May 23, 2021, 2:42 p.m.
Winners and Losers from the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest
I'm out of here.
Good Screen
After an agonising two-year wait, the Eurovision Song Contest has rolled around again, with the Dutch hosts putting together an incredible display despite having a pretty rough hand dealt to them.
With a Eurovision hangover in full swing, it's time to talk about the real winners and losers of this international institution.
Winner: Italy
Let's start with the obvious one. Since returning to the contest in 2011, Italy has been knocking on the door of Eurovision victory; they've been one of the few countries of the so-called "big five" to have reliably placed on the left side of the scoreboard in recent years, always the bridesmaid but never the bride.
Not this year, though. Måneskin's victory was a landslide, with 67 points separating first and second place in the popular vote and 25 points separating the two with the jury votes tacked on.
Zitti e Buoni ("Shut up and behave”) won because, after two years of waiting, Eurovision viewers wanted something different; something staged a little unconventionally, performed by people whose general aesthetic is just relentlessly horny, and with an anger that fits the times we've lived through.
They weren't my favourite song of the night -- anyone who follows me on Twitter knows I was all in on Iceland -- but it was a fully deserved victory from a band who had worked their asses off to go from busking in Rome to the world's biggest musical stage. Here's to Italy 2022.
Losers: The United Kingdom, the BBC, and Amanda Holden
Look, it gives me no pleasure to have to keep writing about how terrible Britain is at competing in Eurovision, but this year was especially bad.
Let's go through why. The BBC outsourcing their song choice to a record label, only for the record label to hand it to a songwriter with zero performing experience? Check. A trailer for the contest that used the Backstreet Boys as its backing music, leaving a majority of the 7.4m British viewers broadly unaware of who was representing us until the night of the grand final? Check. Semi-final commentators Scott Mills and Sara Cox unable to pronounce participants' names like they're reading them for the first time without notes? Check. Opting to not broadcast fun bits from the first trans host of Eurovision to instead run an unfunny send-up of Line of Duty? Check! It's like Bad Eurovision Bingo out here!
And don't get me started on British jury spokesperson Amanda Holden, who turned up clearly a bottle of wine in and declared she had no idea which of the two funny languages she'd given a "good evening" in was French or Dutch. What an absolutely perfect way to sum up fifty years of contempt for our neighbours on the continent.
I realise I've gotten through a lot of this without actually talking about the song. I stand by what I said: it was good, though James Newman's performance was subpar and oozing with Pub Singer vibes. It was never going to do well with national juries, though I feel 0 points from the televote was especially harsh -- you get the feeling the four (!!!) countries that got 0 points from the public were caught in the stampede to give the top 5 hundreds of points.
Winner: Iceland
What a Eurovision journey it's been for Daði og Gagnamagnið. After Think About Things had its moment in the sun snatched away by Covid-19, Icelandic broadcaster RÚV selected the group to perform 10 Years, a song about frontman Daði Freyr's decade-long relationship with his wife.
Then Covid struck again, a member of Gagnamagnið tested positive, and the group had to settle for moving the green room to their hotel and submitting a recording of their second rehearsal to compete.
What a second rehearsal, though. Not only was the vocal performance pitch-perfect, the funky dance moves and the homemade instuments that formed a big keytar circle brought fun and personality to the Eurovision stage, especially following Switzerland's rather dull number in the running order.
Of course, they didn't win the contest proper; they came fourth, with one of Iceland's all-time best results and a healthy amount of points from the jury and the televote. To do that at a normal Eurovision is one thing; to do it from your hotel room is another, and all credit to them for pulling it off.
Perhaps most importantly, Daði's performance isn't an ending so much as it's a beginning. He released an EP on Friday with two fantastic new songs, a wonderful community behind him (join us on Discord!), and has a sellout tour to look forward to in the year ahead. How does it keep getting better, indeed.
Winner: LGBTQ Representation
This certainly feels like the most queer Eurovision in a while, with a sizeable amount of LGBT artists representing their countries. Germany, Australia, North Macedonia, Ireland, Italy, and Iceland all sent entries who were either LGBTQ themselves or had LGBTQ members of their groups; most notably, Hulda from Daði og Gagnamagnið was seen proudly waving a pansexual flag from the Icelandic green room.
It wasn't just the contestants, though; co-host Nikkie de Jaeger -- best known as YouTuber NikkieTutorials -- became the first trans person to host Eurovision, and all of her looks contained a nod to the trans flag. Representation matters, and when countries across the world are trying to stamp trans people out of existence, having a visible trans woman beamed to over 100 million European homes is a big deal.
Loser: Australia
Yes, it's odd that Australia takes part in the Eurovision Song Contest -- Aussievision has a good explanation of the context as to why they take part, if you're curious -- but they've been a solid addition to the contest since their introduction in 2015, becoming the only anglophone country to really care about doing well.
It wasn't to be this year, though. Montaigne's entry, the bright and poppy Technicolour, started at a disadvantage; Australian travel restrictions made it impractical for her to come to Rotterdam, so Eurovision's Plan B kicked in -- she was represented by a "Live-on-Tape" recording, filmed in Australia under strict rules as part of a contingency plan to make the song contest run regardless of national restrictions.
The Live-on-Tape was stunning, but there's only so much you can do with a strictly regulated studio environment, and the Australian delegation had far less time to rehearse their entry than their competitors in a crowded semi-final, which showed a little. Here's hoping next year's hosts find a way to give those who couldn't perform to a big audience another shot at sharing their music.
[Sidenote: her album Complex is fantastic, and you should give it a listen.]