by Geoff Vasil

Opaque participation rules, a system of internal patronage, sad attempts at bad pop music and a voting system which emulates the worst Third World satrapy. Yet, the Eurovision Song Contest has a cult following in Europe, and has had for many decades. In practice this race to the bottom of pop culture has led to performers intentionally playing to the lowest common pop-denominator, making themselves and the contest into a complete caricature, or a caricature-within-a-caricature, if you like.

Besides the byzantine voting process, “reformed” in recent years for a proportional voting system where unelected local/national juries or commissions account for perhaps (no one really knows) half of the total vote, while nation-state-member audiences call in their votes amounting to perhaps half the total, no one has really defined what “European” means in terms of this odd competition. Earlier contestants included Morocco and Lebanon, Australia seems to have secured a permanent vote, and Israel has been an on-again, off-again participant and voting block.

This year around 20,000 protestors descended on Malmo in Sweden–Sweden is the venue because their team, band, or horde, won last year–to demand Israel be excluded.

In semi-finals whoever actually runs the Eurovision Song Contest demanded the Israeli group rename their entry from “October Rain” to something else, which became “Hurricane,” although the actual message of the song seems to revolve around Hamas’s unprecedented atrocities against Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.