Until Baby Lasagna’s folk-techno breakthrough ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ leapt to the top of this year’s Eurovision odds, Croatia had never been among the Eurovision favourites since Doris Dragović’s ‘Marija Magdalena’ in 1999 – when Baby Lasagna was only two years old, Ukraine had not even begun to compete, and some members of Måneskin had not even been born.
Back in 1999, Croatia recording a first Eurovision win as an independent country would have seemed only a matter of time. Most of Yugoslavia’s nostalgically remembered light pop entries from the 1980s, including Dragović’s first Eurovision appearance in 1986 and Yugoslavia’s only winning song in 1989, had come from the Zagreb studio of Yugoslavia’s federal public broadcaster.
Zagreb hosted Eurovision 1990, with Tajči’s legendary home entry ‘Hajde da ludujemo’, days before the pro-independence Croatian Democratic Union would win multiparty elections, and weeks before RTV Zagreb would transform into Croatian Radio-Television (HRT), with the mission of promoting a Westernised, central European identity for the nation and separating from Yugoslav culture for good.
After making its independent Eurovision debut in 1993, Croatia took six top ten places in seven years between 1995 and 2001 – and then never again.
Where did it all go wrong?
As late as 2005–6 when established stars Boris Novković and Severina tried to mine the vein of Eurovision’s passion for ethnopop, Croatia could still expect to place just below the top ten (Novković came 11th, Severina 12th). Croatia’s next entry failed to qualify from the semi-final, the two next entries came 21st and 18th, and between 2010 and 2022 a dismal qualification record saw only two Croatian entries, in 2016–17, reach the grand final at all.
The broadcaster which had been so keen to join Eurovision in 1992 that it organised sovereign Croatia’s first national preselection before its European Broadcasting Union membership was even complete even skipped the contest altogether in 2014–15, after its attempt to celebrate the addition of traditional Dalmatian klapa singing to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list with a hastily-assembled klapa supergroup and tourist-trap video, ‘Mižerja’, fell flat in 2013.
Public finance problems, corruption, HRT management priorities, and the relatively lower stakes of being able to influence international perceptions of the nation through Eurovision once Croatia had EU membership in hand are all part of the story of Croatia’s Eurovision decline.
The tameness and Westernness of most of the songs even selected internally or chosen for HRT’s national final, Dora, since 2007 also suggests, however, an institutional fear of unleashing the kind of scandal Severina’s ‘Moja štikla’ caused in 2006 when her cheeky repackaging of folklore from the Dinaric highlands represented Croatia by combining her risqué humour with the most ‘Balkan’ of the folk traditions on the nation’s diverse cultural map.
HRT’s choice to allow Let 3 – who have played with that same folklore – to spin off a concept from their antimilitarist rock opera project into a Dora entry in 2023, then to give the veteran art-punk band the licence to transfer its satire of warmongering dictators to Eurovision with minimal changes, showed that creative risk was back on the menu, and earned Croatia its first grand final place since 2017.
Even then, producers did not originally choose ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ for Dora: the song that won such a landslide public vote from Croatian viewers that it scored more points than the other 15 finalists combined only moved up from HRT’s reserve list when another participant pulled out. Besides the anxious everyman of his performance or his back story as a metal guitarist going solo, Baby Lasagna’s persona is now also that of an underdog hero triumphing over corruption at the national broadcaster – what might in other circumstances be the plot of a post-Yugoslav Croatian film.
‘Rim tim tagi dim’ becoming so strong a favourite for Eurovision that Zagreb is among the European cities reserving their arenas for next May is ‘Moja štikla’’s revenge: proof that creative play with folklore, scaled up to the spectacle level that contemporary Eurovision demands, can put Croatian entries back into contention, and that the lode has been sitting there untapped all this while.
In the shadows
Marko Purišić, who took the name Baby Lasagna after leaving the folk metal band Manntra to start a solo career, comes from Umag on the tip of Croatia’s Istrian peninsula, almost the northernmost town before the Slovenian border and the still mildly contested Gulf of Piran.
Istria and the adjacent Gulf of Kvarner, where Let 3’s home town Rijeka is the largest city, both take pride in a cosmopolitan, multilingual identity which has often put the region at odds with homogenising patriotism at national level – and have now produced the two most talked-about Croatian Eurovision entries in years.
Manntra formed in Umag as teenagers, joining a list of musicians from the town which also includes Eurodance band Karma and the singer-songwriter Alka Vuica, whose kitsch image made her unusually able to explore Croatia’s Balkan hang-ups – and hint at sapphic relationships – in the mid-1990s’ and early 2000s’ Croatian pop scene. (The city council booked Vuica and Karma to make a summer dance video showing off Umag’s beach tourism in 2015.)
Except when the privately-owned Stella Maris resort plays host to the Sea Star electronic music festival or the Croatia Open tennis championships, Umag is somewhat off the map of Croatia’s headline tourist destinations. The hill towns and villages of inland Istria are even more so, though a regional ecotourism strategy aims to change that.
The 3.4 million views already gathered for the official video of ‘Rim tim tagi dim’, filmed in the Umag countryside, are a promotional opportunity for Umag’s own brand that city leaders couldn’t fail to engage with: the city council and tourist board are even contributing to the logistical costs of Baby Lasagna’s performance in Malmö ‘so that Umag and Croatia will be represented in the “world” as they deserve.’
With just two online song releases before ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ to his name since leaving Manntra, Baby Lasagna’s Dora performance was his first as a lead vocalist, and the vulnerability he showed on Instagram and TikTok videos opening up about his confidence struggles immediately endeared him to a fan culture that commonly adores performances of ‘soft masculinity’ in its male idols.
Though only 28, Purišić has had the benefit of a decade’s experience in live music through Manntra, who began finding their way on to the German folk metal scene in 2017 by collaborating with the frontman of medieval metal band In Extremo, and saw their latest album without Purišić enter the German charts in 2023 – a level of exposure beyond the post-Yugoslav region of which many Croatian acts who are better-known at home only dream.
Manntra brought German folk metal style back to Dora in 2019 with their fourth-placed ‘In The Shadows’ (not the last Finnish coincidence in this post), where Purišić is just about visible in a grey tunic on the right:
Baby Lasagna’s folk metal and industrial background carries through into the lighter-hearted vibe of ‘Rim tim tagi dim’, with strong influences of Rammstein, just like 2023’s Finnish Eurovision sensation Käärijä. ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ was always going to be compared to Käärijä’s ‘Cha cha cha’ because of its own driving riffs and its ability to explore both personal vulnerability and an actual social problem beneath hedonistic top-notes, even before Baby Lasagna’s Dora outfit turned out to also feature puffy sleeves – as able to inspire fan art as Käärijä’s green bolero in 2023, but in this case alluding to Istrian folk costume.
Those Rammstein-like riffs, similarly, also have roots in a wellspring of experimentation with local folk tradition by Istrian pop and rock musicians which dates back to the mid-1990s and even had a token presence at Dora but never came close to representing Croatia at Eurovision itself.
Ča, ča, ča, ča-ča-ča-ča
In the fraught cultural politics of mid-1990s Croatia, alternative-minded Istrian pop and rock musicians started affirming their regional identity by singing in their own dialect, creating a movement known as the ‘ča-val’ or ‘ča-wave’ (‘ča’ is the Istrian word for ‘what’, lending its name to the ‘čakavian’ dialect; standard literary Croatian, ‘štokavian’, says ‘što’).
Ča-val bands like Gustafi, from Pula, developed a laid-back musical idiom which expressed what they saw as the region’s mentality and claimed a full place for their own dialect in Croatian rock.
Ča-val overlapped with the ‘etno’ movement, where musicians across Croatia in the mid-1990s started exploring lower-profile regional folk traditions in more serious, authentic ways than mainstream showbusiness or TV folklore shows had been accommodating. The sound eventually crossed over into mainstream pop, with trained ethnomusicologist Lidija Bajuk and TV presenter Ivana Plechinger both presenting songs inspired by music from the northern region of Međimurje in Dora 1997.
Istria’s offerings to the etno movement were its traditional bagpipes (the ‘mih’) and oboe-like ‘sopile’ and ‘roženice’, played to the region’s distinctive six-tone musical scale.
In 1999, songwriter Livio Morosin and revivalist bagpiper Dario Marušić teamed up to record their defining Istrian etno album Bura, tramuntana, named for two winds that buffet the Istrian coast. Their combination of bagpipes, drumming, and electronic beats on one of its most experimental tracks created an effect not too far from ‘Rim tim tagi dim’:
Ča-val even trickled into Dora around 2000–1 in entries by its most chart-friendly representative, Alen Vitasović, and the etno musician / Radio Pula music editor Bruno Krajcar. Showcasing Istrian bagpipes, dialect and scale to variousextents, these typically appealed to voters in Istria and Kvarner but failed to resonate across the rest of the nation in the way that Let 3 and Baby Lasagna’s creative engagements with the region’s folklore would go on to do.
Like Let 3’s anti-war message, Baby Lasagna has also managed to speak to a serious social theme – the unprecedented scale of youth emigration which has become an ‘existential’ debate in Croatian society.
I’m going away and I sold my cow
Since the late 19th-century, hundreds of thousands of young men like the protagonist of ‘Rim tim tagi dim’, and smaller numbers of young women, have left impoverished Croatian towns and villages in search of a new life abroad. In the days before mass air travel evoked by Baby Lasagna’s sepia-toned lyrics video, these rite-of-passage journeys often meant decades-long or lifelong separation from the families, communities, crafts and traditions that emigrants were leaving behind.
The farmhouse setting of Baby Lasagna’s official video, filmed near Umag with local residents playing his friends and neighbours, wrapped a cinematic visual identity around the song and established a signature look for his Eurovision persona when it appeared online two days before Dora.
Finishing his last farm chores before a leaving party that becomes increasingly anarchic as night falls, fires are lit and home-made brandy flows, he shares his anxious emotions and his sense of humour with the viewer, rocks out in the barn with a band of metalheads in balaclavas inspired by traditional Istrian lacework (also on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list), and syncs the instantly memeable line ‘Meow, cat, please meow back’ with a second’s clip of him holding a one-eyed ginger cat, knowing exactly what the cat-based attention economy of digital culture will make of that.
The cat is his own cat, the internet will joyously find out. He has three cats. Their videos go on TikTok. The cats now have a children’s picture book.
The visuals on stage when the pyro finale kicks in are neon dancing cats. Of course they are. In Malmö there are supposed to be even more.
According to Croatia’s national statistics bureau, almost 350,000 Croatian citizens left the country between 2013 – the year Croatia joined the EU – and 2022, with sociologists finding that nearly three quarters of all young emigrants in their research were motivated by better salaries, employment prospects, and living standards abroad. Youth emigration on such a scale is widely debated in Croatian society as a crisis that has left villages in the poorest areas depopulated and primary schools closed down because they simply had no children to teach.
‘Rim tim tagi dim’ communicates the contradictory emotions of leaving for a better life abroad, voiced by a singer who could have followed that path himself – like his younger brother, now the drummer in German gothic rock band Mono Inc. – but chose the quiet of small-town life with his fiancée and his cats in a village of 300 people, Kaštelir.
Desiring to grow into maturity and modernity, his character simultaneously understands he is leaving behind the community that gives him his identity, so throws himself into celebrating with them one last time.
The emo angst of his chorus is familiar musical language for anyone who grew up in the same alternative subcultures, but meshes even more creatively with the lived angst of leaving your home to fulfil your dreams, quite possibly for good, because that home has failed to provide what you would have needed to fulfil them there. Under Baby Lasagna’s ‘round of decompress’ sits this collective, as well as personal, tragedy.
Such a predicament will be relatable across all Europe’s peripheries, but hit hardest in the Balkans, worst affected by the European financial crisis since 2007–8 and least well served by what they were promised on joining the EU. Beneath the fiction of Europe ‘uniting through music’ at Eurovision are structural inequalities between West and East which have left many south-east European broadcasters only able to intermittently take part.
Before Romania’s financial relationship with the EBU deteriorated so badly that its 2016 entry was disqualified from the contest at short notice and the broadcaster will not even broadcast Eurovision 2024, its 2015 entrants Voltaj dedicated their song ‘De la capăt’ – with one of Eurovision’s most poignant language switches – to the children left behind by Romanian parents who have seen no alternative to emigrating for work abroad if they want to be able to give their children a better life.
