Eurovision
This is a song contest that caused one Australian columnist to ask: “Why are we treating Eurovision like an irony-free America’s Cup, instead of a multinational karaoke competition designed by Liberace?”
Russian officials complain that the win by the Ukraine was ‘politics over art’, which would be more believable if Russia had been second, but they were third.
You can judge for yourself as the ABC has videos of the top five entries. The winner, Jamala, is a Crimean Tatar who wrote the winning song 1944 about Stalin’s mass resettlement of Tatars from the Crimea to the Far East which affected her family. She is a jazz singer and it shows.
Stalin used mass resettlements and redrawn borders as a method of controlling internal dissent. Russia apparently wants to own the Stalinist legacy which is a bit strange as he was a Georgian.
May 15, 2016 Comments Off on Eurovision
