Friday, May 3, 2013

Eurovision - The Good and the Bad

Eurovision is this month! What is Eurovision, you may ask? Let me explain this to my American readership.

It's a yearly contest where a bunch of European countries (and a few in northern Africa and the western parts of the middle east, which as any fourth grader taking a geography class could tell you, are not parts of Europe) pick singers from their country to record a song, and then a panel of judges picks which one is the best. It's a pretty huge deal in that corner of the world.

Some of the artists who took part in the contest have gone on to be big names in the music world. Such as ABBA and Celine Dion, who most of know for being completely and indefensibly horrible.

However, in the interest of fairness, I want to talk about one of the good entries in the contest, because there were some good ones over the years. By the law of averages, there would have to be. If Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of everything is crap, 10% has to be at the very least not crap, and a small percentage of that 10% has to be good or even great, right?

The best song I could find from the contest is by music legend, Julio Iglesias with his first big hit song, Gwendolyne, which was Spain's entry in the 1970 contest. It's an absolutely beautiful song.


On the other end of the quality spectrum is this mess, the UK's 2000 entry, Don't Play That Song Again by Nicki French.

 

UGH. Don't play that song again.

This woman has all the talent of a third place runner up on a bad season of American Idol. She's probably better known for this awful cover of Total Eclipse of the Heart that was an actual hit in America in 1995 going to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. I have no idea why. It's painfully bland.

It's not always pop music, though. Sometimes, it's as far from pop as you can get. And it still manages to suck. Like Spain's 2010 entry, Algo Pequenito by Daniel Diges.

 

It's like Tim Burton and Cirque Du Soleil teamed up to show me absolute horror, and to add insult to injury, they had some guy with Art Garfunkel's hair sing a horrible song at the same time.

Norway's 1978 entry, Mi Etter Mil by Jahn Teigen, is considered one of the worst ever, apparently. The kicker is that they brought this guy back twice afterwards to represent Norway.

 

I don't know why people hated this. If you're going to make awful music, you might as well be hilariously bad about it. I dig this guy. The suspenders, the tie, the collar, the pants, the sunglasses, that little jump he does at the end... This is a man failing spectacularly, and apparently he used that failure to propel himself into a successful music career. Jahn Teigen rules.

Here's another one from Norway, 2009's entry by Aleksander Rybak. The song is called Fairytale. This guy has one of the worst singing voices I've ever heard. And he rocks the fiddle like a Scandinavian Charlie Daniels.

                                    

Here's the worst part. That won. A panel of judges from across Europe determined that this was the best song to come out of Europe and a handful of countries outside of Europe that year. Now, I'm not really up on European popular music from 2009, but I'm betting that that's not true.

As I mentioned before, not all entries are from Europe. The funny thing is that Israel has won the contest three times. That's not a statement of quality, but it's something.

Anyway, here's Israel's 2000 entry. It's by a band called Ping Pong, and the song is entitled Sa' me 'akh. Just press play and brace yourself, because you're in for a bumpy ride.

                                    

You probably turned the video off as soon as the singing starts, and that's understandable because blondie there is one of the worst singers I've ever heard, but trust me - it gets worse with each passing second. This is one of the worst things I've ever heard. I hate this song and I hate everyone involved with it.

Apparently, they got into a bit of trouble with their country's government when they all pulled out flags, some of them Syrian, and waved them around because a song this horrible needs a political message thrown in because otherwise, I wouldn't take it seriously.

That's not all the horrible songs I could find (and the Julio Iglesias song isn't the only good one I could find either), but that's all I really want to say. I think I showcased plenty of horrible stuff and one really good song, and that's really the only thing I'm trying to do here.

I honestly wish I had more time to research this contest because I'm sure I'm missing some great music, as well as some horrendous garbage. I just hope that Ping Pong was the worst entry in Eurovision's history. I don't know if I could stomach anything that's worse than that.

There's also the possibility that I'm being far too kind to Eurovision. I won't rule that out either.

No comments:

Post a Comment