While Voltaj sang from the perspective of a migrant father, losing his own language as he reminds himself why he is away from his child, ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ is a young man’s eye-view of how migration and masculinity have resonated in this part of the world.
Maybe they also know our dance
Wrapped up in Baby Lasagna’s line about ‘those city boys’, ‘all so pretty and so advanced’ – which he has learned to deliver with an ever more camp wrist-flick as his confidence as a frontman has grown – are layers of meaning both inside and outside the song which point to post-Yugoslav masculinities in flux.
In the post-Yugoslav space’s conventional cultural politics of modernity and tradition, urban and rural, which have underpinned so many musical controversies like Severina’s scandal in 2006, the city is where the nation grows up beyond its peasant traditions to become cosmopolitan and European, and leave the Balkans behind: of course ‘they’ won’t want to know ‘our’ dance.
Though leave it until late at night, and – as anthropologists are still discussing – those dances from the village, the more Balkan the better, are where those city boys really go to cast off their modern European inhibitions, let their emotions out, and have their round of decompress. (Istria’s as far from the Balkans as you can get in Croatia, but in this context the village setting will still do.)
Eurovision’s cultural economy since the ethnopop winners of the 2000s further turns the conventional urban/rural cultural politics on its head. When the contest’s very concept as a popular music competition between nations rewards ideas which are simultaneously this contemporary in aesthetic and neotraditional in inspiration, those city boys will want to know our dance, so they can go off and win Eurovision with it.
Unlike the played-utterly-straight sentimentality of ‘Mižerja’, ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ remixes folklore into the kind of creative expression that has driven many of Eurovision’s most successful entries since Jamala and Salvador Sobral’s intimatewinning entries in 2016–17: where the personal authenticity of young masculine vulnerability and sensitivity, and a social anxiety with which neurodivergent fans have sensed something in common, meets the collective authenticity of a context that viewers in numerous countries may have lived themselves or witnessed in their migrant parents’ lives.
Since his Dora performance, Baby Lasagna’s journey from Eurovision has become inseparable from the digital fan culture he interacts with and his newfound national celebrity at home. The singer has been invited to advertise Kaufland supermarkets and Madre Badessa spirits (owned by the pop producer Tonči Huljić, composer of Doris’s ‘Marija Magdalena’ and three other Croatian Eurovision entries).
The broadcaster that did not judge ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ strong enough – or maybe judged it too strong – to initially select it for Dora has since coordinated flashmobs in Zagreb, Split, Zadar, Osijek and Umag with hundreds of schoolchildren, cheerleaders, police officers, firefighters, dance troupes and assorted local people performing the song’s dance.
The picture they paint of an often-so-divided nation uniting to celebrate Croatian achievement which, by leading the Eurovision odds, is already world-class is similar to the atmosphere that breaks out when the national football team heads towards the finals of the men’s World Cup, as it has a remarkable tendency to do.
Outspoken footballer Dejan Lovren might have denounced ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ as ‘demonic’ on the night it won Dora, but the Croatian football federation has jumped on the Baby Lasagna bandwagon by sending him a customised team shirt to bring him luck in Malmo. Even Croatia’s former HDZ president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović – no stranger to a patriotic bandwagon when Croatians do well at international competitions – has voiced her excitement for his song in terms that attempt to fit it into her own interpretation of national unity.
Fantastic to see a kind, modest, and grounded artist like Marko, who proudly celebrates his heritage and speaks of issues that resonate universally—offensive to none. Let’s rally behind him! Go Marko! Go 🇭🇷! #Eurovision2024#GoCroatia#BabyLasagna#RimTimTagiDim#VolimHrvatsku
— Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović (@KolindaGK) May 3, 2024
Baby Lasagna travels to Malmö amid more excitement for a Croatian Eurovision entry than he will have been able to remember during his own lifetime, and the strongest chance of winning that Croatia has ever had as an independent country – in fact, probably higher chances than the only Croatian/Yugoslav winners, Riva, had in 1989.
Disunited by music
And yet, this is not a normal Eurovision. The apparent double standard of the EBU expelling Russian broadcasters from the contest in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but continuing to allow Israel’s broadcaster to participate despite the devastation Israeli forces have caused to Palestinian life and culture in Gaza since Hamas’s terror attack of 7 October 2023, has seen Eurovision added to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) list of targets for the first time in a year when the contest has been held outside Israel. (The EBU contends that the Russian and Israeli cases are not to be compared.)
Israeli forces’ new attack on Rafah started on the night of 6 May – last night, as I upload this post– with the Met Gala taking place in New York and with Eurovision week about to begin.
Contestants from ten countries (Baby Lasagna not among them) posted a joint statement in April about their discomfort at taking part in Eurovision in these circumstances, though PACBI still described their statement as a ‘patronising and colonial attitude’ that did not excuse them from ‘complicity in [the] artwashing’ of a ‘live-streamed genocide’.
Activists’ longstanding critique of how Israeli public diplomacy promotes the country as an LGBTQ+-friendly state to appeal to international LGBTQ+ public opinion, or what they call ‘pinkwashing’, means there has been particular pressure on queer artists with links to alternative scenes that advocate for solidarity with Palestine, like the UK’s Olly Alexander and Ireland’s Bambie Thug (who both signed the April statement), to withdraw from a contest in which, in the final reckoning, they may have been contractually compelled to take part. Every contestant in Malmö is entering a very different atmosphere than would have been expected after the highs of Liverpool in 2023 – an event that inspired the EBU to take up the BBC’s slogan ‘United By Music’ as a permanent one for the competition.
On the day of Eurovision’s heads of delegation meeting in Malmö to review and confirm each broadcaster’s performance plans, a public artwork outside Malmö Live event centre bearing that same slogan was defaced with fake blood by local protestors who oppose Eurovision being held in Malmö while Israel’s broadcaster is taking part.
Almost one in five musicians and cultural organisations who were due to be part of the city of Malmö’s cultural programming have pulled out in protest, including Malmö Dance Academy – who stated on Instagram that this was ‘because of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and in the West Bank’ – well-known acts from Sweden’s annual national final like Dotter and the 2024 runners-up Medina, and, reportedly, Malmö Pride, which is now no longer listed as a partner for a performance in the Eurovision fan village by Conchita Wurst that had been publicised only at the beginning of April.
Both security reasons and the drop in local buy-in seem to have made Malmö scale down its city-based activities, such as cancelling a public stage which should have hosted free performances in Malmö’s designated ‘Eurovision Street’ (remaining performances have moved into the fan village, which is easier to secure), and scaling back the ‘turquoise carpet’ ceremony which produced such dramatic photos from Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery last year that large brands immediately started contacting Liverpool’s museums service to book the space for advertising shoots.
Eurovision will not take over Malmö as Liverpool was praised for enabling it to do in 2023. The step change in musical creativity it has witnessed in recent years may also be threatened if the more alternative artists like Käärijä or Alexander who have given the event new life become dissuaded from participating, especially should PACBI’s boycott campaign become a standing one.
As the only city likely to meet the EBU’s hosting requirements should Croatia win, Zagreb has reserved the city’s arena for May 2025, and will organise a free public screening of the Eurovision grand final, as would usually only happen for major international sports matches. Just like Malmö, however, Zagreb would not reap the full benefits of hosting Eurovision if a repeat boycott hit the contest, or even if the brand’s image starts to alienate more of its once-faithful visitors and fans.
During the Obama presidency in the USA, the queer cultural theorist Lauren Berlant coined the phrase ‘cruel optimism’ to describe attachments to ideas of ‘the good life’ which cannot be fulfilled but, in our yearning for them, hold us back from what might be fulfilment otherwise.
Berlant’s theory has helped critical and feminist scholars make sense of the paradoxes of economic precarity in situations as diverse, and yet connected, as how young people navigate long-term unemployment in Turkey and why Nepalese Gurkhas wager their future happiness on training to work in militaries and private security companies that still subordinate them in paternalistic, pseudocolonial ways.
Migration as Baby Lasagna frames it is a cruel optimism: attachment to the good life that might be had abroad or in the big city, which might be materially more liveable if the cards fall right, pulls you away from the differently good life at home. But when the institution behind Eurovision as an event cannot, by its nature as an association of public service broadcasters responsible to their governments, deliver on all the hopes for justice that its fandom have projected on to it since at least Conchita Wurst’s apparently historic victory in 2014, feeling attached to Eurovision comes with a cruel optimism of its own.
Ukraine is the only country in Eurovision never to have failed to qualify from the semi-finals.
And in a happier year, that would be the first fact on fans’ minds when thinking about Kalush Orchestra’s chances in the competition.
Ten weeks ago, when Russian forces had just launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine, far more urgent and horrific unknowns were pressing on Ukrainians and the watching world than whether their country would be in a position to send their entry to Eurovision in May. Under martial law, all men of military age, including the band members, were prohibited from leaving the country, while at least 5.7 million Ukrainians have fled abroad since the invasion began.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians are already thought to have died in the invasion, with the full extent of brutalities committed by the occupying forces in places like Mariupol still to be revealed, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have reportedly been deported to remote locations in Russia. Yet Ukraine’s victories around Kyiv and elsewhere, the determination of the Ukrainian public, and the military aid rallied by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have all meant that, in a war where Putin has targeted Ukraine’s very existence as a nation, Ukraine still endures.
Indeed, it wasn’t until 2 April, the same day that Ukrainian forces finished retaking control of the entire Kyiv region, that Ukraine’s public broadcaster UA:PBC announced Kalush Orchestra would travel to perform live in Turin after all.
Since 2014, when Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea and tried to create de facto Russian entities out of separatist uprisings, Russia’s war in Ukraine and Ukraine’s reactions to the provocation have become one of the most contentious geopolitical themes confronting Eurovision almost every year.
But from Ukraine’s earliest days in Eurovision, the contest has represented a platform for cultural diplomacy and an opportunity to convey narratives of Ukrainian cultural identity to a West that has often been scarcely able to differentiate between Ukraine and Russia – while the style and scale of 21st-century Eurovision contests also owes something to Ukraine.
Dai-na dai-na, wanna be loved, dai-na, gonna take my wild chances
Ukraine’s debut entry in 2003, Oleksandr Ponomariov’s ‘Hasta la vista’, looks with hindsight almost like Australia’s out-of-competition performance in Eurovision 2014 – an ambitious delegation’s first opportunity to gauge the scale of the contest and start working out what it would take to make Eurovision their own.
Besides the graphics of an Apollo rocket marked with the Ukrainian flag and the presence of a spinning contortionist dressed in light blue, Ponomariov’s song was a relatively undemanding production with the mildly Latin flavour that Estonia and Latvia had both brought to their winning songs in 2001 and 2002.
Riga, the host city in 2003, was the second in a string of capital cities on the eastern, northern and southern peripheries of Europe that would host the contest throughout the 2000s, as the prize for their countries winning Eurovision the previous year. Estonia’s surprise win in 2001 had become the perfect launchpad for a nation-branding strategy that Estonia’s national enterprise agency had already been preparing in any case: ‘Brand Estonia: Positively Transforming’ sought to reposition Estonia as a future-oriented, high-tech Nordic country and distance it from the ‘Soviet’ stereotypes that were still being projected on to it in Western eyes.
Whether or not, as Paul Jordan debates, ‘Brand Estonia’ really resonated with the Estonian public, Eurovision gave Estonia a springboard for its nation-branding that other broadcasters, and even governments, in central and eastern Europe couldn’t fail to notice. That mattered all the more in the context of the EU accession process, when getting recognised as a member or even a candidate meant showing that (as per a logic which set up western Europe as the supreme benchmark of progress) your country was ‘catching up’ with the West.
Ukrainian marketing agency CFC Consulting certainly had noticed, and according to Jordan – who interviewed both Estonian and Ukrainian Eurovision decision-makers for his doctoral research – the agency was instrumental in persuading the Ukrainian broadcaster NTU to start showing and participating in the competition.
