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Introduction
After taking the prize of Eurovision 2018, our good friend Netta Barzilai proclaimed that we’d see each other next year in Jerusalem. At first, Israeli politicians were intent on following through with her promise, and that would’ve made sense in a 20th century year. But Eurovision isn’t the same kind of event it was the last two times Israel hosted: the audience is no longer invite only, but consists of fans from all over the world. With its strong LGBT culture, proximity to an international airport, and appeal to worldwide tourists, there is no Israeli city better suited to host Eurovision 2019 than Tel Aviv.
Eurovision 2019 was a difficult contest to organize in many ways. You probably know that the contest faced protests against Israel hosting, but the difficulties go much further than that. Remember in Eurovision 2017 when the spokesperson Ofer Nachshon announced the dissolution of the Israeli Broadcasting Authority, which viewers misunderstood as Israel leaving Eurovision? Indeed, Eurovision 2017 was the last project the IBA was involved in before it was dissolved and replaced with a brand-new broadcaster called Kan, which was launched on May 15, 2017—just two days after the grand final. The name is not an acronym, but rather a Hebrew word meaning “here” (כאן). The IBA and Kan are two very different broadcasters: the former was government-owned and the latter is a public corporation independent from the government. Another difference is that Kan broadcasts in both Hebrew and Arabic, and is branded in Arabic as Makan, meaning “a place” (مكان). The right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was opposed to the creation of Kan and tried his hardest to stop it, but all he could do was compromise with other politicians to delay it.
Kan wasn’t actually a member of the EBU until December 7, 2018, so during Eurovision 2018, the EBU agreed to let Kan send an Israeli entry to the contest without full membership. The broadcaster joined the EBU partway through its organization of the contest, and I have to say they put up an impressive show! It has quite a lot of signs of a constrained budget, but it’s a massively better show than the last two Israeli contests. Unfortunately, after a whole bunch of back-and-forths, the Israeli government refused to help pay for Eurovision 2019 which meant the contest’s tickets had to be notoriously expensive. In the live shows, the tickets’ prices ranged from €183 (₪750) for hall seats in the semifinal to €414 (₪1700) for level 1 seats in the final. If you’re intimidated by these prices, then just know that Eurovision seats normally are nowhere near this costly.
Most of the same countries competed as last year, but two skipped out: Bulgaria due to financial constraints, and Ukraine due to national final drama. I watched the semifinals together with Liv with Swedish commentary (the usual Edward af Sillén, plus Charlotte Perrelli who won 20 years prior in Jerusalem) and unfortunately couldn’t find the semifinals’ German commentary on eurovision.de, so I’ll just stick to that. We have 16 songs to get through in this post: one reject and 15 non-qualifiers.
Ukraine: Siren Song (withdrawn)
Artist: Maruv (Hanna Borysivna Korsun)
Language: English, plus a repeated phrase in German at the start
Key: E minor
Crazy enough, this Eurovision year was almost going to have two songs with German lyrics in it! That’s not the most interesting song about this song; it’s just a repeated “komm zu mir” (come to me) at the start. These tiny bits of German I feel like I have to survive off of breadcrumbs, or “Brotkrümel” as the Germans call it. Though I’m surprised the word isn’t spelled “Brotkrümmel”, since most Germans I’ve heard including my mom pronounce it with a short ü. This spelling looks so much more correct to me. I admit, my sampling of Germans is heavily skewed towards Baden-Württemberg, the state that my mom comes from.
An explosion of controversy happened when this song won Vidbir 2019, since Maruv frequently performed music in Russia and expressed wishy-washy views on Ukraine’s relations with Russia. The end result was that she was disqualified from participating in Eurovision 2019 and no other Vidbir contender was willing to take her place.
