This week is one of the rare occasions where my home town of Stockholm hits headlines around the world. This is because the international media’s attention is drawn to the annual tradition of announcing the winners of the Nobel Prizes, with each day seeing a different prize announcement.
Alfred Nobel, who the prizes are named after, was a famous 19th Century scientist and successful inventor – most notably for the invention of dynamite, which brought so much good to the world alongside its pain. The Nobel Prizes are awarded formally in five categories; Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace, with an Economics prize awarded in recent history in memory of the Alfred Nobel.
These prizes exist today because Alfred Nobel left vast quantities of his financial wealth to their creation in his will. He wanted these awards to celebrate achievements in these fields that offer the “greatest benefit to humankind”. Looking at many of last year’s winners, for work in feeding the planet and genome editing, amongst others, that link to improving the world for all in society seems obvious.
As wondrous and powerful as the Eurovision Song Contest can be, no, I’m not putting writing this piece to suggest it offers the greatest benefit to nearly eight billion people of planet Earth. But the more I think about the Eurovision Song Contest, and the more I reflect on what I want it to be, the more I think about it just like a certain Nobel Prize.
The What And How Of The Literature Nobel Prize
On the list of the five Nobel Prizes, for me the Literature prize comfortably stands out as being the odd one out from the pack. The inventions and discoveries in the scientific world show a clear link to advancing society, as does the pursuit of world peace. The original text of Alfred Nobel’s will calls for the literature prize to be awarded for “the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction”.
The literature prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy, a secretive group of 18 writing experts of various forms, from authors to linguists to literary scholars. They have to interpret this vague criteria each year to work out who the prize recipient should be. Sara Danius, a former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, explained the process of deciding a winner to students at the home of her PhD, Duke University.
“You are expected to come up with something new in terms of content or form or both”, said Sara, when defining how the Academy chooses those recipients who should ultimately receive the Nobel Prize. I am sure it would surprise few readers of ESC Insight, armed with this vague criteria and noble goal of ‘newness’, that there are many interpretations of what this ultimately means and the trends of winners have changed vastly through its history.
Much of the modern trends of the literature prize do I see in the modern day Eurovision Song Contest. Ana Mikatadze in the above linked article suggests that three trends have dominated post-war literature prize winners. Firstly, they are pioneers, with award winners being those writers who master or develop new styles. Secondly, there has been a shift in the literature prize to reward lesser known names in recent years, to highlight their work to a wider audience. And finally the Swedish Academy has made an active effort to reward literature from wider spheres of language and global influence in recent years.
I see our Eurovision Song Contest following these trends more and more with each passing year.
Mastery of their art
It will surprise few of you that as a Eurovision fan who has moved across the North Sea to live in Stockholm that there is a certain poptastic taste in the music I enjoy. Yet I’m quite picky about anything that fits into the vague definition of ‘schlager’ that follows Melodifestivalen round in circles, but there’s plenty of examples in recent years that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed.
But I consider it an absolute requirement of being a Song Contest fan that I actively embrace any type of genre that earns its rights to exposure on national television. Do I listen to rap, rock or reggae outside of the Eurovision bubble? Barely at best, but I make sure not to dismiss a song just because of its genre. Instead I take the view that I’m actually looking for a song that pushes its genre in a new direction or a complete mastery of its style.
So many of our winners hit this criteria in different ways. For example we have the wins of Conchita Wurst and Måns Zelmerlöw that have been put down by many by merely being described as a Bond soundtrack or an Avicii-lite number respectively. Yet I’d argue that the marriage of these genres with their artists, and artistry, are as good as the Song Contest gets to mastery in action.
A similar claim can be given to this year’s winner’s Måneskin, it is good old rock’n’roll that stays true to form and relies on combinations of riffs to create three minutes that scored a comprehensive victory. One can argue that it is simple, but actually the whole combination is worthy of Song Contest winner status because of how masterfully the whole package comes together.
