Double Vision

In 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest—a televised European, well, song contest—debuted in Switzerland. The event grew out of a similar competition in Italy as well as an emerging union—and content-sharing push—among Europe’s public service broadcasters as the continent healed following the ravages of the Second World War. It would go on to bear witness to bona fide music history: in 1974, ABBA got their big break when they won with “Waterloo” in the English seaside city of Brighton; ditto Céline Dion, who won for Switzerland, in 1988, with “Ne partez pas sans moi.” In more recent times, however, the content has been less memorable for the songs—which are sometimes passable, often terrible, and occasionally truly unhinged—than its reliable, high-camp sense of spectacle. (Eurovision has yet to really catch on in the US, though it is a reliable subject of curiosity for the American press and inspired a decent Will Ferrell movie, in 2020, as well as an American Song Contest on NBC, in 2022, which was hosted by Snoop Dogg and Kelly Clarkson, and took the form of a battle between states. The show petered out, but not without bequeathing the insanely catchy Wyoming entry “New Boot Goofin’.”)

Eurovision presents as a glossy annual celebration of continental unity; it’s also a testament to the ongoing mass-cultural potential of traditional media, and linear public service broadcasting in particular. (It boasts a higher TV audience than the Super Bowl, for example.) It is also reliably political, despite claiming to be a respite from politics. Often, the politics are petty; growing up in the UK, I’d routinely hear grumbling about (quite literal) bloc voting on the part of, say, neighboring countries in Eastern Europe, a complaint that reflected some mix of reality, casual xenophobia, and a refusal to acknowledge that British entries—the nightmarish airline-inspired bubblegum-pop number “Flying the Flag,” for instance—might have struggled on merit. (Eurovision winners are determined by combining the verdict of juries of experts with a continent-wide popular vote, in which viewers can opt for any entry bar their country’s own. In fact, the vote is more than continent-wide: Eurovision involves a handful of countries from beyond Europe’s borders, including Israel and Australia.) Sometimes, however, the politics have been much more fraught. Following mass protests (and an attendant clampdown on press freedom) in Belarus, the country tried to enter a song about teaching people to “toe the line,” and was eventually expelled. In 2016, Russia was favored to win, but lost out to Ukraine, whose entrant sang of the persecution of the Tatars of Crimea; Ukraine apparently convinced the organizers that its song was historical, not political, but it had clear contemporary resonance given Russia’s recent occupation of Crimea, and Russian state media declared something like an international incident. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That same day, Eurovision’s organizers indicated that, since the event is nonpolitical, Russia would still be able to compete—but a day later, they reversed course and banned it from participating. A Eurovision official later told a BBC program (which was being guest-directed by a member of ABBA) that the contest always stands up for “the basic and ultimate values of democracy.”