The format of Eurovision, where winning countries’ broadcasters get the right to host, meant cities like Tallinn in 2002 or Riga in 2003 could become the symbolic centre of Europe for a night, answering back to western Europeans’ doubts about how ‘European’ their countries even were. In Riga, Turkey joined the debut winners’ roll of honour with Sertab Erener’s ‘Everyway That I Can’ – which packaged the erotic appeal of ‘harem’ stereotypes and the trendy sound of ‘Oriental R&B’ production into the first ever winning entry to be inspired by Balkan and eastern Mediterranean pop-folk.
To represent Ukraine in Istanbul, NTU (and CFC Consulting) found their perfect ambassador in Ruslana Lyzhychko – who had been developing her own ambitious ethnopop project based on repackaging the folklore of the Hutsul people of western Ukraine since 2002.
The Hutsuls and their supposedly timeless village lives in the Carpathian mountains – in the part of Ukraine that wasn’t occupied by the USSR until 1939 – have been romanticised and arguably objectified for decades as what the ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky calls the so-called ‘“wild folk” of Western Ukraine’. Sonevytsky, whose 2019 book Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in Ukrainian cultural politics, starts her look at Ruslana’s ‘Hutsul project’ with Ruslana’s 2002 video ‘Znaiu ya’ (‘I know’).
Through what was then the most expensive music video ever produced in Ukraine, ‘Znaiu ya’ put Ruslana in the position of an explorer discovering the hidden secrets of Hutsul culture and conveying them to her audience, heralding a new stage in her career.
Musically, ‘Znaiu ya’ already exhibits some of the key features Ruslana carried over into her 2004 Eurovision entry ‘Wild dances’, including the loud calls of the Hutsul ‘trembita’ at the beginning, rhythms based on the traditional foot-stamping dances of Hutsul men, and beats accentuated by Ruslana’s tambourine. So did the rest of her 2003 Ukrainian album ‘Dyki tantsi’, which gave her Eurovision project its name.
What represented a small and exoticised part of the nation in a Ukrainian context, however, turned for the purposes of Eurovision into an exoticisation of Ukrainian culture itself. Ruslana’s image for the 2004 contest brought fur and leather costumes, fiery backdrops and ‘tribal’-style motifs together to create an ‘Amazon’ persona inspired by the mythologisation of Scythian warrior women who had lived in other parts of what is now Ukraine.
Many viewers outside Ukraine likely associated the look with Xena: Warrior Princess. And if we’re talking about exoticism and folk music from the Black Sea they’d have been more right to do so than they might have known, since (as another ethnomusicologist, Donna Buchanan, points out) the composer of Xena’s theme song, Joseph LoDuca, had himself been inspired by the polyphonic Bulgarian women’s singing which had become one of the most popular musical phenomena from this region on the 1990s world music scene.
Ruslana won Eurovision 2004 with a record-breaking score of 280 points (in a year when the introduction of a semi-final meant more countries could vote in the final than ever before), bringing Kyiv the chance to follow Tallinn, Riga and Istanbul and rebrand itself in western European eyes.
Four months later, though, Ukraine’s presidential election run-off led to mass demonstrations in Kyiv’s main square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), when authorities declared that the sitting prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, had beaten the opposition coalition’s leader Viktor Yushchenko and opposition supporters believed it was a fraudulent result.
We won’t stand this, no, revolution is on, ’cause lies be the weapon of mass destruction
Protestors occupied the Maidan until the result was overturned, taking Yushchenko’s campaign colour of orange as the symbol of their movement. Entertainers and public figures who supported the ‘Orange Revolution’ constantly visited the Maidan to keep up protestors’ morale, including the then-unknown hip-hop band GreenJolly who had recorded an anthem for the protests, and also Ruslana herself.
NTU’s selection process to choose the host entry for Eurovision 2005, with 45 announced acts across 15 semi-finals, had started in November 2004 before the Orange Revolution had even begun. By the time Ukraine’s Supreme Court had ordered a repeat run-off election and the Electoral Commission had declared Yushchenko the winner in January 2005, more than half of the heats had already taken place.
For the final on 27 February 2005, GreenJolly and three other acts were controversially given wildcards to go straight into the final, with GreenJolly performing their Orange Revolution anthem, ‘Razom nas bahato’.
Controversially, and reportedly at the behest of Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, GreenJolly won the final ahead of the prior favourite Ani Lorak, who was seen as a Yanukovych supporter – ensuring that the narrative of the Orange Revolution would carry directly into the competition. Eurovision’s rules against directly political messages meant that ‘Razom nas bahato’ had to take the lines about Yushchenko out of its chorus before it was allowed to take part.
The clips from the Orange Revolution that NTU inserted into GreenJolly’s pre-performance postcard, and the drummer’s orange shirt on stage, went a long way to making the connection clear.
More significant in Eurovision’s history than GreenJolly in the long run is probably how Ukraine and Kyiv approached hosting the contest, turning it into a touristic spectacle even more than had been the case with Tallinn, Riga and Istanbul. Throughout the week leading up to Eurovision, outdoor stages on the Maidan showcased Ukrainian musicians, and the government encouraged Western tourism by lifting visa requirements for EU visitors. The EU visitor visa regime was never reinstated after the contest, giving Ukraine an ongoing advantage over Russia in competing for tourists and their currency.
When Helena Paparizou won the Kyiv contest, her trophy was awarded by none other than Yushchenko himself, an unprecedented role for a head of state in a Eurovision final.
For almost a decade until the invasion of Crimea and Donbas forced Ukraine’s public broadcaster to miss the 2015 contest, Ukraine’s entries gave the country a trademark style at Eurovision that could be counted on to soar through the semi-finals and usually finished comfortably in the grand final’s top ten.
Show me your love, show me how much you care, talk to my heart, whisper my name
Most Ukrainian entries over the next few years followed a similar pattern, crafted to appeal to the public ‘televote’ that awarded 100% of the points in Eurovision until 2009: uptempo songs with a slight ethnopop flavour, built around female singers with assertive and sexually confident personas who were often already well-known in Russia and other neighbouring countries as well as Ukraine, and equipped with a new and unique staging concept every year.
Tina Karol’s ‘Show me your love’ in 2006 thus came with a crew of leaping ‘Cossack’ dancers who skipped rope during the instrumental break; Ani Lorak, three years after her disappointment in 2005, performed the fan-favourite ‘Shady lady’ in 2008 atop a set of giant light boxes; Svetlana Loboda brought shirtless gladiators, stiltwalkers, her own drum kit, and a set of three interlinked ladder/gyroscopes called the ‘Hell Machine’ to perform ‘Be my Valentine (Anti-crisis girl)’ on stage in Moscow in 2009.
Whether that crisis was the European financial crisis, the crisis following the Russian-Georgian war, or part of a Thunderdome far future was left to viewers’ imagination, and by the time gladiators were pulling Loboda’s drum kit across stage while she beat out a drum solo surrounded by Ukrainian flags, hardly anyone would have been asking anyway.
The celebrity culture that made Karol, Lorak and Loboda into entertainment personalities was often not to the taste of Ukrainian feminists, especially those who campaigned against the objectification of women, pornography and sex work. A co-founder of the controversial activist group FEMEN, who became internationally notorious in the early 2010s for their topless protests, told the feminists Olha Plakhotnik and Mariya Mayerchyk in 2010 that the media’s relentless sexualisation of female pop stars had even helped to inspire FEMEN’s own tactics:
I worked in show business for a year, and all this time I was curious why […] the work of civic organizations and civic movements is virtually unknown. […] But every one knows that, say, Tina Karol ripped her dress. And everyone is excited to look at that. The news of, I don’t know, say, Ani Lorak losing her panties is exciting. And every one is terribly excited about it.
In 2007, however, NTU had turned to a different corner of Ukrainian popular culture for its Eurovision entry, and delivered not just Ukraine’s second iconic representative but an act whose image has been taken up in Eurovision fan culture to symbolise the kitsch spirit of the 21st-century contest itself: Verka Serduchka, the creation of comedian Andriy Danylko, who like Ruslana had had a well-developed creative product at home before being chosen to translate it into Eurovision abroad.
‘Dancing lasha tumbai’, with its disco-ball uniforms, accordion riffs and semi-nonsense lyrics, is for many viewers the excess that defines Eurovision, and came second in Eurovision 2007 behind Marija Šerifović’s ‘Molitva’. As a cross-gender performance, Verka’s persona was also received by many viewers as one more in the line of Eurovision’s drag queens. In Ukrainian, and Russian, media culture, however, Verka had much more culturally specific meanings.
Verka, as portrayed by Danylko since the late 1990s, is a boisterous sleeper-train conductor swept along by the many transformations of postsocialist Ukraine, and speaking the mixture of Ukrainian and Russian known as Surzhyk, like many Ukrainians from her social background. As Sasha Raspopina writes, ‘anyone could name a “Serduchka” from their own lives’, not just in Ukraine but anywhere else which had been under Soviet rule.
At least until she came to Eurovision, Galina Miazhevich argues, Verka had less to do with Western practices of drag and more to do with the Soviet and post-Soviet form of subversive irony known as steb or stiob – though the very fact that Verka was a cross-gender character still led one Ukrainian parliamentary deputy to criticise her selection using anti-intersex terms.
Once at Eurovision, however, Verka and Danylko both found out she could also be seen through the lens of drag, and her post-contest album, Dancing Europe, closed out with a semi-remix of her entry titled ‘Evro Vision Queen’.
On top of all that, the song’s nonsense title and Verka’s naïve persona gave the entry just enough cover for Verka to repeatedly sing lyrics that sound very, very like the words ‘Russia, goodbye’.
Rather than argue about whether ‘lasha tumbai’ really was the Mongolian word for ‘whipped cream’ (supposedly no such phrase exists), the EBU of 2007 let it through.
I want to see ‘Russia, goodbye!’
Verka notwithstanding, Ukrainian Eurovision entries after 2007 didn’t go on to say ‘Russia, goodbye!’ at once – just as Russia continued to be an important TV and live performance market for many Ukrainian stars. Ani Lorak’s ‘Shady lady’ was composed by the serial Russian Eurovision entrepreneur Philipp Kirkorov, who represented Russia himself in 1995 and has moved on to produce six Russian and Moldovan entries since 2014.
(How involved he’ll be in future contests is another matter, though, especially with future Russian participation in question: Lithuania and Ukraine banned him from entering their countries in 2021, and Estonia in 2022, making an increasing number of potential host countries where he wouldn’t even be able to appear.)
In 2008 Lorak was Ukraine’s second Eurovision runner-up in a row in Belgrade, but Dima Bilan won the contest, meaning Moscow would host Eurovision in 2009.
Russia’s attack on Georgia in August 2008, between the two contests, turned even more of a political lens on to the 2009 contest than there would already have been given the fact that Eurovision had become well established as a space for simultaneously celebrating LGBTQ+ and national pride, whereas since 2006 every attempt to hold Pride in the Russian capital had been banned by Moscow’s mayor.
Georgia’s broadcaster, which had only started competing in Eurovision in 2007, at first declared it would withdraw from the Moscow contest, then changed its mind after winning Junior Eurovision in November 2007. Treading the same linguistic tightrope as Verka’s ‘Lasha tumbai’, Stephane and 3G’s ‘We don’t wanna put in’ left listeners in no doubt as to the fate it desired for the Russian leader; ordered to change the lyrics by the EBU, Georgian television withdrew instead.
Loboda’s Ukrainian flags planted in the Moscow stage, in contrast, were well within the rules: who can object to a national flag when Eurovision itself makes them integral to the contest’s visual identity? From 2022’s viewpoint, they might seem to assert much more resistance to neoimperial Russian ambitions against Ukrainian sovereignty than they necessarily did in 2009, yet all the ingredients necessary to make that interpretation were already present then.
Russia’s own entrant in 2009, meanwhile, was from Ukraine herself: Anastasia Prikhodko was born in Kyiv but had taken part in a series of the Russian talent show Fabrika zvyozd in 2007, as Ukrainian contestants used quite often to do. She had already been eliminated from the 2009 Ukrainian final, in circumstances that led to her suing the organisers, before entering the Russian selection process instead. Her entry ‘Mamo’ (‘Oh, mother’), with lyrics in both Russian and Ukrainian, became the Russian host entry.
