If Måneskin’s victory in Rotterdam last year felt like a watershed moment for the Eurovision Song Contest, the months that followed confirmed it. The chart success of Zitti E Buoni was impressive enough, but the fact that the group immediately followed up with two songs that went even bigger – ‘I Wanna Be Your Slave‘ and ‘Beggin’’ – confirmed them as the Song Contest’s most immediately impactful breakout act since ABBA.
For Contest watchers, the big question was how this titanic success would impact the future of the Contest. ABBA’s victory didn’t just launch their careers, it helped to drag Eurovision into the glam-rock seventies virtually overnight. From 1974 onwards the Contest would be brighter, more colourful and a lot more relevant than it had been before.
Now that we have our forty entries for 2022, has the Måneskin effect been similarly pronounced? Let’s take a look…
The Eurovision Rock Contest?
Much as some members of the Insight team might have wished for it, Eurovision 2022 has not proven to be the year in which the Contest becomes an all-out guitar fest. By my count, there are six entries this year that could generously be described as belonging to the rock genre.
Finland have sent hard rock veterans The Rasmus; Bulgaria have pinned their hopes on prog-rock supergroup Intelligent Music Project;, Georgia have also gone prog with some indie thrown in thanks to Circus Mirkus; Moldova have returned folk-rock outfit Zdob și Zdub to the fold; Denmark’s entry from Reddi begins as a ballad before morphing in to a sprightly punk pop song; and San Marino have also leaned into punk rock with Italian superstar Achille Lauro.
This doesn’t exactly count as a deluge, but it does represent a mild uptick. There were arguably only two other songs in the 2021 contest with strong rock elements – Finland and Georgia. It’s hard to say how many of this year’s crop would have been directly influenced by Måneskin either. Finland were probably always going to send The Rasmus at some point, and Moldova have, of course, sent Zdob și Zdub twice before.
Breaking language boundaries
2021 was the best year in a long time for linguistic diversity at Eurovision. While there were only seven entries that featured no English lyrics at all, four of those seven wound up occupying the top five – Italy, France, Switzerland (also in French) and Ukraine.
This year sees a mild uptick with eleven entries primarily sung in non-English languages. Most notably is the appearance of languages that we don’t normally get to hear. Lithuania are singing in their mother tongue for the first time since 1999, we have a performer singing in Dutch for the first time since 2010, Breton is represented for the first time since 1996 and Serbia are even giving us our first ever entry partially performed in Latin.
While Måneskin weren’t the only non-English winners of recent years – Portugal managed it in 2017 – their success alongside Barbara Pravi, Gjon’s Tears and Go_A last year does seem to have given artists who usually don’t perform in English the confidence to be true to themselves, which can only be a healthy thing for the Contest.
This shift away from an English-dominated Contest may also be helping to attract acts who may previously have been considered unsuitable for Eurovision, despite local popularity. S10 performs almost exclusively in the Dutch language, and her entry ‘De Diepte’ is reflective of the music she has succeeded with outside the Contest. Last week it rose to #2 in the Dutch singles charts, becoming the biggest hit of her career to date.
Similarly, Monika Liu from Lithuania has enjoyed massive domestic chart success with her entry Sentimentai. Viewers in these countries now have an opportunity to hear the kind of music they might hear on the radio or stream on Spotify, from artists who they already have an investment in. Whether or not these songs are able to translate to a wider audience in May, it has been observed that a big domestic hit generally brings in higher local ratings, another good sign for the long-term health of the Contest.
Reaching a new audience
One key element of Måneskin’s post-Contest popularity has been their ability to effectively harness social media. All of their hits have benefited from massive exposure on Tiktok, where they currently have over 5.4 million followers. By contrast, 2019 winner Duncan Laurence has just under 500,000.
Perhaps inspired by this – and the success of Iceland’s Dadi Freyr, who had a massive viral success in 2020 with Think About Things – several broadcasters have engaged with artists who have built their careers via TikTok as opposed to more traditional record companies. The United Kingdom’s Sam Ryder might be an unknown quantity to older viewers, but to the TikTok generation he’s a bona-fide megastar, eclipsing even Måneskin with over 12 million followers.
Other entries such as Norway’s Subwoolfer, Latvia’s Citi Zeni and Serbia’s Konstrakta have marketed their songs aggressively on the Tiktok platform, gaining global exposure they might struggle to achieve by more traditional means. For broadcasters anxious to appeal to younger viewers, this kind of publicity is worth its weight in gold.
Conclusion
A surface glance at the crop of songs and artists for 2022 might suggest that if you were hoping that Måneskin would usher in a new era of sexually charged glam rock for the Contest, you’re probably going to be disappointed. This year’s Eurovision is shaping up to be a curiously sedate affair, with ballads and midtempos dominating.
Analysing the myriad reasons behind this would take an entire essay of its own, but despite the lack of obvious Måneskin imitators, a look beneath the surface does show how their influence has helped to guide the Contest into some promising new directions – or perhaps more accurately, accelerated a subtle sea change that was already occurring.
That’s the thing with the Eurovision Song Contest – it is in a state of constant evolution. When we look back on Måneskin’s victory years from now, we might not necessarily see them as a complete transformation of the Contest, but they will surely rank alongside the most significant and memorable winners of their era, and can be credited with introducing Eurovision to a new generation of fans. That sounds pretty ABBA-esque to me…
I think calling Georgia 2021’s entry a rock entry is a bit far fetched.
It is and always has been a ballad and not even a rock ballad.
Roy Delaney of Eurovision Apocalypse and a regular guest here, has described it at best as an alternative track.
Not a rock track by any means.