It’s becoming more and more evident that the Eurovision Song Contest is changing rapidly before our very eyes, and at an even faster rate than those golden years between Paul Oscar’s first sofa gyrations and that welcome yet still slightly unexpected win for Lordi. On top of that the fandom is becoming a younger and much more diverse landscape year on year, with the youth vote clearly having a more significant effect on May’s final result than it ever has before.
This was clearly evidenced by 2021’s winners – a young and thrusting noise pop act now rabidly beloved of teens across the globe. To my uncultured ear the United Kingdom has got a ready made, fully-fledged artist who would take Måneskin’s edginess and pure sex power and elevate it to an entirely new level of danger – and his name is Yungblud.
The lad is sexy, ambiguous, speaks his mind, and mashes genres into his own entirely unique cross-fertilised flavour. With trimmings of punky pop, anthemic rock and smatterings of UK rap, his fanbase covers the same slavering young ‘uns that get so twitchy at the merest flap of Damiano David’s trouser leg, but also transcends to the cooler indie pop fans, and even gnarly old punkers like myself, who see him as part of the bright future of British pop.
And where other countries are witlessly attempting to follow up on Italy’s 2021 victory by sending leaden pub rock acts, Yungblud would see Måneskin’s bluster and raise it to his own stellar levels of rock’n’roll goodness.
Of course, his handlers would never touch our favourite Contest with a barge pole, but I reckon if the right person dripped some Eurovision passion into the lad’s ear he might just go for it.
Of course, it’s very unlikely that he’d win – not because of the usual dreary “no one likes us’ bleat – because he’d probably be just that little bit too edgy for your average juror to prefer. But if we want something to show off the British music scene in its best possible light, while giving us an exciting and ear-melting performance at the same time, well we couldn’t make much of a better choice.
Hopefully it would lead to an ever more interesting array of subsequent entries in the near future.
Remember the United Kingdom song is an automatic finalists. We don’t have to win to succeed, and we definitely don’t have to battle our way out of a Semi Final. Let’s look at who’s watching the Song Contest these days and send songs that they like rather than the usual fair-to-middling Radio 2 mid-afternoon fare that struggles to chart in the UK. A vital, youthful artist like Yungblud could knock us out of our seemingly endless torpor and give us something to be proud of.
And if we’re going to go down in flames it might as well be with something that’s going to give us an exciting ride along the way.
On a slightly similar note, I always felt that Big Brovaz would have been a fantastic choice back in 2007, I believe they would have achieved a good result (in a year where western countries fared poorly/lacked effort), attracted a new audience and positive interest and set a better precsident.
Good call!
This is soo true oml