Speaking broadly, there are two schools of thought when it comes to Eurovision. One is the old school, all blackboards and state-sponsored milk, pining for the days when the contest was about a line-up of respected artists standing behind a microphone, singing songs in their native languages (or in the case of most of the singers who represented Luxembourg: French) and trusting to the fair play and expertise of the juries. The other is the new school, who recognise the fact that the contest has evolved and indeed encourage it to do so, putting the 'vision' into 'Eurovision', with less emphasis on the song bit; as one of the biggest television events of the modern age, it must provide spectacle. On this basis, one of these two groups is likely to be much more taken with Azerbaijan's Eurovision debut than the other.If there's one thing Day After Day cannot be accused of, it is subtlety. Unlike their newly shod stablemates San Marino, the Azeris have looked at the contest and decided that what it needs, and what it takes, is three minutes of pure theatre. Had anyone asked me prior to this year's songs being chosen which country I thought would produce the campest entry of 2008, Azerbaijan would never have figured in my top 40, let alone my top 5. And yet look at what they are giving us: an OTT tale of elicit passion, with pop-rock sensibilities, a splash of ethnicity and a falsetto faux-opera prologue, played out by the archangel and the Devil himself. If ever there was a recipe for success in the Eurovision Song Contest in the 21st century, I'd say the Azeris have found it. However unintelligible it may be.
And that's whether we like it or not. Day After Day bears all the hallmarks of a song that will do well regardless of its musical quality; it is so impudent it simply must be rewarded. Which is not to say it suffers a lack of quality. The music, while unspectacularly well produced, knows which buttons to push and when to push them. As you might expect, the strings carry much of the melodrama, while the electric and bass guitars are put to good use in producing the underlying atmosphere. The general sense is of a composer very much aware of what he's there to do: produce a workmanlike backdrop of sound against which the histrionics can unfold.
As I mentioned in my overview of the first semi-final prior to these individual reviews, Azerbaijan is one of only a handful of countries in my view to truly benefit from the draw. (The fact that they do is all the more random given they chose to start from 7th, but then it might reasonably be claimed that they would have made a splash whatever their position in the running order. Having said that, they have done well to be separated from Finland.) Coming after a run of six unprepossessing songs, Elnur and Samir's homoerotic antics are bound to be noticed. Provided they can keep the audience's eyes on them for the full three minutes I can't see any way that they won't qualify for the final, however shouty and flustered the whole thing gets. It simply ticks all of the boxes of the kind of thing that will finish in the top 9 of every country that meets the televoting threshold.
I am very confident that we will be seeing Azerbaijan in the final, and wouldn't be at all surprised to see them coming top of the class in 2008.
1 comment:
With a whopping great national final and one of the slickest preview videos of the lot, there would seem to be no doubt that the Azeris have every intention of making their debut outing a high-profile one. Nor can there be any doubt that both visually and aurally, this is going to make people sit up and take notice from the off. Less certain is whether three minutes of unrelenting sneering and wailing are going to be enough to see them through. I might as well admit as this point that I really find this hard to listen to. The transition from eunuch mock opera intro to full-on rock screeching as the song proper kicks in is fantastic but most of what follows leaves me cold. What I miss here but found in the debuts of say Moldova or Georgia is any sense of an attempt to charm or produce something genuinely likeable. I mean Lordy were more loveable for chrissakes! But who knows, perhaps that's something the revamped stage show will supply? As for coming top of the class in 2008, surely not?
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