Eurovision 2014
If you have been following my blog for a while you know that I love the yearly Eurovision song competition which takes place each May and features musical performances from countries around the continent. This year Eurovision was in Copenhagen as it moved to the location of the home country of the winner from the last year. The hosts´did a great job with the show and I especially liked how they asked each contestant to create their country´s flag in a unique way to be shown during the introduction to their song.
I first discovered this phenomena two years ago (read about it here) and followed last year´s competition as well (this blog). I can honestly say that 2014 had a pretty awesome line-up of songs and artists so I was excited to watch. This was only compounded by the fact that I actually liked the song to be performed by the Spanish singer, Ruth Lorenzo, and had heard that she was one of the favorites to win. Though I think she rocked her performance, she came in 10th place which isn´t too bad. I especially liked that she sang part of the song in Spanish and the rest in English. Basically it is impossible to win if you sing in your native language because you have to appeal to a wide audience.
The competition was pretty fierce. The songs from Sweden and The Netherlands were great. During the voting process in which all the countries give out points to their favorites it became clear, however, that there was one true winner: Conchita Wurst from Austria. She was a controversial contest. Watch the video to find out why. That being said, I thought she sang quite well but in my opinion her song sounded more like something out of a Broadway musical rather than a pop hit.
In any case, her performance was triumphant and shows how progressive Europe can be. It was also very interesting to hear people´s responses to Russia throughout the performance. When countries gave high marks to them in the voting process they were boo-ed. The two sisters who performed for Russia were meh, not bad but people did NOT want them to get a good score and were quite vocal about it. I would say that other shall we say "stand-out" performances came from France (a group of douche-bags who ended up with a whopping 2 points in the end I think), Belarus whose song was titled "Cheesecake" and Armenia (one of my favorites, a singer whose voice completely changed throughout the song and only got better at its height).
Can´t wait to see what next year brings!
The competition was pretty fierce. The songs from Sweden and The Netherlands were great. During the voting process in which all the countries give out points to their favorites it became clear, however, that there was one true winner: Conchita Wurst from Austria. She was a controversial contest. Watch the video to find out why. That being said, I thought she sang quite well but in my opinion her song sounded more like something out of a Broadway musical rather than a pop hit.
In any case, her performance was triumphant and shows how progressive Europe can be. It was also very interesting to hear people´s responses to Russia throughout the performance. When countries gave high marks to them in the voting process they were boo-ed. The two sisters who performed for Russia were meh, not bad but people did NOT want them to get a good score and were quite vocal about it. I would say that other shall we say "stand-out" performances came from France (a group of douche-bags who ended up with a whopping 2 points in the end I think), Belarus whose song was titled "Cheesecake" and Armenia (one of my favorites, a singer whose voice completely changed throughout the song and only got better at its height).
Can´t wait to see what next year brings!
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