A dark ballad about a young woman confessing her mother had been right to warn her against running away with an untrustworthy man, ‘Mamo’ has had its own retrospective interpretations projected on to it since Putin’s launch of a full-scale invasion aimed at bringing Ukraine back under Moscow’s control: could it even have been Mother Russia she was meant to be singing to? Prikhodko herself, however, remained in Ukraine, made two more attempts to represent Ukraine at Eurovision, and joined the Euromaidan protests in 2013-14; after Putin’s invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014 she gave up singing in Russian, and has been trying to build a political career with Yulia Tymoshenko’s party since 2018.
Ukraine’s entries in 2010 and 2011 continued with female soloists, though without the eroticism of the Karol/Lorak/Loboda years. Alyosha’s ‘Sweet people’ in 2010 was pitched as a warning against letting the world slide into environmental catastrophe, with a video filmed at Pripyat in the Chornobyl exclusion zone in Polesia – the first time a Ukrainian entry had alluded to the disaster that had fuelled many negative Western stereotypes of their country.
As much as it might have seemed to take Loboda’s ‘anti-crisis’ theme a step further, ‘Sweet people’ was only a last-minute, third-chance choice to represent Ukraine: NTU had first planned for a different artist, Vasyl Lazarovych, to sing Ukraine’s entry, then had to organise two different national finals in the space of a month, only for Alyosha’s original winning song to turn out to have been released before Eurovision’s eligibility deadline.
Mika Newton’s ‘Angel’, in 2011, nearly faced reselection as well after vote-rigging allegations, but the re-run was cancelled after the other two artists who would have been featured, Zlata Ognevich and Jamala, both decided not to take part. Newton’s staging featured a live performance by the Ukrainian sand painter Kseniya Simonova, whose appearances in Ukraine’s Got Talent had racked up a remarkable figure for the time of 2 million views.
For 2012, Ukrainian television knew that the country was about to be hosting a mega-event on an even greater scale than Eurovision 2005 – the men’s football European Championships, which Ukraine in co-operation with Poland had successfully bid for in 2005-7 (not that long after Kyiv had hosted Eurovision for the first time).
Welcome, girl and boy, take my hand, let’s enjoy
Ukraine’s preparations for Euro 2012 included major upgrades for the stadia in Kyiv and Kharkiv, two new stadia in Donetsk and Lviv, and new international airport terminals serving all four host cities to accommodate the tens of thousands of foreign fans who would be travelling unprecedented distances in a European football tournament to follow their teams.
(During the first phase of the war in Donbas in 2014-15, Donetsk’s airport became the site of a 242-day stand by Ukrainian troops who became mythologised in Ukraine as the ‘cyborgs of Donetsk’; Ukraine’s other airports are now all closed to passenger traffic and have been targets of Russian missile attacks.)
Gaitana’s uptempo entry ‘Be my guest’ doubled as a song of welcome for visiting football fans later in the summer, creating the same kind of sport/Eurovision crossover as the French entry in 2010, which France Télevisions also used as a theme for its coverage of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
Kyiv-born and with a Congolese father, Gaitana also stood out in Ukraine as Ukrainian showbusiness’s most prominent Afro-Ukrainian. The central structure, or central myth, of Eurovision as a competition between representatives of national musical cultures means that contestants don’t just perform their songs but take on the symbolic role of representing their nations. Players and fans of colour before Euro 2012 had already been expressing concerns about racism in Poland and Ukraine, and Gaitana herself had faced opposition from a member of the far-right Svoboda party, who attacked her song as sending ‘a vision of Ukraine as a country located somewhere in remote Africa’.
Within Ukraine, Gaitana’s star image has arguably involved a certain amount of self-exoticism around the African elements of her heritage (Adriana Helbig in Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration, for instance, comments that Gaitana’s videos in the late 2000s projected a ‘hypersexualised’, ‘alluring and mysterious’ persona, leveraging associations between sexuality and Blackness and remediating Soviet-era notions of Africa as a faraway, exotic land).
On the Eurovision stage, however, her floral ‘vinok’ or wreath – traditionally worn by marriageable girls – framed Gaitana as equally as authentic a carrier of Ukrainian tradition and national womanhood as any white Ukrainian woman.
In its first ten years at Eurovision, then, Ukraine had already been energetically using the contest as a platform to define and communicate certain narratives of Ukrainian national identity – as hospitable, welcoming, creative, ‘wild’, but with a knowing ability to package that ‘wildness’ for Western tastes that proved Ukrainian creativity was at ‘European’ standards.
To many of the Ukrainian students and other members of the public Jordan interviewed in 2007-8, Ukraine’s early entries were quite clearly representing the culture of western Ukraine and sometimes appeared as an elite-driven, rather than popular, narrative of the nation. Debates within Ukraine about both Verka and Gaitana, in particular, continued to illustrate the ‘ambiguity and complexity’ of defining Ukrainianness itself.
Somewhat on a principle of ‘turn and turn about’, Ukraine’s national final in 2013 was won by Zlata Ognevich, one of Mika Newton’s unsuccessful contenders in 2011. Here too the delegation hired a Ukrainian known for something else to join the stage performance: Igor Vovkovinskiy, who carried the 1.65-m Ognevich on stage dressed as a medieval giant, then held the record as the tallest living person from both Ukraine and the USA (though sadly died in August 2021, aged 38).
Ognevich’s ‘Gravity’ was hardly the only Eurovision entry around that time to nod to fantasy medievalism, two years into Game of Thrones’s reign as a transnational cultural phenomenon, and it’s probably not fanciful to hear hints of Disney and Idina Menzel in there (Menzel having made her name with Wicked’s showstopper ‘Defying gravity’) even though Frozen was still six months away.
In 2013-14, Ukraine was about to go through even greater upheaval than the Orange Revolution – though, unlike in 2004-5, it would take several years to see its effects on the Eurovision stage.
Tick tock, can you hear me go tick tock?
For all the hopes of change that Ukrainians had invested in Yushchenko on the Maidan in 2004, in the long run public disaffection with politics after the Orange Revolution remained the order of the day. A rivalry had broken out between Yushchenko and his Orange Revolution ally Tymoshenko; ruling coalitions had repeatedly failed to form stable governments, causing new parliamentary elections; and in 2010 Viktor Yanukovych, Yushchenko’s opponent in 2004, defeated Tymoshenko in the presidential elections.
Believing in closer relations with Russia, Yanukovych changed his mind about signing an association agreement with the EU in November 2013: the activists who gathered on the Maidan to protest the decision, and the artists – including Ruslana again – who flocked to the Maidan to support them, were mobilising against Yanukovych for a second time.
(Ruslana was then the only Ukrainian Eurovision entrant to have served as a parliamentary deputy, representing Yushchenko’s faction in 2006-07; since the second fall of Yanukovych, Prikhodko represented Tymoshenko’s party in 2018-19 and Ognevich represented the Radical Party of Oleh Liashko in 2014-15.)
Between November 2013 and February 2014, the ‘Euromaidan’ protests escalated into what Ukrainians know as the Revolution of Dignity, as Yanukovych used increasingly authoritarian tactics against protestors and activists formed self-defence groups in response – a pattern of popular mobilisation which primed the Ukrainian public to react so quickly to Russian invasion in 2022, but also gave Ukrainian far-right movements an unsettling place in the revolution’s history, since their members had been among the first to be ready to fight.
On 21 February, after three days of activists marching on parliament under police sniper fire, Yanukovych signed a deal with the opposition calling for a unity government, and fled Kyiv the next day. A new government could be expected to distance itself from Russia again and move closer to the EU. Putin’s Russia considered the revolution to have been a coup d’etat, and Russian security services stirred up pro-Russian demonstrations in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. The first pro-Russian demonstrations in Crimea took place on 23 February, the same day as the closing of the Sochi Winter Olympics, and on 27 February Russian special forces seized the Crimean parliament building in Simferopol so that the annexation could begin.
On 6-7 April, Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk started the process of declaring themselves independent republics. Fierce fighting in Donbas between Ukrainian forces and the separatist militias, which had covert Russian backing, broke out and lasted until the ‘Minsk II’ ceasefire in February 2015, though hostilities along the line of separation never ended, and more than 2 million people had fled the separatist-held areas.
None of this background was reflected in Ukraine’s 2014 Eurovision entry, which had been selected through a national final in December 2013. Unlike in 2005, no serious attempts were made to change it after the revolution – not only would time have been much tighter (Yanukovych was ousted in the last week of February, and Eurovision entries would have to be confirmed by mid-March), but the emergency in Crimea and Donbas was already breaking out.
Instead, Mariya Yaremchuk’s ‘Tick tock’ went down in Eurovision history as the performance which gave Måns Zelmerlow and Petra Mede’s ‘Love love peace peace’, then the 2020 Netflix movie, their man in a hamster wheel.
The escalation of the war in Donbas left NTU unable to commit to participating in Eurovision 2015 (leaving the Vienna contest ‘building bridges’ all the way to Australia while leaving out Ukraine) – so Ukrainian television’s first opportunity to communicate a national narrative in these new conditions would be 2016, when NTU launched a partnership with the commercial network STB. The outcome was another landmark in Ukraine’s Eurovision history.
Where is your heart? Humanity rise
With hindsight, the talent that both Jamala and her stage director Konstantin Tomilchenko poured into channeling the personal and collective emotions of ‘1944’, and our knowledge of what’s happened in Ukraine since then, might make it seem as if Ukraine would always have been the preordained winner of Eurovision 2016.
The pre-contest discourse, however, was much more about whether as contentious, divisive and politicised a song as ‘1944’ was widely seen to be could appeal to juries and audience members across the whole of Europe. Direct political messages are, of course, banned in Eurovision, as NTU had found with GreenJolly’s lyrics in 2005; Eurovision’s reference group had however concluded that ‘1944’ did not break the rules, presumably because it was not directly commenting on the politics of the day.
From academic perspectives on history and memory, of course, few things are more political than commemorating the past, above all when that past has immediate resonances with a conflict which is still going on: indeed, conveying a narrative of a conflict in the present by framing it as a continuation of a conflict that happened in the past is one of the most foundational discursive moves to look out for in studying historical memory.
As expansive as one might like the definition of ‘political’ to be in many other contexts, the fact that the reference group applied a much narrower definition worked in Jamala’s favour – and is probably important for creative freedom at the contest in a wider sense.
When necessary, Jamala could parry allegations that the song was political by explaining that it was about what her own Crimean Tatar great-grandparents had suffered in 1944 when her people were deported from Crimea. Any viewer knowing that Stalin had ordered those deportations and that Putin has looked to Stalinism as an era of lost Russian greatness, however, could already fill in the gaps with the present; while the song’s evocation of the traumas of ‘1944’, and Jamala’s skill in communicating vocal anguish, could also speak more widely to viewers across the rest of Europe whose own family histories had been scarred by the Second World War.
By the time of the contest, Jamala, whose grandparents were still living in occupied Crimea, could openly tell journalists that ‘of course [the song] is about 2014 as well’.
The song’s opening lines, graphic by Eurovision standards (‘When strangers are coming, they come to your house / they kill you all and say “We’re not guilty”’) deftly explained how Ukrainian public diplomacy would want European viewers to see through Russian disinformation about responsibility for violence in Crimea and Donbas. The chorus in Crimean Tatar incorporated allusions to a Crimean Tatar folk song understood as a protest against Stalin’s deportations (‘Ey, güzel Qırım’), and her virtuoso ‘melismatic wail’ over the sound of a duduk worked, as Sonevytsky explains it, to ‘include the Eurovision audience as co-participants in the experience of grieving, of experiencing anguish over loss’.
‘1944’ might well not have been organisers’ ideal winner in 2016: ‘Love love peace peace’, that contest’s legendary interval act, even joked that winning the competition with a song about war, like Abba’s ‘Waterloo’, ‘is not something we recommend’.
Yet in showing that a song with such complex emotions and politics could win, it arguably helped to make a step forward for the health of creative diversity at Eurovision – even if Kyiv hosting Eurovision 2017 meant that contentious public diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia was going to be at the centre of the contest’s politics for another year.
Time to find truth, time against the lies
Eurovision 2017 took place in a Ukraine which, since 2014, had seen sweeping government interventions against Russian-language media and remaining traces of Soviet public memory. A law in June 2016 introduced a quota for Ukrainian-language music and programming on Ukrainian broadcasters – similar to a move France made in 1994 to protect French culture from Anglophone competition, but particularly likely to affect Russian cultural products, in a context where Ukrainians experience Putin’s denials of Ukrainian nationhood as a continuation of 19th-century Russian imperial repression of Ukrainian linguistic and cultural expression.
