Eurovision Song Contest family has shared since the difficult decision to cancel the 2020 event.”
      “As such, the EBU and its members are currently exploring alternative programming, but not a competition, to help unite and entertain audiences around Europe during these challenging times,” the statement continued. “It is our intention with this programming, and on our online platforms in the coming months, to honour the songs and artists which have been chosen for the Eurovision Song Contest 2020.”

      Organisers concluded: “We ask for your continued patience while we work through practical implications of these ideas in the coming days and weeks.”

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