On the other side of this, there’s also the pioneering entries that, in winning the Song Contest, gained a platform that allowed their song to spread further and influence others – this being a song that you should hear. Swedish pop winning Europe’s biggest entertainment show is little surprise, but this past decade has also brought us two winners in ‘1994’ and ‘Amar Pelos Dois’ that on paper should not resonate across a continent. But they did in the most brilliant of ways, and the fact that the highest scoring Eurovision winner is a gentle waltz with a long introduction and irregular structure still fills me with pride. After all, if Portugal can hold that record, surely every country can.
And this brings me to the second point. The Song Contest is one of those few platforms in the world where the viewer is thrust into being exposed into vastly contrasting cultures and styles. And, no matter which broadcaster you represent, you have three minutes to show your worth to the world watching. It doesn’t matter if you are the biggest pop star in Europe squeezing Eurovision into your busy touring schedule or the plucky amateur who wrote their little ditty on a ukulele – you both get the same exposure and the same time to shine. Yes, big names can win the Eurovision Song Contest, but more often than not they are not the stars of the show. Honestly ask yourself, if you ignore your Eurovision superfan knowledge, how many of the 21st Century winners would you have known before the night itself?
A Decade Of Authentic Change
Many people will look at those winners in the 21st Century though in dismay at how culturally weak many of them are. Pop dominates the list and while well done, many songs such as ‘My Number One’, ‘Believe’ or ‘Only Teardrops’ don’t come close to Nobel Prize worthy productions.
But that’s changing. Two of the last five winners of the Eurovision Song Contest were not in English, and another two of them include either small sections of text, or words, that clearly identify the song with its homeland. And the Song Contest is evolving in this generation to make this effect stronger. Eight out of nine of the top three in televoting in the last three Eurovision finals have featured at least some non-English language element in their performance. A meaty and convoluted statistic, yes, but one that I’d argue kills off this always fake theory that you need to sing in English to do well at the Song Contest.
The word that has been bounced around more than ever before with the 2021 edition of the Song Contest has been authenticity – that the songs that rose high on the leaderboard had a sense of authenticity that, to use a derogatory term on purpose, the fast-food music entries didn’t offer. I don’t particularly enjoy the use of the term in the current Eurovision community, it implies that voters of only a decade or so ago didn’t care about authenticity while today’s generation are so different, yet now the bubble has burst artists are throwing songs out into Eurovision without making them fit into ill-conceived constraints as to what Eurovision should be.
Language is a huge part of those traditional constraints. And while the linguistic colours across Europe are more on show than since the national language requirement was lifted, think for a second too how the diversity of topics is also moving away from love, love, peace and more peace. Yes, the 2021 Contest will always have the asterisk next to it due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but look through the songs at how many of those artists went on stage not just with a performance to sell, but a story to share. There’s many examples I can give here, but I’ll actually highlight one that never reached Rotterdam – the solo electric guitar track ‘Behöver inte dig idag’ from Sweden’s Melodifestivalen. This has been the shock radio hit of this season’s Swedish selection and, with lyrics about a destructive relationship as the song’s selling point, is a world away from the flashy image that Melodifestivalen often portrays.
Noble Songs in our Contest’s Future
I’ve always been somebody who wants my Eurovision songs to mean something more than just three minutes of fun. I want to see a performer who knows this is the biggest thing they may ever do, to their biggest audience. I want to see them take musical risks, both in composition and performance, to hopefully land on a new magic formula that captivates a continent. And it doesn’t matter where that comes from or what that story is or how you tell it to me – if I can feel the emotion of the text’s soul pour through, that is what I want to hear, resonate with, and ultimately vote for.
I’ve always overthought my Eurovision far more than the average viewer, and I appreciate the quantum leaps for many that I am equating a Saturday night entertainment spectacle to the Nobel Prizes. Yet this Song Contest is, for a growing number of artists, the ultimate way to present what you deliver, where you are from and spread that beyond borders. If we take these pieces of art as seriously as growing numbers of them deserve to be, then my extrapolation doesn’t seem so far fetched after all.