(Since then, a further law in 2019 has defined Ukrainian as the only state language, and introduced further requirements on education and media in languages other than Ukrainian which operate most stringently for content in Russian.)
Becoming the first, and still only, city in central and eastern Europe to ever host Eurovision twice meant that Kyiv and Ukraine would not just be showing themselves off to ‘Europe’ again but illustrating how much had changed there since 2005 – while using the diplomatic platform of hosting the contest to counter Russian disinformation narratives about Ukraine.
O.Torvald, a rock band from Poltava, won Ukraine’s national final in February 2017 with the song ‘Time’ – a second Ukrainian host entry by an all-male group (in a year also featuring an unusually all-male presenter team), in contrast to the iconic female performances which had defined most of Ukraine’s Eurovision history to date.
O.Torvald’s national final performance featured the band playing in what appeared to be the aftermath of an explosion, with red ticking clocks seemingly implanted in their chests counting down a three-minute time limit and the frontman Yevhen Halych spreading his arms during the breaks as if waiting to be shot. When the song and countdown ended, the band members stood stunned as whatever was impending failed to happen, and the countdown at the back of the stage started ticking back up in green.
‘Time’ wouldn’t be the last occasion that Ukrainian Eurovision entries toyed with apocalyptic themes, but the rawness of the national final performance was significantly toned down for the contest itself: with a more abstractly dystopian vibe, the band performed in outfits that looked a little like futuristic chainmail in front of a giant, hologram-style head.
Compared to ‘1944’, or even O.Torvald’s original performance, reading politics into the version of ‘Time’ staged at Eurovision would have taken much more active interpretive work. The main political narratives of Kyiv’s hosting Eurovision were instead offstage. Questions over whether LGBTQ+ visitors would be welcome and safe in the Ukrainian capital were being intensively fielded by Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko, the British Embassy and British Council, and activists from Kyiv Pride, who were only just beginning to win municipal support for the marches they had been organising since 2013.
The slogan of Eurovision 2017, ‘Celebrate diversity’, could but did not have to allude to LGBTQ+ diversity as well as the diversity of national and ethnic cultures, and the same strategic ambiguity attended the city authorities’ decision to temporarily rename Kyiv’s late-Soviet-era People’s Friendship Arch the ‘Arch of Diversity’ and paint it in rainbow colours; this decoration would last through Eurovision and Kyiv Pride. (Far-right activists temporarily halted the paint job during Eurovision week.) The arch itself had been scheduled for dismantling since May 2016 under Ukraine’s new decommunisation laws, and in April 2022 Klitschko did order the sculpture of two friendly Ukrainian and Russian workers beneath the arch to be removed.
Post-2014 Ukraine’s policy of cultural separation from Russia, made in the context of Russia’s occupation of Crimea and eastern Donbas and its ongoing strategy of ‘hybrid war’, directly affected the 2017 contest when security services announced that the Russian representative Yulia Samoilova would not be allowed to enter Ukraine.
Dozens of Russian entertainers since 2014 who had taken stances in support of Putin or the annexation of Crimea had already been added to a ‘list of persons posing a threat to the national security of Ukraine’ compiled by the Ukrainian security service (SBU) and culture ministry, and Russians were also ineligible to enter Ukraine if they had made what Ukrainian law considered to be illegal visits to Crimea (travelling there directly from Russia, without crossing a Ukrainian border post).
Samoilova, who had been runner-up on Russian X Factor in 2013 and appeared in the opening ceremony of the Sochi Paralympics, was not an established enough star to have come to Ukrainian security services’ attention, but had performed in Crimea in 2015. The day after she was selected for Eurovision, the SBU announced that she could be banned from entry to Ukraine, causing a month-long stand-off that ended in Russia withdrawing from the 2017 contest.
The circumstances of the tussle over Samoilova, who has spinal muscular atrophy and performs from her wheelchair, left room for suspicion that those responsible for selecting her had exploited her disability for extra sympathy. Russia selected her again for Eurovision 2018, where her song became the only Russian entry to date not to qualify from the semi-finals – at the time leaving only Ukraine and Australia with a 100% qualification record.
Ukraine’s own 2018 entry, ‘Under the ladder’, might have caused technical headaches but at least not political ones: Mélovin began the song by bursting out of a hydraulic coffin ten feet above the stage, and ended it sitting at another of the gimmicks celebrated in ‘Love love peace peace’, a burning fake piano. (Retrospectively, Mélovin now figures as Ukraine’s first LGBTQ representative, having come out as bi while performing at a Kyiv music festival in 2021.)
The programme of cultural sanctions against Russia came back to bite Ukraine’s Eurovision participation in 2019, when Maruv won the national final but was forced to pull out because she was not prepared to sign a contract with UA:PBC agreeing not to perform in Russia for some months after the contest. In 2017-18, as Tatiana Zhurzhenko notes, the Ukrainian parliament had debated several proposals to directly ban or sanction Ukrainian artists touring in Russia, sparking wider discussion about whether such so-called ‘unpatriotic behaviour’ should be left to the music industry to regulate or governed by the law.
UA:PBC had made its stance on the matter unequivocal, and so had Jamala – who had put Maruv on the spot during the final by role-playing a Eurovision press conference and asking Maruv the ‘very uncomfortable question’ of whether or not she believed that Crimea was Ukraine.
As a result, Ukraine never found out whether Maruv would have kept up the country’s 100% qualification record – though the hypersexualised style of ‘Siren song (Bang!)’ might have gone somewhat out of fashion since Eurovision’s all-televote years.
Siyu, siyu, siyu, siyu zelenesenki
Before Covid-19 wrote 2020 into Eurovision history as the only year when the contest has ever had to be cancelled in almost seven decades, Rotterdam 2020 was already going to open a new chapter in Ukraine’s own Eurovision history – as the first time a Ukrainian entry had ever been performed solely in Ukrainian.
Jamala’s lines in Crimean Tatar and Verka’s phrases in German and Surzhyk aside, every Ukrainian entry since 2006 had been wholly in English; Ruslana had sung predominantly in English with some words of Ukrainian, and even GreenJolly had mixed Ukrainian and English together.
‘Solovey’, by the electronic folk band Go_A, both updated Ukraine’s reputation for repackaging folklore as expertly-crafted Eurovision spectacle into the 2020s, and helped to express a creative spirit that Zhurzhenko has described as a ‘cultural revolution’ in Ukraine since Euromaidan.
This creative revival was characterised, Zhurzhenko writes, by ‘the active role in the long-due reforms claimed by a new generation of artists, cultural managers and activists, the redefinition of the very notion of Ukrainian culture (such as reclaiming the Ukrainian contribution to what is usually labelled Russian avantgarde and Soviet modernism), the growing understanding of Ukraine as a multicultural polity and, finally, the new appreciation of Ukrainian culture as an instrument of soft power’ – just as Jamala had proven in 2016.
Founded in 2012 by keyboardist/percussionist Taras Shevchenko (who shares his name with Ukraine’s national poet), Go_A’s four-piece membership also includes guitarist Ivan Hryhoriak, folkloric multi-instrumentalist Ihor Didenchuk, and the hypnotic vocals and stage presence of Kateryna Pavlenko, who learned traditional ‘white voice’ singing from her grandmother during her childhood in Polesia and trained in folklore at Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts.
How the transfixing production of ‘Solovey’ would be translated on to a Eurovision stage was one of the most anticipated questions of the 2020 Eurovision season – until the contest was cancelled and Go_A’s participation was rolled over to 2021.
Eurovision 2021’s standing as an instant classic in the contest’s history owes much, of course, to the collective emotions of being able to come together once again and share in the rituals of the Eurovision year – but also, perhaps, to the fact that the many acts from 2020 reconfirmed for 2021 had had months longer than usual to prepare their songs.
Go_A were no exception, and worked on three different options before settling on ‘Shum’, a song they had released online in January 2021. Trimmed to fit into Eurovision’s three-minute time limit and differentiate itself more from the traditional folk song about awakening the spring which had inspired it, the Eurovision version of ‘Shum’ premiered in March with a video reimagining the spring ritual as a post-apocalyptic rave, filmed in forests near the vicinity of Chornobyl.
Second only to Måneskin in the public vote at Eurovision 2021, and indeed in the contest’s year-end global streaming stats, ‘Shum’ captivated its audience from Kateryna’s first note through to its ever-accelerating finale – while, as with Ruslana and Xena, any resemblance one might have perceived to the style of The Matrix very much worked in its favour too.
Even in strictly musical terms, following up on the phenomenon of ‘Shum’ in 2022 might have seemed a nigh-impossible task – though that didn’t deter Didenchuk, who re-entered Ukraine’s national selection in 2022 as the flute-player of his other band, Oleh Psiuh’s folk/rap project Kalush Orchestra.
Remember your ancestors, but write your own history
Since ‘1944’ and its response to the Russian annexation of Crimea, at the very latest, Eurovision has represented an explicit, not just implicit, site of Ukrainian public diplomacy, on top of the role it has had as a platform for communicating narratives of Ukrainian national identity ever since 2003-4.
(With that public diplomacy function in mind, in fact, Jamala’s infamous question to Maruv – as coercive as it seemed on the night – might not have been an unrealistic reflection of the role that Ukrainian TV would have expected a national representative to play in the Eurovision press circus.)
After weeks when Russian forces had been massing at the Ukrainian border, Ukraine and its allies were already on high alert for an imminent invasion when the national final took place on 12 February. Knowledge of what might be to come gave the competition a sombre extra layer of meaning: as well as competing for the right to represent Ukraine at Eurovision, would they also be auditioning for no less than the role of begging allies to save their very nation if the worst warnings came true?
Kalush Orchestra and their tribute to Psiuh’s mother Stefania came second on the night behind Alina Pash, another 1990s-born musician who experiments with fusions of rap and Ukrainian folklore. Pash’s song ‘Tini zabutykh predkiv’ combined strategies that both Jamala and Ruslana had used in winning entries: Jamala’s emotional intensity of describing her own family history in the context of national tragedy, and Ruslana’s ability to present herself as a mediator of Carpathian and Hutsul folklore for a modern age.
The song shared its title, translating to ‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’, with the famous film directed by Sergei Parajanov in 1964-5 which re-romanticised the Hutsuls of western Ukraine – and which influenced Ruslana’s Hutsul project to such an extent that the trembita calls introducing ‘Wild dances’ follow very closely the calls over the title sequence of Parajanov’s film.
As a historical narrative, it referenced a free Ukrainian people dating back to pre-Christian times, the early Slavic form of popular assembly known as the ‘viche’, and the role of the hetmans and Cossacks in defending their land – thus directly resisting the imperialist narrative of Ukrainians as a people without history that Putin’s propaganda had been carrying abroad, and arguing that the Ukrainian people had a claim to the land dating back centuries further than the claims of any Russian-centred state.
Its English-language rap section vocalised Pash’s creative identity and patriotic duty to her people as aligned with the work of Dumas, Dante, Picasso, Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm – suggesting Ukraine belonged equally at the centre of European high culture, and touching off the national cultural reference points of almost as many countries as Zelenskyy has managed to address in his own televised addresses to the leaders and parliaments of the liberal West. Her performance ended by projecting a map of Ukraine in its internationally recognised borders, including the whole of Crimea, plus Donbas.
‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’ practically foretold itself playing out as the winning reprise of Eurovision 2022, in other words – until it started being reported that Pash had committed one of the cardinal sins of post-2014 Ukraine’s ‘cultural revolution’ by illegally visiting Crimea herself in 2015.
Vidbir’s rules, on paper, should have prevented the national selection being derailed by a second Crimea scandal in three years, since all artists were expected to confirm that they had not performed in Russia or crossed through it to visit Crimea since 2014. As the authenticity of documents her team had shown UA:PBC about her visit started being questioned, Pash pulled out of Eurovision of her own accord.
Ten days later, Ukraine’s representatives for 2022 were finally confirmed as Kalush Orchestra – who had been vocal since the final about irregularities they believed had taken place in the jury vote, which had narrowly awarded Pash victory in the first place.