It’s quite a shame all this drama happened, because as a song this is totally up my street. It’s a fun dancey bop with a great catchy beat and synths. It starts simple and gradually gains new instruments and riffs, including a poppy bassline and the melody of the low trumpets. My face always lights up when the synth bassline begins amidst each verse. Her breathy singing might not be to everyone’s taste, but I think it fits the song well and makes it sound mysterious. And then comes the drums’ breakdown in the final chorus, which sounds almost like it should be a bridge section but I don’t mind that it ends the song instead.
This might actually be my favorite rejected entry and I understand why it got disqualified, but it’s a real shame that it had to happen to such a great piece of music. Fortunately, Eurovision 2019 has a few other dance bops with a similar spirit.
Montenegro: Heaven
Artist: D mol
Language: English
Key: D major, E♭ major
After a girlbop in English was predictably put in the opening slot, we have this abomination in the death slot. I don’t like that the death slot is used so often for a weak entry that will obviously never qualify, i.e. as a “death slot”. I prefer it when the second entry is something different from the first that keeps the audience in good spirits.
For the first thirty seconds I thought, “huh, is Montenegro trying to qualify by sending something normal?” But then it gradually got more and more obnoxious. Turns out that it’s one of those ensemble ballads where everyone gets a turn to sing, and they all have inconsistent singing abilities and don’t fit together at all.
Normally accordions and violins elevate a song, but in this pop ballad they’re out of place and are just a failed attempt to make it sound more interesting. And then the song just gets more obnoxious and cheesy and vaguely twee, then comes an annoying key change, then ultimately it becomes clear that Montenegro didn’t try at all this year. We won’t see them in Eurovision again until 2022.
Finland: Look Away
Artist: Darude featuring Sebastian Rejman
Language: English
Key: B♭ minor
I feel bad for Finland this year because this was the real low point of their 2010’s stump era, scoring dead last place. I also feel bad for Finland because their song isn’t as bad as everyone says, it’s just incredibly easy to make fun of. The song is supposed to be a criticism of people looking away from harsh living conditions in the third world, but the endless repetitions of “look away” make me think that he doesn’t want to be on stage and wants viewers to look away. I only realize he’s not telling us to look away if I notice he starts with “we look away”, but even then, he says “look away” way too many fucking times.
Liv told me this song could be good but too many things mess it up, and I couldn’t agree more. I’m not just referring to the repeated title. This is also just way too restrained for a techno song, especially the intention behind sending Darude was due to the fame of “Sandstorm” as an Internet meme (though I’m informed Europeans know it more as a football anthem). But sending one-hit wonders to Eurovision usually doesn’t work all that well, if you remember Las Ketchup in 2006. No one is gonna care that the Darude – Sandstorm guy is in Eurovision. And also, the song ends abruptly.
Poland: Pali się
Artist: Tulia
Language: Polish, plus a few parts in English
Key: C♯ minor
It’s a common misconception that this song missed out on qualifying to the grand final only because the Belarusian jury reversed their votes. While it’s true that the Belarusian jury screwed up their voting, it didn’t actually mess up the list of qualifiers. In reality, one of the Czech jurors is believed to have voted in reverse, and if her votes had been flipped, Poland would’ve then qualified.
As a song, I can’t decide this is my thing or not. It’s a pretty cool melancholy rock song with gritty verses and a more anthemic chorus. But man, the white voices are so damn high pitched, and white voice can only work for me under very specific circumstances. It’s nice to hear the Polish language again; the song is clearly designed around the language with its folksy even rhythm, and only two short sections are in English. We haven’t heard the language in Eurovision since then.
One nice thing Kan did when organizing this show: they were consistent with showing translations of songs’ titles into English. It annoys me when some songs arbitrarily get an English translation shown on screen and some don’t. This contest translates all foreign song titles into English on screen, yay for consistency! If I’m not mistaken, the only other years where foreign song titles were translated onscreen were 1967 (English, French, and German) and 1982 (English). The translation here is a little unusual, since the English title comes first and isn’t an exact translation. It’s listed as “Fire of Love (Pali się)”, although the Polish title means “it’s burning”.
