Monster mash at Eurosong

Lordi

I walked in on a cultural phenomenon this week when I came into the office and found the staff crowded around Lidija's computer.

They were watching a video of Hari Mati Hari singing Leilja. Some were singing along. They were all rapt and applauded at the end. Hari, a dark-haired crooning Bosnia pop star, is serving as the BiH entry into this year's Eurovision Song Contest.

They could not believe that not only had I not been following the contest, I'd never heard of. Have any Americans?


Eurovision has been around since 1956 and is akin to the Miss America pageant in the US, a huge cultural event that keeps people around the continue glued to their TV. As in the Olympics, viewers cheer for their country – and they get to vote on the results using SMSs on their cell phones and internet. Celine Dion was a contestant once, Abba too and Riverdance, the wildly popular Irish folk dancers, was first seen by a big audience in an Eurovision contest. (Ireland, by the way, has won more of these contests than any other country and how do I know? The Internet is filled with sites of trivia devoted to this phenemenon.)

So, armed with this knowledge, my friend Hawley visiting from New York City and I decided we had to watch the finals on TV Saturday night – along with 1 billion Europeans.

It was like a bad knock-off of American Idol, a repulsive show I've never watched. It was so bad I may have trouble describing it. Hawley did an imitation of the show – nearly every act was the same and so that was pretty easy – and this was it. She flung her arms in the air, flipped her long hair as if wind was blowing through it and pulled off her blouse – screaming the entire time.

The music was uniformly bad English pop – until about 1998 you had to sing in native language but that appears now to be a rarity. Each country gets to pick the performer who represents it – Croatia picked a young singer famous for a Paris Hilton-like sex tape that was all over the internet recently. We wore, well, she didn't really wear much of anything, but she was loud and wind blew fetchingly through her hair.

Turkey sent a singer with a big star in her long hair and planets and moon covering her breasts but little else who screamed over and over I want to be a super star.

Hawley noted that few songs seemed to contain any more than two lines of lyrics.

Israel had an entry. Israel part of Europe?

My personal favorite was the UK act – a short white guy singing exceedingly bad, worse than Vanilla Ice rap while a bevy of busty women in schoolgirl uniforms skipped around him. Pedaphilia, always a crowd pleaser.

Hawley and I decided there had to be something cultural involved here that we were missing. We switched channels, but that was a problem because nearly every channel, English, German and Serbo-Croat, was showing Eurovision. We missed the voting, which I've since learned is the really interesting part of the show. I found the convoluted rules on the internet
After all songs have been performed, viewers have ten minutes to vote for their favourite song. Viewers cannot vote for their own country's entry.
All the votes are added up per country (e.g. all of the votes from Irish voters, from French voters etc.)
Each country, via satellite link, reveals its votes. The top ten songs voted for in each country receive points, from 1-8, then 10 and 12 points. As of 2006, points 1-7 are shown on the screen with only 8, 10 and 12 points being read out.
In the end, the winner is the country with the most points. In a tie, it is the country with (any number of) points awarded from most countries that wins.
The winning country receives the honour of hosting the following year's contest.
What happens in practics is that countries vote in blocks – all the Scandinavian countries vote for each other, the former Soviet block, even the otherwise at-each-other's throat Balkan block nations.

So, with that as background, you'll not be suprised to hear that winners were Finland, Russia and BOSNIA. Hari came in third!

He was decidely tame next to Lordi, the Kiss-like monster hard rock band from Lapland that won for Finland. Hawley and I thought they were a joke, a Halloween act – men in masks, but no, they are hugely popular.