Two days after that, the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began – and Mama Stefania, like so many suffering mothers and grandmothers in the wartime media of this and other conflicts (not least the Yugoslav wars), has come to symbolise the suffering of the Ukrainian nation as a collective.
Psiuh’s promise to his mother that ‘I’ll always find my way home, even if all roads are destroyed’, means something else altogether when millions of Ukrainians are separated from their loved ones by ruined roads and bridges or by battle lines: as Psiuh told the Associated Press from Turin, ‘After it all started with the war and the hostilities, it took on additional meaning, and many people started seeing it as their mother, Ukraine’.
‘Stefania’ itself, meanwhile, is already soundtracking more than 150,000 TikTok videos, many of them showing the new daily life of Ukrainian social media users who have joined the military or relaying the ubiquitous videos of Ukrainian tractors towing away abandoned Russian tanks. When Ukrainian scholars reflect on the culture of everyday life in wartime (as Croatian scholars found themselves having to do three decades ago), Kalush Orchestra’s song would already have been part of the story even if the band had never gone to Turin.
Even if all roads are destroyed
By giving the band members permission to leave Ukraine to promote their entry internationally and to perform in the contest live (which almost all of them took up – only the net-wearing hypeman, Johnny Strange, stayed behind in Ukraine’s territorial defence, to be replaced for Turin by Salto Nazad’s Sasha Tab), the Ukrainian state has acknowledged how important Eurovision has been as a platform for articulating Ukrainian diplomatic narratives and 21st-century interpretations of Ukraine’s national cultural identity, not just in 2022 but ever since Ukraine started taking part.
For Ukraine in 2022, like Bosnia in 1993, the platform that competing in Eurovision affords a nation at war is more significant than the part any one musician could play in military ranks – and, unlike in 1993 (when Bosnia only received votes from the Italian, Turkish, Belgian, Maltese, French and Irish juries, and came 16th), the votes of a transnational public which has mobilised in remarkable solidarity with Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion will account for 50% of the points.
Having only declared independence from Yugoslavia at the beginning of March 1992, however, Bosnia-Herzegovina never had the chance to function as a peacetime state before its war began (and even though Yugoslavia had been competing in Eurovision since 1961, TV Sarajevo had been far less successful in steering representatives through the national selection process than the TV studios in Ljubljana, Belgrade or Zagreb). Ukraine’s independence is three decades old, and artists in their late 20s like Psiuh do not even have living memory of a time when Ukraine was under Moscow’s rule.
With a critical eye towards how national identities are constructed and represented, Ukraine’s record in Eurovision offers much to unpick. Although Russian is an everyday language for many Ukrainians (up to and including Zelenskyy), Ukrainian entries have never featured more than the odd Russian word.
The cultural centre of gravity for Ukrainian entries has often tacked towards the nation’s west as if it represents the whole of the country, while arguably writing out the histories of non-Ukrainians in western Ukraine (including Jews, Poles, Armenians and Roma, Sonetvysky notes in Wild Music) who have also been objectified and oppressed.
The wide-ranging extent of Ukraine’s post-2014 laws on national language and ‘decommunisation’ are open to critique – though the level of aggression against Ukraine from Putin’s Russia has influenced some Russian-speakers to switch more towards Ukrainian in daily life, all the more so since the full-scale invasion began.
As far as Eurovision is concerned, meanwhile, Ukrainian entries have used the contest for political ends, and have tested the limits of its rules against political messaging again and again – though the EBU has never disqualified any Ukrainian entry on political grounds. Ukraine’s national selections have often seemed to privilege perceptions of suitability for Eurovision above the appearance of a transparent selection, and 2022 was scarcely the first time that participants distrusted the result. Indeed, without speaking Ukrainian I don’t have the in-depth knowledge of the patronage networks within Ukrainian entertainment and media circles that would put the relationships between performers and producers in more context.
As of the beginning of May 2022, Ukraine has still qualified from every semi-final it has appeared in – yet beneath that headline record, Ukraine didn’t even get to perform an entry in 2015 or 2019, for reasons far beyond the broadcaster’s control the first time but well within them in 2019.
Nevertheless, without the creativity of Ukrainian musicians and designers, each responding to the politics of 21st-century Ukraine in their own way, Ukrainian Eurovision delegations would never have had the wherewithal to pursue public diplomacy objectives through the contest so effectively. While broadcasters select their entries with certain strategic objectives in mind, it’s primarily the music and performance of Ukrainian contestants which have defined what Eurovision viewers come to expect from Ukraine, and Ukraine’s most iconic Eurovision entries have been those where the entrants themselves brought most creative vision of their own.
In an unmissable address to the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies’ annual conference in April 2022, Olesya Khromeychuk, director of the Ukrainian Institute in London and a historian of gender and nationalism in 20th- and 21st-century Ukraine, asked her audience of scholars of eastern Europe: where is Ukraine on the international academic community’s ‘mental maps’?
As ‘the largest state in Europe,’ Khromeychuk points out, Ukraine has taken its rightful place since 1991 on geographical maps, even with its cities misspelled or an unnecessary definite article inserted before its name. And yet, on Western scholars’ mental maps, Ukraine has largely remained colonially subsumed by versions of Russian culture which imperialistically appropriated it, or torn between Russia and NATO as simply a pawn in a greater geopolitical game.
The worlds of sport, fashion and technology have all offered counter-narratives to that erasure – yet out of all the forms of international exchange and co-operation Ukraine has participated in since becoming independent, participating in Eurovision is where Ukraine has staked its place most forcefully and inextricably on an international public’s mental maps. 21st-century Ukrainian cultural politics might not have been quite the same without Eurovision – but 21st-century Eurovision would certainly not have been the same without Ukraine.
In an opening without most of the mass spectacle that has become such a ritual of the modern Olympics, and marred by last-minute resignations over previous abusive behaviour from several core members of its creative team, one element in the opening ceremony of the ‘2020’ Games gave viewers much-needed continuity with fondly-remembered ceremonies of the past – the Parade of Nations, where each competing country’s athletes march behind their flag.
Every Summer and Winter Games since London’s first Olympics in 1908 has opened with a flag parade, though the tradition actually dates back two years further to an oddity of the Olympic calendar – the Intercalated Games held in Athens in 1906, during the brief period when the early Olympic movement planned to hold an extra Games in Greece halfway through every regular Olympiad, and now no longer recognised as an Olympics by the International Olympic Committee.
(The first Athens Games in 1896 did see standard-bearers lead athletes into the stadium before a rendition of the Olympic anthem and a short speech from the King of Greece – but since the 100m dash began immediately afterwards, perhaps that doesn’t count now as a proper ‘parade’.)
The ritual of each team parading behind an athlete carrying their national flag, carrying over the practice of military and uniformed organisations’ parades, could hardly be a more effective symbol of an idea the sociologist Michael Billig called ‘banal nationalism’ in his 1995 book of that name, which scholars have been using to think about international competitions ever since – the idea that the surface of the world and the whole of human culture are perfectly, cleanly and naturally divided into nations, bounded pieces of territory where national cultures are handed down.
So expressive of international competition as a format are flag parades that they have been adopted by other multi-sports events (like the British Empire Games, first held in 1930, which became the Commonwealth Games after the Second World War when the decolonisation of the British Empire began), and even Eurovision – the producers of the 2013 Malmö contest staged one for the first time in what might well have been a nod to the London 2012 Olympics, and the tradition has stuck.
Some past parades have enabled national Olympic committees to take stands on international political issues, such as North and South Korea marching under a unified flag when PyeongChang in South Korea hosted the Winter Games in 2018, or the British Olympic Association’s secretary Dick Palmer marching alone in 1980 to express British displeasure at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – an act of compromise with several sports bodies (and Margaret Thatcher) who had wanted to join the US in boycotting the Moscow Games.
Yet the parade has also started to reveal ways in which the fiction of banal nationalism breaks down. Since the Rio 2016 Games, the IOC has operated a Refugee Olympic Team for athletes who have had to flee their country of citizenship and could not otherwise compete because they are not yet eligible for citizenship of any other country. (Among their 29 members in Tokyo is the former Iranian taekwondoka Kimia Alizadeh, a bronze medallist in Rio, who fled Iran for Germany just before the pandemic began and had not formally competed since 2018; her unusually low seeding meant she met and eliminated the defending champion in her weight class, Great Britain’s double gold medallist Jade Jones, in the last 16.)
Eligible Russian athletes, meanwhile, currently parade and compete under neutral colours as the ‘Russian Olympic Committee’ as a result of IOC and World Anti-Doping Agency sanctions against Russia: punishing the Russian state for sponsoring its extensive doping programme but not athletes who have proven themselves to be drug-free, the exclusion of Russia’s flag and anthem will last through the 2020 and 2022 Games. (The many Russian gold medallists we can expect in the meantime, including shooter Vitalina Batsarashkina who’s already won hers, will hear Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 during their medal ceremonies instead.)
Then, of course, there’s the ongoing fudge that means Taiwan has to take part under the name, anthem and insignia of a nominal ‘Chinese Taipei’ so as not to invite protests from China, which has been in place since the IOC recognised the People’s Republic of China in 1979.
Flags are the universally recognised symbols of nations in the Olympic-style parade – but the bodies of athletes, and teams’ choices about how to style them, do just as much symbolic work under the Olympic gaze.
Performance on parade
Even in everyday life, dress and style are imbued with meaning: both consciously and less consciously, we signal aspects of our identity through at least some of our choices about what we wear and our responses to who we expect to see us; other people draw conclusions about aspects of our identity from what they notice about the choices we’ve made, whether or not those are the conclusions we meant. Uniforms, designed to signal a collective identity to insiders and outsiders as well as to create a sense of conformity and discipline within a team, bring with them an extra level of deliberateness altogether.
As dress historian Geraldine Biddle-Perry writes in her study of very early British Olympic teams’ opening ceremony uniforms, ‘[t]here is a need to examine what is at stake when bodies participate in the spectacular culture of nationalism’ – which, in modern Olympic opening ceremonies, they now do in front of some of the largest simultaneous television audiences in the world.
Creating a team uniform for an Olympic ceremony, especially outfitting the flagbearers who will be the focus of the audience’s collective gaze, puts teams and their designers in the position of deciding how to embody the nation on a spectrum from traditional to modern, and how to signal the team’s relationship towards the social institution of world sport. All these considerations influence design as well as the practical factors of cost, climate, and the multitude of body shapes that Olympic uniform designers need to clothe.
For the majority of countries in the Olympics, the spectrum from traditional to modern is also a spectrum from national authenticity to the aesthetics of the homogenising West (even if, in many of their cases, the idea that certain traditions were national emerged from anti-colonial resistance once the Western colonisers had already come) – and, designers will be aware, is simultaneously yet another balancing beam for the nation to perform on in the endless test of how well it has ‘kept up’ with the West.
‘Western’ styles of opening ceremony outfit – the kind that go unmarked as ‘normal’ by most viewers in the West – run on their own spectrum, linked to ideas of modernity and class. Classic ensembles with blazers, pocket handkerchiefs and sometimes even boaters stem from the summer wear of the white British and North American upper classes at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the fashion of the elites who founded world sport’s institutions for themselves – and the ideal that outsiders would have to match impeccably in order to assimilate.
(Back in that era during the first few Games, the idea of team uniforms for the opening parade was only starting to bed in: according to Biddle-Perry, even though the US team in 1908 had been issued with matching suits in national colours on the voyage to London, most of the athletes who marched in the parade turned out in ‘everyday leisure attire of tweed knickerbockers or dark lounge suits’ topped with a stars-and-stripes cap, while the British team’s vests were each edged in their own club or college colours, with a Union Flag cricket cap again the only completely homogenous piece of uniform.)
Modern, casual performance wear might suggest the opposite: a technologically advanced and forward-looking nation, secure enough about how the world sees its modernity to be confident in its meritocracy. The simple business suit probably falls somewhere in the middle, while Team USA has defaulted to Ralph Lauren’s country club aesthetic every Games since 2008 (and counting). Opening ceremony outfits have lent themselves to instant nation-branding since before the word ‘nation-branding’ was invented: a famous image from the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid shows the US team in shearling jackets and Stetsons and the Soviet team in equally iconic fur coats and hats, with the smaller Yugoslav team in chic alpine winter wear directly between them on the field, exactly where socialist Yugoslavia’s geopolitical identity would have wanted it to be.