Hungary: Az én apám
Artist: Joci Pápai, returning from 2017
Language: Hungarian, for the last time ever
Key: E♭ minor
Say it with me. Take a deep breath and scream your lungs out as you repeat after me:
HUNGARY WAS ABSOLUTELY FUCKING ROBBED! HOW DARE THE TELEVOTERS PREVENT THIS FROM QUALIFYING? THERE IS TRULY NO GOOD IN THIS WORLD!
Well OK, the existence of this wonderful song proves there’s a tiny sliver of good in this cruel world we live in.
Most non-qualifiers in Eurovision history I agree with, and most that I disagree with, I can at least understand why they didn’t qualify. Even “Työlki ellää”, which I love with all my heart, I can see not being the juries’ cup of tea even if they’re completely wrong. But I genuinely don’t understand how this could possibly not qualify, and I am absolutely heartbroken that it didn’t. Erica was also in shambles when this didn’t qualify, and she’s right to be. It’s her favorite non-qualifying Eurovision song of all time. The only other song whose non-qualification I find this incomprehensible is “Planet of Blue” from 1996.
This song tugs at my heartstrings in all the most perfect ways. Hungarian is one of the most impenetrable languages in Europe, nowhere close to mutually intelligible with even one other language in the continent, and only the official language of one country. I don’t understand a single word he’s singing, yet he sings with so much emotion that I feel like I can understand the whole song. I can certainly tell he means every word he’s singing. It helps to know the title means “My Father” and the lyrics are a reflection on all the great things his father has done for him.
The lyrics are verbally dense and do a ton with the Hungarian language. Just like his last entry “Origo”, you really get to know how this language sounds within three minutes, and both songs cleverly have some wordless portions that anyone can sing along to but don’t make the song any less Hungarian. The song has a lovely mix of four-chord progressions that each start with the same E♭ minor root chord and go in a new direction every time. I love the shift in chord progression from the verses to the pre-chorus, and I especially love that the last “nanana” chorus has one chord progression that loops three times, then subverts expectations in the fourth loop with a lovely ♭VI chord (C♭ major, sounds the same as B major).
The instrumentation of this song also contains everything I love and nothing I hate: heartfelt acoustic guitars at the start, a drum beat that adds to the emotion and isn’t in-your-face, and some lovely violins once we reach the chorus. The whole song is so amazing and almost makes me want to cry. It’s even better than “Origo” and even more heartfelt, yet somehow it was the televoters who prevented it from qualifying?! The juries ranked it 9th place which is already too low, and then the televoters were total philistines and ranked it 14th. I simply don’t understand how this could possibly be.
Sadly we aren’t going to see Hungary in Eurovision again, but at least they went out with a great song! I wish they had won at least once before their batshit prime minister decided Eurovision was too gay now.
Belgium: Wake Up
Artist: Eliot Vassamillet
Language: English
Key: G minor
Liv purposely hyped up this song to me by mentioning I loved the last two Belgian entries and saying that this has the same songwriters as “City Lights”, so that I could feel the same pain that she did when she realized this song isn’t good at all. I gave this song the benefit of the doubt at first and thought to myself, “the instrumental here is kind of good”, but then it dawned upon me that his singing is incredibly flat and he barely hits any of his notes, and that completely spoils the song. The instrumental is a decent enough synth dance ballad, but his vocals make it impossible for me to pay attention to anything else.
Liv said the song might sound better in French, and I could perhaps imagine that but it’d also need a way better singer. Screw it, just get Slimane to sing a French cover of this. The Swedish commentators weren’t impressed with this either: Edward af Sillén said (translated to English): “The feeble Eliot sings “I came to fight”. I don’t know what he’s gonna fight against, but I wouldn’t bet my lunch money on a Belgian victory in such a duel.” He was joking about the singer’s small stature, but I feel he wouldn’t have been this snarky if the song impressed him.
