The Eurovision Song Contest, that glorious, glittery spectacle that isn’t just out of left field, but comprises the field, had quite the 2014 edition. A televised competition featuring entrants from a changing selection of nations in the European Broadcasting Area, it has an extraordinary appeal and place in the hearts of viewers worldwide. With a history of contestants from fifty-two countries and viewers from many more, Eurovision is huge. It’s also full of the wacky and unexpected, with performances running through everything from the awkwardly gimmicky to the exquisitely executed and sublime. It’s also, inevitably, never not political in one way or another, but this weekend several political issues ran together and came to a head.
The winner – look away now if you’d rather not know just yet – was Conchita Wurst of Austria, who gave a solid performance with “Rise Like a Phoenix”. Prior to the competition’s commencement, there was a possibility that Russia and Belarus were not going to broadcast her performances because Ms Wurst flagrantly has a beard, or something. Apparently this is unbroadcastable and would, as per a petition to the Belarusian state broadcaster, turn Europe into a ‘hotbed of sodomy’. One wonders how people feel comfortable making such bizarre, breathy accusations, but do let’s continue. Ms Wurst’s win has sparked ‘the end of Europe,’ according to Russian political Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and you can fill in the gaps as to the other kinds of comments that have ensued. The precise grounds for this are unclear: detractors and supporters have variously referred to Wurst as a bearded lady, as trans, as gay, and so forth (for the record, she’s the drag queen persona of Tom Neuwirth. There’s just a broad and ill-defined transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic mess going on here.
Filipp Kirkorov, who produced Russia’s Eurovision entry this year, thinks the win is perhaps ‘a kind of protest against some of our views in Russia […] it probably is a challenge from Europe to us,’ following the infamous institution of homophobic laws in Russia. It’s sad to think that Austria’s entry may not have won entirely on its merits, but that this dynamic is possible evokes the hostility against Russia that was highly prevalent at the contest. The booing faced by the Russian entrants and whenever Russia gained any votes was clearly due to both the unpopularity of the new laws and also Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Between that and all the creepy sexualisation the teenage “hot twins” faced, the Russian entrants can’t have had a fun night. There’s a great extent to which Eurovision can’t just be about music or fun or the merits of the entries: Eurovision is not just glitter, but a barometer of European tensions and political sensibilities.
Eurovision is a contest that was designed to bring Europe together in the aftermath of World War II. This year showed that, as much as ever, political divides don’t wash away in the wake of a melody. Music is, once again, something that brings political values to the fore, and brings everyone together not in order to ignore difference, but to facilitate discussions about it.
Photo by THOR, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license