Friday, May 09, 2014

EUROVISION?

The Eurovision Song Contest is a huge, annual, transnational, media event that was originally created to foster popular European music culture and industry.  In the beginning, competing nations had to sing in their native tongue and entrants often offered music with an indigenous flavour.  As the years have passed, the music has become more homogeneous, and the language of choice, for the singers, and the on-air hosts, has become english. As far as being a bulwark against english language pop culture is concerned Eurovision  is a failure.

What it has become is its own kitsch universe, that exists in a bubble, and is only fully understood by the Captains of Camp - the gay community.  This fact is clearly understood by DR, whose TV Hosts play up to gay sensibilities:





The most interesting aspect of the show is observing the Regional Voting habits of Europe, as citizens who are unable to vote for their own country inevitably reveal cultural alliances in the voting statistics.

And the most important thing we can learn from Eurovision is that government subsidized Culture (in the case of Eurovision, to the tune of $100 million per year) is a complete fiasco.  Very few acts from Eurovision have made any impact on the music scene. If Eurovision was a private enterprise it would have gone bankrupt years ago...

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