Eurovision 2022 Wrap-up (Ukraine wins)

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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.

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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.