The Best One Won!

Shortly after moving to Iceland, I became aware of yet another in the long list of popular things that are beyond my comprehension.  In this case it is a song competition.  Those of you who live in Europe or have lived in Europe know exactly what I’m talking about.  But for the few Americans in my readership, I’ll give you a little description of the competition.  It’s called the Eurovision Song Competition-Euovision for short.  Until recently, as I understand it, the competition was centered on two types of songs.  One type of song is the brainless happiness regularly played under a montage of driving and laughing sequences in a movie aimed at 13 year old girls.  The other kind of music is cheesy romance songs with a sweetness factor somewhere between Peeps smothered in saccharine and velvet “paintings” of kittens glazed with honey.  For decades, it seems, these two classifications of what can only loosely be referred to as music didn’t suffer invasion of anything with innovation or talent.  When I first saw the competition I stared in wonder that any sane, thinking person could actually like this crap.  The more I talked to people the more I became convinced that rather than voting for the best music, people of Europe were voting for the best of what was on offer.  I put forward the suggestion that if anyone with any actual talent ever entered the competition they would win it in a cinch.  I was, of course, talking about music that was written by an adult for adults and not by a cookie-cutter for the stupid masses.  
     My taste in music has always been criticized for being one the edge of what’s acceptable.  I was starting to feel that maybe that opinion had been proven right.  But earlier this Spring a band called Lordi from Finland released their song for the song competition.  It sounds very much like a song by Alice Cooper (though I don’t remember what that song was called) and the band wears costumes reminiscent of what the members of G.W.A.R. were sporting back in the eighties.  Their sound is heavy metal with a growling low-pitched lead voice and all the typical guitar chords.  Anyway, when I saw the video for the first time, I said to the person sitting next to me, “Finally a song that shows some balls!”  I knew right away that this was a test of whether I was right about my musical opinion.  
     Then the Icelandic song was released and while I don’t think Silvia Night (as she calls herself) is terribly funny, I thought it was great that SOMEONE was willing to come forward with a song that made fun of the cheese of the competition.  I thought she might have a shot.  Then she made all sorts of insulting remarks about people all over Europe and didn’t even make it into the competition.  Her song was booed and she lost her composure and ended up giving a terrible performance (according to my daughter-I was out walking on the beach on Snæfellsnes during the preliminary competition.  
     Anyway, last night the people of Europe proved that the music I think is fun is the music they like, too.  Lordi and the song “Hard Rock Hallelujah” won by a landslide.  The song in second place was 50 points below them.  It seems that the garbage music of the competition just paled by comparison to someone with a little bit of creativity.  Even my 12 year old daughter looked at me during the voting and said, “All the other music is the same, how can anyone remember which song was which?”  This is what I had been wondering since the first time I saw the competition.  
     You can see the video for the Lordi song here.  It’s real theatrical metal and I know some would say that it won merely for the cheese factor, but I like it.  And here is the Icelandic contribution from Silvía Nótt.

     Sometime soon I’ll be posting lots of pictures from the birding trips I’ve been going on for the last five days.  I’ll put them on the travel blog, though because there will be a lot of them, but I will post a notification here because I know some of you are dying with anticipation.