Yugoslavia: between East and West
Tradition has its own spectrum too. At one end is full-on reproduction of ‘authenticity’, concealing any adaptations out of plain sight; at the other is showing off the nation’s modernity through how skilfully its designers have been able to incorporate traditional elements into creativity recognisable by global standards – that is, by a Western gaze – as fashionable and contemporary. (‘Folk music’ and ‘world music’ work exactly the same way; at Eurovision, it’s the difference between ‘Hora din Moldova’ and Ruslana).
Post-Soviet states in the Caucasus and Central Asia, with national folklore infrastructures shaped by decades of Soviet cultural policy that aimed to construct national cultures for each of the USSR’s titular republics, might be some of the most likely to bring traditional dress to the Olympic opening ceremony. Budget constraints and the extreme heat of Tokyo in July/August probably explain why that’s been slightly less in evidence this year (the ‘2020’ Games are likely to see the highest temperatures of any Olympics to date, though who knows how long that record will stand) – certainly compared to 2016, when the Georgian team offered a perfect illustration of the gender politics of tradition, modernity and nationhood by outfitting the men in charcoal suits with folk details and the women in full-on folk-style dresses, reportedly inspired by the medieval Georgian past.
This year’s Georgian team opted for white suits with red arm stripes matching the national flag; Kyrgyzstan carried the metaphorical flag for post-Soviet neotraditional fashion at the Olympics by dressing its athletes in long white embroidered jackets and having its men wear kalpaks, the Kyrgyz national hat, which was added to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list in 2019.
Athletes and designers from island states in the Global South, meanwhile, know very well that their countries’ costume traditions exist within a complex web of coloniality and exoticism on the global stage. Under colonial rule, these were among the very practices Western missionaries and educators sought to stamp out. Despite that – or equally, in the erotics of colonialism, because of it – both the Caribbean and Oceania have seen their folk costumes relentlessly sexualised for Western gazes and Western profit.
No Olympic flagbearer has created as much anticipation around themselves as a flagbearer as Tonga’s Pita Taufatofua has done since 2016 when he first carried the Tongan flag wearing a traditional ta’ovala around his waist and a bare, oiled chest.
In Rio, Taufatofua had to craft his entrance behind the back of team officials, who reportedly asked him to ‘please just wear the suit’ – suggesting how sensitive they might have been over the risk of being seen as conforming to stereotype rather than reclaiming tradition. (‘I was representing 1,000 years of history,’ Taufatofua told The Guardian in 2019; ‘we didn’t have suits and ties when we traversed the Pacific Ocean.’)
Since then, his flag parade appearances (including the 2018 Winter Games, where he competed in cross-country skiing) might just have made him the most famous Tongan on the planet – though more people probably know him as ‘the topless Tongan flagbearer’ than by his name.
Taufatofua, formerly a youth counsellor in Australia, has used his fame to become a UNICEF Pacific Ambassador and work with the Tongan government on sport in schools – and seems to have inspired Vanuatuan rower Riilio Rii to make a shirtless entrance in Tokyo as well (serendipitously accompanied by an orchestral version of the Final Fantasy theme, no less – as part of the parade’s medley of famous soundtracks from Japanese video games).
The only country in the Global North to incorporate Indigenous dress into its flagbearer outfits is New Zealand, whose flagbearers since the last Athens Games have worn Te Māhutonga, the kākahu or feathered cloak that Māori master weavers spent thousands of hours creating for the team’s future heritage in 2004. As the weaver who keeps it safe between Olympics, Rānui Ngārimu, explains:
For me it is about telling the story of New Zealand and our team from Aotearoa … Many hands went into the making of the kākahu, Māhutonga. Whether it was by the gathering and preparing of the fibres and feathers, and the weaving itself. And many hands went into helping those athletes to become Olympians. That’s what I think about when I see it.
The entrance of flagbearers wearing Te Māhutonga – this year David Nyika, a boxer of Ugandan and European descent (a last-minute switch for rower Hamish Bond), alongside women’s rugby sevens captain Sarah Hirini, who has Māori heritage – also symbolised the extent to which New Zealand has incorporated Māori symbols, tradition and language into its state identity, decentring European primacy more than any other settler colonial nation has attempted. (Nyika wore Te Māhutonga itself, Hirini was presented with another kākahu before the team travelled to the Games.)
Outfitting a pair of flagbearers wasn’t a prospect Ngārimu and her fellow weavers had to think about in 2004 – but the Tokyo Games are the first where flagbearers of both genders recognised at the Games have been allowed and encouraged, though not required. In May 2021 the IOC hailed Tokyo as ‘the first gender-equal Olympic Games ever’, with at least one female and one male athlete on each team, though the United Arab Emirates chose not to act on its invitation to enter a woman in the 100m sprint. (The UAE and Oman both fielded all-male delegations in the flag parade, though Oman’s Mazoon al-Alawi is due to compete in the women’s 100m later this Games.)
Only some 10 per cent of Olympic committees chose not to select two flagbearers (the UAE, Ethiopia, Oman, Samoa, Djibouti, Suriname, Tajikistan, Nigeria, Niger, Nepal, Vanuatu, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Brunei, Mali and Libya only had men; Congo, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Bermuda and Bulgaria only had women), leaving 90 per cent of the parading countries (including Afghanistan and Iraq, the training grounds for NATO’s implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda) appearing as gender-equal as the IOC is able to imagine.
These 400-odd athletes all carried the weight and honour of representing and symbolising their nations – while, in Olympic ritual, the host nation’s chosen torchlighter carries the extra prize and burden of symbolising the Olympic community’s hopes for the entire Games, and thus the world.
Carrying the torch
The Olympic torch relay, notoriously, dates back to 1936, when the Nazi regime which had inherited Germany’s right to stage the next Summer and Winter Olympics used the Games to attempt to tie together their myth of Aryan racial origin and superiority – which grafted smoothly on to the Eurocentrism of Baron de Coubertin’s vision for the Olympic movement itself.
Though Amsterdam’s organising committee in 1928 had instituted the convention of lighting the Olympic flame at the opening of the Games, in homage to the ancient Games’ tradition, lighting the torch at Olympia and transporting it overland to the host stadium was the invention of the Berlin organisers, who realised they could use the symbolism of flame to cast the Third Reich as the inheritor of classical Greek virtue. Such was its propaganda value that the flame-kindling ceremony at Olympia was even restaged by Leni Riefenstahl for her film of the Games, because she considered the organisers had staged it in an unphotogenic setting.
Fritz Schilgen, the final torchbearer in the relay, was chosen as what the Olympic Museum euphemistically describes as a ‘symbol of German sporting youth’ – or rather, as any photo of the ceremony makes clear, an embodiment of the Nazis’ Aryan athletic ideal from head to toe.
Post-war Olympics have kept the torch relay but made various efforts to democratise the figure of the torchbearer, partly perhaps to distance the ritual from its Nazi past. A surprising number of final torchbearers have not even been athletes: Norway’s two Olympic cauldrons have been lit by Fridtjof Nansen’s grandson (at Oslo in 1952) and Crown Prince Haakon of Norway, in honour of his father and grandfather who had been Olympic sailors (at Lillehammer in 1994).
Montreal’s cauldron in 1976 was lit by two teenagers representing the confederation of Anglophone and Francophone Canada; several other Games have given the honour to young people, and the London 2012 Games, performing (in Olympic terms) a radically cosmopolitan and democratic identity for Britain after the ultra-regimented Olympics of Beijing, split the symbolic role of torchbearer up altogether among seven teenage athletes and sports volunteers.
Tokyo’s first Olympic cauldron, in 1964, was lit by Yoshinori Sakai, an emerging sprinter who had been born in Hiroshima on the day of the US atomic bomb in 1945. For the ‘2020’ Games, held in 2021, Tokyo’s organisers chose a Japanese sporting celebrity like no other – Naomi Osaka, the Japanese-Haitian tennis star and winner of double Australian and US Opens whose family have lived in the US since she was three years old.
In 2020, moreover, Osaka had become an icon of athlete activism through her support of Black Lives Matter. After Kenosha police shot Jacob Blake in August 2020 she temporarily withdrew from the Western and Southern Open to join a strike called by NBA, WNBA and MLS players, and a few weeks later at the US Open came out for each round in a mask honouring the name of a different African American who had lost their life to police or vigilante racism (Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Philando Castile and Tamir Rice) – harnessing all the attention that sports spectatorship draws towards the athlete’s body and dress through a compulsory accessory that had not even existed a year ago.
Though no other Japanese athlete has a profile like Osaka’s, choosing her as torchbearer also made the Tokyo Games appear to stand on the side of global racial justice, in a country where anti-Black racism is widespread and until recently almost unquestioned (Tokyo witnessed its own Black Lives Matter protests last summer, and Osaka’s activism has had ripples in Japan as well). Indeed, even the opening ceremony reportedly failed to live up to its own ideals behind the scenes – as a Senegalese percussionist who lives in Japan, Latyr Sy, claimed he had been cut from the ceremony with only weeks to go because an official had thought he would look out of place in the drumming display.
Osaka’s stand against the exploitative infrastructure of contemporary sport this year, protecting her mental health by refusing to take part in confrontational press conferences even at the expense of her French Open and Wimbledon places, meanwhile reminds us that behind athletes’ bodily performances there are choices and costs.
Until very shortly before Tokyo, athletes whose teams had become accustomed to taking the knee in collective commitment to the struggle against racism could not be certain whether or not they would fall foul of the Olympic Charter’s Rule 50, which bans any ‘kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda’ across Olympic sites.
After a ten-month review – that is, a review that must have started in autumn 2020 after the summer’s unprecedented displays of athlete anti-racist activism – the IOC relaxed Rule 50 to allow peaceful gestures on the field of play before the start of competition, though podium protests like Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s Black Power salute in 1968 would still be banned. (The British Olympic Association, for its part, had confirmed as early as last October that it would support any GB athletes who chose to protest at the Games.)
Reportedly, the IOC has also prevented its own social media channels from relaying images of athletes taking the knee. With media organisations, national team accounts and athletes themselves all sharing content into the same digital space, that ban’s impact might be limited in the digital publics where Black Lives Matter activism is already being debated (and already showing signs of how national identities like England’s could refresh) – suggesting it might instead have been a containment measure against its further transnational spread.
Coming back full circle to the question of dress, a parallel focus of athlete activism this summer has been the revealing nature of women’s traditional competition outfits in many sports (the German women’s gymnastics team started wearing full-length bodysuits in this year’s European championships to feel ‘the most confident and comfortable’, and have brought them to Tokyo; the Norwegian women’s beach handball team, who aren’t in the Olympics, were fined during their European championships for defying their international federation’s imposition of bikini bottoms; while Paralympic long jumper Olivia Breen was told by an official at the British championships that her Adidas competition briefs were too short).
These cases have predominantly involved white women (though Kim Bui, on the German gymnastics team, has Vietnamese and Lao heritage) – but taken in parallel with the racism athletes like Osaka have been exposed to through social media and the press, and the anti-trans, anti-intersex measures that have prevented some women of colour like Caster Semenya taking part in the Games at all, they hint at how racism and sexism have intersected to produce double standards for women in sport that athletes are starting to name openly but sports institutions are yet to properly address.
Whatever meanings viewers make from athletes’ bodily performances, in parade or protest, the choices that athletes make about how to enact them in the instant of a live broadcast are ultimately their own – and in this second year of the pandemic, they, plus everyone else who has made the Games in person, are the ones who have put their own bodies’ health of the line so that athletes can gather to achieve the feats they trained for and the IOC can deliver its spectacle with only a year’s delay.
Eurovision 2021 saw a record number of Black performers, from backgrounds that represented a wider range of Afro-European histories than ever, and offered a home entry that made a more direct reckoning with the legacies of racism and colonialism in the host country than the contest has ever witnessed before – and yet the voting results brought the uncomfortable evidence that every single Black entrant appeared to have underperformed on pre-contest predictions, especially on the public televote.
