I'm a big Eurovision fan, and I felt like treating my post-Eurovision low by posting a bit of a wrap up of what the rest of the world is missing (or not
) I have no idea if anyone here is remotely interested, but it's not like this forum is running out of space
So here's the top songs and collected other songs of interest.The winner was unsurprisingly Ukraine, with an overwhelming majority in audience votes and a good chunk of the jury votes too, which wasn't surpsising since their song was quite good.
Their stage show was fairly unmemorable so instead of that I'm going to post the video they released for the winning song a few hours after the competition. This one doesn't need anything additional commentary, it's a fantastic video for a great song. It's subtitled in English for your convenience.
UK has done terribly in Eurovision for quite a while. Last year they ended up with literally zero audience or jury points, a memorable achievent in itself. This year a TikTok favorite Sam Ryder wiped a lot of that sad history away by collecting more points than the last 11 UK entries combined. The guy is a legit fantastic vocalist, with a solid Elton John-style song. I'm posting the music video version because the stage show was just total crap :P
3rd place was Spain, who really nailed their performance in the final. No subtitles, but it's about exactly what you'd think, a "booty hypnotic"
Sweden was Sweden, doing very well in both jury and televotes with an expertly produced break-up power-ballad in English.
Now for your classic Eurovision weirdness, it's 'In Corpore Sano'.
Serbia's entry was likely the most fascinating story of the year. The artist Konstrakta had created a three part art-pop piece in Serbian, and thought she'd get a bit more visibility for it locally if she performed one of the songs in the Serbian national qualification contest. She picked the middle song of the three simply because it was the the shortest one (Eurovision has a strict 3 minute time limit for songs). The look on her face when she actually won was pretty funny. Success kept following her through the semifinals and into a very respectable fifth place finish.
'In Corpore Sano' covers some real crowd-pleasing topics like how commercialization has made us conflate beauty with health, the way physical health gets prioritized over mental health, and how artists in Serbia don't have proper access to public healthcare. Oh, and some of the lyrics are in latin, just to make it extra accessible. The appeal of Konstrakta's handwashing performance is somewhat hard to explain, but there's just something about this song that captured my imagination and the imagination of a lot of people in Europe, despite most of them not listening to it without subtitles. It's also way more catchy than a song like this should be
Or maybe we're just all connecting with the stage show, which was mostly just her obsessively washing her hands.
The video has english lyrics.