Georgia: Keep on Going
Artist: Oto Nemsadze
Language: Georgian, plus a repeated phrase in Abkhaz—the language of a region Georgia has been warring with Russia over
Key: B minor
Georgian is one of the few national languages of Eurovision countries we’ve never heard in the grand final: the only other is Azerbaijani. Czech was the third last such language, but it debuted in the Eurovision final in 2023.
Anyway, as a song this is very “it’s dramatic I guess”. I like that it explores the sound of the Georgian language, but I’m not convinced by his loud raspy singing, and the instrumental just sounds like a generic cinematic song. Maybe it could be spiced up by a larger amount of major chords, like mixing in a major version of the root chord.* That would really heighten the tension. I like the surprise of the backing singers singing “varada varada”; their singing style is much more appealing to me than the lead singer.
* EDIT: I’m fairly sure that is an observation Liv made, not me.
Portugal: Telemóveis
Artist: Conan Osíris (Tiago Emanuel da Silva Miranda)
Language: Portuguese
Key: E minor
This song is to Liv what “Az én apám” is for me: a non-qualfier that she absolutely loves and is completely gutted didn’t make it. It’s one of the most polarizing Portuguese entries—some people love it because it’s exotic, trippy, and never has the same musical ideas for more than thirty seconds, and some people hate it for all the same reasons.
I don’t love this song as much as Hungary’s entry, and I get that it was too exotic for most people’s ears, but I really enjoy this one too. Erica said that she’d think this was a joke entry if these guys didn’t look so serious about it, and honestly, I think that’s why this song works. It has strange lyrics about addiction to telephone and a weird indie stilted beat with some Portuguese, African, and Middle Eastern ethnic elements, but you can tell from his performance that this is an earnest piece of music. I love the variety of beats and synth riffs here a ton. The song throws so many surprises at me, and it isn’t spoiled by a painfully harsh singing style (glares at my beloathed “Quién maneja mi barca”), instead something normal and moderately warbly.
I’m not surprised this song didn’t qualify because it’s so eccentric, but I love it for this exact reason. It’s exactly the kind of indie music that’s all the rage in Portugal, because they’re the only European country too cool for beige radio pop.
EDIT: Rewatching this song without someone who’s obsessed with it, I think of this more as a song with fairly good elements that’s not bad to listen to, but too weird for me to love.
Semifinal 1 thoughts:
I wish the voting time window could have been shortened this year, because it’s blatantly obvious that Kan had only enough money for one interval act per semifinal: in this night, it’s Dana International covering “Just the Way You Are” by Bruno Mars, which is fine but not her best work and the performance is way too preachy. Then came a video skit assembled from footage of all the postcards set to a dance remix of “A-Ba-Ni-Bi”, advertisements for Eurovision spinoffs (ugh), and even interviews advertising the interval acts for the final.
Among the bloat of interval segments, the best part is the mega-mashup of old Eurovision songs and clips. As someone who’s very familiar with mashups and sample-jams (especially involving video game music) and knows the difference between a good and bad mashup, I can safely say this mashup is musically great and everything a mashup should be!!! It’s more of a samplejam than a mashup and whoever made it must be truly passionate about Eurovision, since it has a mix of songs old and new, obscure and famous, and I love the detail of the lovely Lena Valaitis interrupting Johnny Logan with “Oh Johnny”. The mashup of “A-Ba-Ni-Bi” and “Dancing Lasha Tumbai” is technically off-key (B minor and E minor respectively), but if I wasn’t familiar with the songs I wouldn’t have noticed because the melodies fit together so perfectly. It helps that the keys of B minor and E minor are neighbors in the circle of fifths, so they have most of their notes in common.
