Eurovision is A Campy Festival of the National-Cultural

Euro2007LordiWins

This is a little late, I realize, especially given the greatly accelerated lifecycle of the ‘topical’ in these days of the internets and scroll-down news. Yet, two weeks ago at an academic conference in Turku, a little analysis was offered of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest in early May (I summarize below the jump). So Eurovision’s topicality endures a bit, and besides, what’s not to love about it? I can’t think of any comparable global institution: a campy take on the idea of the nation–and a campy take that people evidently really care about! Indeed, one that they get angry about sometimes. There is also the Olympics of course, but although Olympic pomp and circumstance is often theatrical, I don’t think it could be described as camp (with the possible exception of Lionel Richie’s performance at the Closing Ceremonies of the 1984 L.A. Olympics or maybe Björk in Athens — she tucks ‘the world’ under her undulating dress).

Anyway, Helsinki hosted the contest this year because Finnish band Lordi, much to the shock of Finns everywhere, actually won the contest last year. (I was still in San Francisco back when Finland won, and was in fact having lunch with a Finnish family when the kids suddenly received excited phone calls from home announcing that Finland was victorious. We all jumped up and down. With characteristic self-deprecation, Finns had often joked that Finland would only win the contest after hell freezes over, having long endured low placing finishes.) Finns had been nervous and a little embarrassed about their entry, an over-the-top monster-goth-rock band from Rovaniemi near the Arctic Circle (pictured on the right above; one of their songs is ‘Would You Love a Monsterman?‘). But judging from the visible commercial culture I see every day, the country ultimately rallied behind these monsters escaping a frozen underworld. Thus, joining in the High Goth spirit of things, I have tried to drink as much Lordi Lite Cola as possible since moving to Helsinki.

Readers of SM from outside Europe may be unaware, as I was, of some interesting aspects of the contest. One of them is the legendary ‘tactical voting,’ in which countries award contest points to other countries through a system of what appears to be something like nationalized general reciprocity and/or regional alliances. Wikipedia notes:

The Contest has long been perceived as a political institution, where judges — and now televoters — allocate points based on their nation’s political relationship to the other countries, rather than on their opinions of the songs. An analysis of voting patterns does indeed show that some countries tend to favour countries in geographical proximity, with which they might be politically aligned, as the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland), Greece and Cyprus, Romania and Moldova, the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), United Kingdom with Ireland and Malta, France and Portugal, Slavic countries (e.g. Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavian states), Turkey with Bosnia and Turkish diaspora (e.g. particularly in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands) or Belgium and the Netherlands. However, these somewhat informal affiliations are not always the expected ones, nor can their existence be explained solely on the grounds of geographical proximity. Defenders of the contest argue that the reason countries that tend to allocate disproportionately high points to others is because the people of those countries share similar musical taste and culture, speak similar languages, and are therefore more likely to appreciate each other’s music.

Most of my Finnish friends (read: my students) have noted that Nordic countries historically award points in something like paternalistic fashion. Sweden awards its top points to Finland… Finland in turn awards its top points to Estonia. This stereotypical point distribution narrative reflects putative perceptions of difference in status. An emergent theme in these voting controversies is the rise of Eastern Europe.
Along with something like 20,000 other (drunken) folks, I watched this year’s contest on a giant screen in Helsinki’s Senate Square (below) with anthropologist Nancy Abelmann and with Emily Martin’s husband Richard Cone. Neither Richard nor Nancy could understand why I was rooting for British entry, Scooch. To my mind it was rather obvious.
helsinki015.jpgEurovision entries I think fall into two main groups: Gay Kitsch (Western Europe) and Vegas (Eastern Europe). Sometimes these overlap, as for example in Ukraine’s fabulous Verka Serduchka. But compare Moldova’s Natalia Barbu. For Western Europe, the whole contest seems to be almost like gay pride. Indeed, Helsinki seemed like a gay town (for a second!) during the contest. Entries from Sweden, Switzerland, Great Britain, Austria, and others seemed to solicit the gay vote. (Switzerland attempted to cross the gay aspect with Lordi-style goth in a hilarous and cheesy Broadwayesque number called ‘Vampires Are Alive‘. Seriously, check it out.)

As it happens, the actual winner ended up disturbing in a slightly different way any division between Western Europe (gay kitsch) and Eastern Europe (straight kitsch, which I am labelling ‘Vegas’). The winner was a woman from Serbia called Marija Šerifović. Her song, a plaintive pop prayer, Molitva, was straightforward enough and nicely featured her powerful singing voice. What was surprising and interesting was the obvious lesbian subtext of the way she staged her performance. This is where the feminist conference in Turku comes in.

A speaker at the conference in Turku noted that at an academic discussion of Eurovision (yes, these exist) at the University of Helsinki during the contest, a great deal of speculation surrounded the sexual identity of Šerifović. Reasons were obvious: the number featured soft-butch Šerifović apparently having something like elbow sex with a group of super femme back up singers. (Little lipstick hearts were painted on their hands.) When I saw Šerifović, I initially thought — Hey, isn’t that a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric at Berkeley?? Others were thinking the same thing (or something similar anyway) and were then disappointed when immediately after winning the contest, Šerifović announced that she was looking forward to finding a husband. She subsequently did come out as a lesbian, and dedicated her song to minorities everywhere.

What troubled the speaker in Turku was that while feminist-queer theorists have been busily deconstructing ‘identity’ and calling for a ‘fluid’ conception of sexuality, gender, et al, when it comes down to it, they nevertheless want people in public to identify. This seemed ironic.

Obviously, pop anthropologists would find lots to discuss in the national-cultural festival of Eurovision — commercial cultures and technologies of public address, national rivalries, the shifting notion(s) of Europe, the (sexual, gendered) intimacies of nationality, and more. But for those of us who just dabble in such matters, the contest is really just Good Times.

UPDATE (06.12.2007):  There is a Eurovision conference in 2008 organized by the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly (Volos, Greece) in association with the Benaki Museum (Athens, Greece).  Click here.