Eurovision Song Contest 2008

I didn’t want to put this one up. I was pretty sure one of the others would. And it’s quite difficult to express why it’s so interesting. I mean, it’s bloody Eurovision, right? A shocking, irrelevant Euro-pudding from the wrong end of the Seventies. How could it possibly be interesting?

And then when you try to list the factors that really do make it interesting it all gets very confusing. There’s the music, which is basically transatlantic pop filtered through… well, you know… all the stuff that’s been happening in the former Soviet bloc and in the Balkans for the last twenty years.

Then there’s the geopolitics, which is like, fucked up. Fringe moves to centre, centre to fringe. The economic and pop powers of the North are obviously finished. Or at least irrelevant. We can still produce the Ting Tings and tax credits and the Wombats. We may have Glastonbury and the world’s fourth largest economy but that’s all so much hermetic bourgeois bullshit when compared with the top-drawer weirdness coming from Georgia and Azerbaijan and Bosnia.

Anyway, this year’s is—if you ask me—the best yet. Really marvelous other-worldly entertainment. Ecstatic musical lunacy.