The qualifier reveals though… dear god, that was a horrible sequence. How the fuck was that boring-ass un-Greek entry from Greece the first one that qualified? None of the songs that I truly hoped would make it qualified, until Czechia at number 6, that’s a bright spot of happiness. Iceland (number 8) was happy if totally obvious, but I would have been so sure the last qualifier would be Hungary. These qualifier reveals feel totally randomly generated: how on earth did San Marino make it and how was the last qualifier Slovenia instead of Hungary? I’m glad I didn’t watch these reveals live in 2019, because my heart would’ve shattered into a million pieces.
Armenia: Walking Out
Artist: Srbuk (Srbuhi Sargsyan)
Language: English
Key: F minor, F♯ minor
Sadly it seems like Armenia entered a slump era after their well-liked entry of 2017. This is some kind of pop ballad that tries to sound dramatic but is really just a little stilted. She has a good sassy singing voice but I don’t think she’s great at hitting notes, and I can’t understand her lyrics that well. I do like the camera gimmick where during the bridge, the video broadcast shows a rehearsal with an empty audience, then the audience returns in the (fairly good) key change.
Ireland: 22
Artist: Sarah McTernan
Language: English
Key: C major
If you’re wondering why this song is named after a number, it’s not about the singer turning 22 years old. Rather, it tells the story of a woman who can’t get her ex out of her head and thinks of him whenever she sees the number 22, which is his house number.
Liv absolutely hates this song and thinks it’s totally aimless and sloppy, but I think it has some things to like about it: a mellow and comfy instrumental, and a staging with a table and sundaes that comes off like a real-life music video. Still, it’s not very competitive and I’m not at all surprised this didn’t qualify.
What really drags this song down is the style of singing. When someone is giving a long speech, I find it easy to tell whether they’re speaking from their heart or just reciting a bunch of words (happened way too much at my high school graduation, and even more my sister’s high school graduation, it was painful to watch). The same is true for singing, at least to me. In this song, Sarah blatantly sounds like she’s reciting words that someone else wrote, not any kind of personal story. She almost comes off like a singer who barely speaks any English but has to recite an English song for a talent show. Funny enough, this song was composed and written entirely by Dutch people.
Moldova: Stay
Artist: Anna Odobescu
Language: English
Key: C minor, D minor
The staging for this song pisses me off because they brought back the sand artist from 2011 for the sole purpose of distracting us from how fucking boring and soppy this ballad is. Well guess what, I ain’t falling for it. The sand artist doesn’t even have a camera above her, so the footage shown on the LED screen is just pre-recorded. Normally I admire Moldova for having fun staging even on the occasion their songs are crap, but this time they just stole an idea from Ukraine.
I also hate the ultra-stompy clappy beat in the final chorus before the key change. That’s a trope in late 2010’s and 2020’s pop music that really annoys me, and it annoys me doubly so when it leads to a key change.
Latvia: That Night
Artist: Carousel
Language: English
Key: G minor
I really don’t like the title of this song, both because it’s uninspiring and because it’s never sung in the lyrics. I would have much preferred to name it “Where Are You?” because of the hook, “lo-o-o-o-ove, where are you”. Yes, I know that’s the same title as the runner-up of 1998, and that’s a non-issue.
This song really suffered from coming after gender-swapped “Fuego”, because it seems so forgettable in comparison. Which is a shame because I rather like listening to it. It’s a perfect rainy day song, or a song for when you’re in a bad mood and want something to soothe you that isn’t aggressively cheerful. I like the guitar, bass, and brush drum beat quite a lot, and I love the melody of “lo-o-o-o-ove, where are you” and how it’s played both by the guitar and vocals. I don’t think I love the song overall, because it’s really quite restrained, but I do have a soft spot for it; a mild crush on the song, you could say. Liv said that if it wasn’t so “easy listening” and more gripping, she would have liked it a lot more, and I totally agree.
I’m trying to think about how this song could’ve possibly been saved, since it’s such a damn obvious non-qualifier. It was drawn into the first half of the semifinal, so I have to wonder if it would’ve scored better as an opener. Or maybe it could’ve come after a song that isn’t as strong and competitive as “She Got Me”, so as to give it more of a chance.
