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Old 05-15-2022, 06:20 AM   #2
Itse
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That was the top 5, and here's some other entertaining picks.

Moldova was 2nd in audience votes but got absolutely buried in jury votes (each counts for half), but got enough to finish 7th. This is a great example of how to sneak politics into a supposedly a-political show. On surface this song seems like a complete nonsense party-song, but hidden in the lyrics is actually a fairly controversial topic, as it's actually a pro-unification song for Romania and Moldova. (Not going to get into the history of that, but a very short version is that it's a thing that's been talked about. Romania is in the EU and NATO, Moldova is not. Russia is against the idea, current Moldovan political leadership is I think for it. A unification would have consequences for Transnistria, which borders Ukraine. Basically a lot of Eastern European geopolitics.)

This is the 3rd time this band has competed in the Eurovision, and they've always done pretty well. Easy to see why.



And here's Norway keeping up Eurovisions reputation as a place for weird party songs. Respectable 10th place finish. Guaranteed to be blasted in many drunked dance parties in Europe this summer.



Lithuania was one of my personal favorites this year. This performance is from their national final, after her win, because it's got translated lyrics. It's just such a perfect version of what the song is trying to do.



I'll end with a trio of songs that didn't make it past the semifinal stage, but were nevertheless quite entertaining in one way or another.

This is Latvia's entry. The song is absolute trash and I mostly hate it, but that opening line does grab your attention, and the song is also annoyingly catchy :P
(Obviously they had to censor the song a bit for the actual contest.)

NSFW LYRICS


Georgia's entry was a fairly obscure local prog-rock band, who put on a pretty good show.



I'll finish with San Marino's entry. The artist is actually Italian, seen often as an influence to Måneskin (who won last year's Eurovision).

The song is garbage, but the guy went all out on the show, so it'd be a shame to not include it




Other mentionable events were Switzerland making it through the semi-final and doing fairly well in the finals in jury points, until audience votes were published... and then getting literally zero points from the audience. After the final they released the semi-final points, revealing that the same thing had happened in the semi-final. Good jury points, literally zero audience points.


As an overall comment, despite the picks here being fairly upbeat, this year was dominated by ballads, many of them fairly sad.

Last edited by Itse; 05-15-2022 at 06:28 AM.
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