February is the cruelest month

February is the cruelest month breeding inanity from the dead waves. Mixing bigotry and desire, stirring dull roots with winter snow. In February the culture pages of the major newspapers in Sweden suddenly succumb to ‘news’ of the Eurovision Song Contest. Art and books and poetry and theatre and debate are pushed away to make room for what is announced as the largest public party ‘folk fest’ of the year. What this masquerades is a deep ethnocentrism and a complete capitulation of culture to a consumerist populist media despotism.

In the name of European diversity we witness an annual event that is a lesson in prejudice. The very nature of the competition is geared not to reflect the differences of a modern Europe but to shore up the hegemony of national statehood founded on xenophobia and nepotism. Simultaneously it manufactures a mythological sameness through a process of banalisation and conformity. It is perverse that the aim of the contest; to show the richness of European culture in all its fluid and dynamic forms, results in the homogenization of musical plurality and conversion to the standardized cliché of Euro pop.

The ‘folk’ music of the nations competing is as absent as the ‘genuine’ presentation of music that reflects the breadth of cultural diversity in Europe today. In the history of the event nations that have opted for music that reflects their own regional musical particularity have failed appallingly. Portugal will not present Fado; Spain is unlikely to include Jota just as Britain will steer clear of Northumbrian pipe music. In fact whenever the echoes of regional music have appeared they have been converted to a watered down innocuous pulp that at best can be seen as regional flavouring. In regards to reflecting the heterogeneity of contemporary music the same is true. Anybody expecting the music of the banlieues of Marseilles or Rouen, or the latest bhangra or brithop will be disappointed. Complexity, difference and the wonderful multifaceted and multilayered references of contemporary (popular) music are reduced to appalling attempts by young European singers to reach beyond their own national audiences by diluting their talents in the anachronistic thinner of Euro pop. Marx would have recognised this as pure commodification or better the manufacture of a fetish obscuring all social and political value. All substance is emptied out, replaced with the simulacra of celebrity and reinforced by the bigotry of national ideology.
Sweden, curiously, believes it owns the soul of Eurovision. This proprietary ownership is only possible with, first the beatification and then canonization of the holiest of the holy, namely ABBA. With a museum in London and another to open in Stockholm ABBA have not only been given sainthood they have been granted a patron sainthood for the Swedish people. Two boys, two girls, the implication of internal relationships, the reinforcement of heterosexual purity scrubbed squeaky clean in the perfect lines of Swedish design. Musically ABBA offer virtually nothing of any novelty, the songs are mainstream pop written to a set formula without any great innovation. Their lyrics perhaps place them in the pantheon of the worst lyricists of all time, they are beyond banal and the incredible amount of repetition that marks almost all their work is simply beyond belief. To pull just one moment of triteness from the heap the following little verse from ‘Knowing me knowing you’ is about as vapid as one can imagine.

“Knowing me, knowing you (ah-haa)
There is nothing we can do
Knowing me, knowing you (ah-haa)
We just have to face it, this time we're through
(This time we're through, this time we're through
This time we're through, we're really through)
Breaking up is never easy, I know but I have to go
(I have to go this time
I have to go, this time I know)
Knowing me, knowing you
It's the best I can do”

I could pass all this off as just a bit of fun, a joke, if it was not for the fact that the platitude for which they stand and the adoption of this as being culturally significant is not so easily shrugged off. The Eurovision’s that are constructed contribute to a much more threatening sense of cultural white washing. The inclusion last year of The Russian contestant Anastasia Prihodko who apparently holds white supremacist views or the open war on live TV between Armenia and Azerbaijan are not isolated occurrences. Another example was provided when in 2009 when the host nation Russia objected to the bad pun on their president’s name in the song “We Don’t Wanna Put In” by Stephane & 3G, Georgia were forced to withdraw. So as much as one might like to see the contest as a bit of kitsch nonsense, what emerges is one of the most brutish and ugly displays of nationalistic intolerance. To hide this behind the pathetic veneer of ABBAesque cliché and musical parody only make the site more repugnant.