EDIT (Dec 28, 2024): This song has grown on me so much, it’s absolutely unreal! I love the plucky guitar, I love the lonely yet dreamy mood, I love the subtle harmonies as it progresses, and I can live with the breathy singing.
Romania: On a Sunday
Artist: Ester Peony
Language: English
Key: C minor
This is a 6/8 ballad that’s fairly good as a composition, but it just comes off as unfocused to me. It has an awkward mix of acoustic guitars, synthy bass, and a stompy cinematic drum beat, and the singer sours it further with her wailing and weird pronunciations of words. The song is fine I guess, but I’d never think to vote for it and I’m not surprised it didn’t qualify.
Austria: Limits
Artist: Paenda (Gabriela Horn)
Language: English
Key: C major
Given that the Swedish commentators talked about Gabriela’s versatile instrumental skills and compared her to “Prince… but alive”, and that she composed the song all on her own, I suspect she thinks her song is a lot better than it really is. It’s a soppy electronic ballad with an even more annoying waily voice than the last two. Credit to her for singing notes this high without sounding like a child or an opera singer, but there’s only one Eurovision singer with a soprano voice I truly love, and her name is Eimear Quinn.
Croatia: My Dream
Artist: Roko Blažević
Language: English and Serbo-Croatian (Croatian)
Key: F minor, F♯ minor
Can Eurovision please ban singers from lying on the floor at the start? It annoys the absolute shit out of me every time. And then he starts breathing into the microphone and sounding all hushy and out of breath. His P’s are especially overemphasized by the microphone. Then the song builds up and it turns into yet another soppy overdramatic ballad, this time an attempt at a cinematic orchestral one. The second half, sung in Croatian, is a little better but then a key change sours it once more. My god, it feels like this song was designed to annoy me, but I’ll view the non-qualifiers being annoying as a good thing, because it means most of the good stuff made it through. Key word: most.
Lithuania: Run with the Lions
Artist: Jurij Velenko
Language: English
Key: C major
Now we have the last dud entry from Lithuania—every entry of theirs from here on out is fun and interesting in some way! Especially my beloved “Sentimentai”, a song I have a huge fucking crush on.
Even though the singer’s name sounds like “jury”, this song actually scored 8th place in the televote and only 16th place in the jury. Good thing I don’t really care about most non-qualifiers in this semifinal anyway. This is just a generic anonymous four-chord pop ballad by an anonymous-looking guy that goes in one ear and out the other. Charlotte Perrelli (the guest commentator) was audibly unimpressed when this ended.
Semifinal 2 thoughts:
The interval acts and skits are once again full of time-filling bloat, even more blatantly than semifinal 1. I mean seriously, a skit where contestants hold numbers that spell Eurovision, and an interview with Måns Zelmerlöw for like the fifth time in Eurovision history? Well OK, the interview is an advertisement for the final interval act, but it’s still annoying that Kan could only afford one staged interval act: a fairly nice song by a band representing people with various disabilities, which isn’t set apart from the competing entries so it’s doesn’t work well as an interval act. Luckily we then got part 2 of the Eurovision mega-mashup, which is once again buckets of fun and musically great. The sentence mixing in there is especially genius.
In contrast to the first semifinal, the qualifiers this time are completely unsurprising. I bet I would’ve been able to predict all ten in 2019. Maybe I would’ve been a bit shaky in my predictions because Hungary surprisingly didn’t qualify, but I’d have been satisfied to get them correct anyway. The only qualifier I’m a bit sad about is Latvia, but all ten qualifiers I’d say deserved it more. These reveals would’ve soothed my heartbreak about Hungary not qualifying, especially because I find Albania’s song similar in spirit.
Weird that one semifinal succeeded in eliminating all the drivel, and the other threw away some true gems.
Tot de volgende keer als Nederland eindelijk weer Eurovisie wint.
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