nEUrosis

Eurovisionary boredom

May 14th, 2007 by Viktor Dimitrov

It all went wrong on Friday evening: the party at Holdudvar got out of control so the only way to survive the weekend was to go to the countryside and avoid friends who could get you out for another round of utter madness. Ildiko, our favourite waitress at Caledonia told us that on Saturday they would dress up as ABBA and follow the Eurovision together in the pub. Thus, one more reason to get out of town as soon as possible.

What you try to avoid something really hard is usually imposed on you one way or another, so there I am in front of the telly, sipping quietly some white wine and bang – it’s the Eurovision. An event which should be banned for the sole reason of taking ABBA out of obscurity, if being utterly rubbish itself was not enough. I got stuck and I watched it and I felt there was something shockingly similar between this boring and tedious show and the state of affairs in modern Europe.

First, it was obvious that the English are not taking the whole contest seriously, there is no other way to explain why they were represented by a cheesy anachronism of the 80’s at its worst. Second, the French came up with top quality stuff but the Euro-audience was too stupid to understand that. Third, the whole show lacked creativity – we saw the Moldavian Evanescence, Armenia’s Tom Jones, Greece’s and Turkey’s own Ricky Martin’s (funnily enough, both songs were about ‘shaking it up’ or something), and if Germany and Sweden took it one step further they could have been accused of plagiarism. This is the Europe we know – the English are ignoring it, we can’t hide the anti-French sentiments, and there is not enough true originality of thought and innovation (although I need to admit that the cucumber-related EU regulations are bringing in something fresh). On top of that, the attempt to inspire an all-European emotion, as if something really great was happening, was absolutely pathetic. Solidarity was present only on a regional level when people systematically voted for their neighbours or allies.

Thankfully, underneath the artificial and rotten surface of Eurovision, European music culture might be really fascinating and valuable. Sunday night I went to Beshodrom’s gig in Budapest – top-quality stuff, interpretation of roma musical traditions that blew my head off. Applying the above analogy, it might turn out that if we disregard the junk they are trying to sell us as true-European, we have lots of things we can be happy about.

Of course, a few words about what was good at the Eurovision: Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and Macedonia’s contribution was not bad at all - doing something cool and modern based on your own tradition is fine. Hungary’s pet, Magdi Ruzsa insisted on wearing jeans and a simple t-shirt, explaining that she wants to be evaluated solely based on her voice.

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