Obligatory Eurovision blogging

While I maintain that the title of this blog is ironic, I suppose it obliges me to offer some trenchant commentary on the Eurovision Song Contest.

The greatness of the format is that it combines a talent show with nationalism to give everyone a rooting interest. Sure, what we have in offer is mostly terrible and entirely lacking in good taste besides, but that just means that our entry - a brilliant distillation of all that's good in popular music every year, of course - has a shot at winning.

The big weakness is that there are just too many songs taking part. There are only so many cheesy techno pop tunes and hideously bombastic ballads one person equipped with any taste in music can take in one go. I'm not sure what the limit is, but I know both the semi-final and final cross it. Someone please put Yugoslavia back together, is what I'm saying.

Also, everyone should go back to singing in their own languages. The English language has the odd quality of making the most inanely insipid lyrics sound merely normal. Having the words delivered in some language I don't understand and thus being forced to rely on Finnish subtitles, on the other hand, brings out their stupidity in all its glory.

Based on the semi-final, Georgia and Hungary must be complimented for sending entries that resemble music. Both were rewarded with places in the final. Croatia and Austria sent inoffensive rock songs, which means that they were better than your standard Eurovision fare, but they didn't make it to the final. The rest of the songs were not very good.