Benny Cristo didn’t qualify from his semi-final (and neither did Australia’s Montaigne or Austria’s Vincent Bueno, this year’s two entrants of Filipino descent), and apart from Tusse, who got a relatively mid-table 63 points from the public, every Black contestant would have finished near the bottom of the Eurovision scoreboard if results had been televote-only as per most of the 2000s: Senhit and Flo Rida only scored 13, Eden Alene 20, Destiny 47 (despite ranking third in the jury votes), and for all the creative power and virtuosity Jeangu Macrooy brought to ‘Birth of a New Age’, the public vote awarded him no points at all.
No Black entrants placed on the left-hand side of the final scoreboard except for Destiny, who finished 7th, but the announcement of such a low televote total for what had been one of the pre-contest favourites was a crushing moment in what should have been the high-energy lead-up to Måneskin’s thrilling win.
We could point to reasons why each individual act underperformed: Cristo has given better vocal performances of his song than he did in the semi-final; the government of Alene’s country had just been at the centre of international condemnation; expensive American guest acts have flopped at Eurovision before (ladies and gentlemen, Miss Dita von Teese?); Tusse suffered from arguably the worst spot in the whole grand final running order by having to follow Måneskin; Destiny’s kiss-off hook might have relied too much on French slang (‘je me casse’ – ‘I’m out of here’) and a humorous English idiom (‘excuse my French!’) to connect with voters who are mostly second- or third-language speakers of both; the concept of Jeangu’s staging, breaking through a backdrop of oppressive concrete to reveal the joyous colour of his Sranan Tongo words, was slow to build and left him surrounded by a cold, bare background for those all-important first thirty seconds and more. (Imagine the same performance surrounded by a digital version of his video’s backdrops in the Rijksmuseum?)
Yet if every single Black artist in 2021 struggled in the public vote, including the one who jurors voted third best overall, is that evidence of something more unsettling in how voting audiences react to Black singers representing countries at Eurovision?
If you really want to talk unfair bias at Eurovision…
…*every* black artist did worse, sometimes much worse, in the European televote than they were predicted.
The 2021 scoreboard makes it most glaring because the final contained so many Black performers in the first place, but in fact since the current voting system was introduced in 2016, Black finalists have received an average of 123.4 points from juries but only 46.6 points from the public vote – and the contest has still never had a solo Black winner.
Accordingly, the contest’s communities do need to confront the likelihood that racism is having an effect on how audiences react to Black performers at Eurovision, and even in more subtle ways than viewers deciding not to vote for a Black singer because they are overtly prejudiced – modern Eurovision’s cardinal sin.
As well as conscious prejudice, which the majority of viewers interested enough in Eurovision to vote would probably distance themselves from, racism also manifests in less conscious forms of assumptions and bias.
Along with the beliefs about their backgrounds, attitude and appearance that Black creators and professionals have to fight against in essentially every sphere of public life, the context of Eurovision brings with it the idea that the show is celebrating European cultural traditions – and this is a ‘Europe’ commonly, though wrongly, thought of as a historically white place, where people of African descent have only recently started living and so are not part of its cultural traditions. Their own cultural traditions, in the same way, seem less ‘European’.
Applied to voters’ tastes at Eurovision, where viewers are being asked to make emotional connections with 26 different songs one after the other, this might invisibly contribute to viewers sensing that Black musicians’ entries are less what they enjoy in a Eurovision context even if they’d never come close to putting that thinking into words, or finding Black sound or dance too confrontational to connect to.
It likely has an impact, too, on how people react to particular Black performers – especially Destiny, who’s been being criticised since the final as overconfident even though her whole delegation was promoting her so heavily before the contest that they bought ads on social media campaigning for her to win. As a Black woman with a larger body shape, Destiny has borne the brunt of diverging from European beauty standards, and celebrates her ability to enjoy her body in her own song – yet a groundswell of remarks about the very same thing was going on behind her back at the very contest where she was supposed to be getting her message across.
Moreover, the conventions of beauty that Destiny stands out from are products of both racism and sexism at once – since the standard of preferring women to be thin dates right back to the era when being thin demonstrated white women’s ‘European’ level of self-control and distinguished them from curvier Black women, a trope we still see in hostile reactions to fat Black women performers like Lizzo today.
This would make Eurovision yet another context where Black people have to work ‘twice as hard’ as their white counterparts to achieve the same success, and where straying away from a white norm to pursue Black traditions of cultural expression is an extra creative risk.
(Without taking away from the example of representation that Tusse wanted to set on stage as a Black soloist with all-Black dancers, which he’s spoken about never having had when he was growing up in Sweden as a child refugee from the DRC, what he’s achieved in breaking through in Swedish pop, or how more accessible his message of liberation seemed to be on grand final night, it’s notable when we’re talking about how Black entrants’ songs resonated with the voting public that, musically and lyrically, ‘Voices’ hits all the beats of typical Swedish Eurovision production, to the point that it shares its hook line with Russia’s partly-Swedish-written runner-up from 2015.)
Another, even more subtle, way that racism in its structural sense influences how viewers connect with Black music and musicians at Eurovision is through something that philosophers of racism call ‘epistemic ignorance’ – or, very simply, what we’ve been trained not to know about our own society and our own history when it has to do with racism, slavery and empire.
Until Black historians and campaigners, and their counterparts from other racial minorities, started challenging it, the status quo in predominantly white societies was for schools, museums, media and other institutions that deal with the past not even to mention the violence that European colonisers inflicted on people of African descent and the inhabitants of other territories they colonised – and certainly not to deal with the material and psychological consequences for their descendants in society today.
How far that is being challenged in each country, and from what starting point, is a complex matter – and it’s far less on the agenda in countries that didn’t have their own overseas colonial projects, or where national history between the 16th century and the First World War was mostly a matter of being ruled by other empires themselves.
In countries which did have their own systems of colonial exploitation, but perhaps also when it comes to thinking about ‘Europe’ as a whole, we have to set that past and its consequences aside to be able to feel proud of our shared history – but the privilege of not having to know about racism or the history behind it doesn’t extend to Black Europeans or members of other racial minorities, who experience the disadvantage from it every day.
In my last post on Eurovision and the struggle for racial justice this year, I talked about how ‘Birth of a New Age’ could be compared to Jamala’s ‘1944’ in the way they both express their singers’ emotions about violence against their ancestors and what that means in the present. But compared to how ‘1944’ played out in 2016, where Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was common knowledge, many viewers had strong feelings of injustice about it, and most viewers would have heard Eurovision commentators explaining that her grandparents were Crimean Tatars, colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade don’t figure as a living history to most white Europeans – nor, therefore, does the full resonance of how ‘Birth of a New Age’ calls into being its resistance to injustice.
Jamala enjoyed a wall of press coverage before her Eurovision in which she could explain Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, describe how her own grandparents were suffering in occupied Crimea, and invite viewers to make the historical connections for themselves (all to the benefit of Ukraine’s public diplomacy, even before she’d won).
Although pre-contest media coverage was more limited this year due to Covid restrictions, the pandemic can take only some of the blame for how few viewers would have approached the grand final knowing and feeling as much about the history behind Jeangu’s song as they would have known about Jamala’s – and, with the Netherlands going through its own reckoning with the legacies of its colonial past (including what may at last be the phasing out of blackface Zwarte Piet, and the Rijksmuseum acknowledging the significance of the Atlantic slave trade to Dutch history in an exhibition that opened in the very same week as Eurovision), it’s not as if there wasn’t an epic scale of story to tell.
(Many more viewers will now know at least a small amount about Dutch colonial oppression against enslaved Africans and their descendants in Suriname thanks to Jeangu’s performance in the final, which shouldn’t be underestimated – but even in countries where commentators were linking the song to Black Lives Matter, how many viewers even now know the basic lowdown of what happened when?)
With more racial diversity behind the scenes in how Eurovision is covered – including, as Alesia Michelle has been pointing out, in fan media accreditation and the online press room – we might have seen more journalists asking the questions that would have let Jeangu and his delegation draw the nuances of his story out… and fewer of the unpleasant, disproportionately critical comments about Destiny’s rehearsals that reportedly marred the atmosphere of the online chat there.
What would it take, then, to improve awareness of the historical, institutional and structural dimensions of racism – or increase what’s sometimes called ‘racial literacy’) – across the Eurovision world in general? A priority would surely be strengthening racial literacy, and indeed sheer racial diversity, in Eurovision’s reference group itself, where incorporating more invited members with relevant lived and professional experience could compensate for the other pools of potential members still being wholly or predominantly white.
Besides a stronger ability to spot potentially problematic song concepts before they reached the televised stage, we could expect stronger support for other initiatives as well:
What more could Eurovision as an organisation do to spotlight the histories of racial and ethnic minorities in host cities, working against the misperception that Europe and its constituent nations have only ever been historically white?
How can it ensure that Black contestants and Black music are fairly served in the narratives that build up around the contest and help viewers connect with entries every year?
What can Eurovision do to see that cleaning, hospitality and security staff at its venues, who in many countries are more likely to belong to racial minorities, are being fairly treated?
What leverage could Eurovision use to support other struggles for racial justice in European television, such as the tide of resistance to blackface performance in many countries that may finally be turning?
And how can Eurovision ensure that its physical and digital spaces are as welcoming to fans, workers and participants of African and Asian descent as they are to anyone else?
It’s when organisations don’t get it that those most affected, and their allies, end up saying: je me casse.
Shortly after lockdown in Italy began, Italian apartment-dwellers started joining in co-ordinated singing from their balconies, including the song that had just won the Sanremo Music Festival and was still officially Italy’s entry for the 2020 Eurovision Song Contest. When it became clear that that too would have to be cancelled, Eurovision fans rallied together on social media to bind their sense of community back together by watching past contents online.
Both these ‘affects’ of lockdown presumed opposite relationships to space and gathering together than those on which Eurovision and other live televised events have relied for their emotional power. To illustrate that, consider how each contrasts with the seemingly unlikely note of sombreness and sincerity that Ermal Meta and Fabrizio Moro brought into the Eurovision grand final in 2018 when they performed that year’s Italian entry ‘Non mi avete fatto niente’ (‘You haven’t done anything to me’) –a song commemorating the hundreds of victims of the urban terrorism which had added undercurrents of fear to the everyday experience of city life for millions of people in the mid-2010s.
Alone on stage against a background of deep red spotlights and digital projections of their lyrics translated into fifteen languages, Meta and Moro named the sites of recent attacks in Cairo, Barcelona, Paris, London and Nice, with imagery more graphic than casual viewers would likely expect from a contest with so kitsch a reputation, and appeals to tolerance and religious reconciliation that tested the boundaries of Eurovision’s rule against political messages.
Moro’s intense gaze at the crowd, and the tightness of his fist clenched around his microphone stand, even seemed to make visible the unspoken knowledge that audiences, performers and fans had had to suppress since the Bataclan attacks and the Manchester Arena bombing in order to enjoy any live spectacle at all: it could have been any working musician, and any crowd.
Two years later, the song that would have been Italy’s Eurovision entry, Diodato’s ‘Fai rumore’, was instead being sung in unison by Italian city-dwellers from their balconies, joining in one of the only physical forms of community with a group larger than their own household that was open to them now that the severity of coronavirus in Italy had forced the country into Europe’s earliest and arguably strictest lockdown.
In Meta’s and Moro’s song, as in the discourses of the many European leaders who had had to react to mass-casualty attacks in their countries and cities over the previous few years, terrorism appeared to be motivated by religious intolerance and a blow struck against what their words implied was a shared way of life (in a transnational community extending through Europe to Cairo, though marked specifically as victims of Islamist terrorism compared to the effect it might have had to name Oslo or Utøya as well): its targets were members of the public taking part in the city’s everyday rituals of sociality and joy, in bars and shopping streets and concert crowds.
Against the geographic enormity of the globe, with ‘galaxies of people dispersed in space’, Meta and Moro sang, ‘the most important thing is the space of an embrace’. This intimate, commonplace comfort is now, for up to half the world’s population, against the law to share with anyone outside their household, and denied to those living alone at all – while the terrorist has all but vanished as a source of outdoor dread.
The everyday emotional and affective experiences of living through coronavirus lockdown are unprecedented for those who have been fortunate never to have lived under extended state curfew or a wartime siege, or to have had disabilities restricting them from taking part in public life outside the home; the context of a global, seemingly uncontrollable airborne pandemic is new even then. Together with the anxiety and, for growing numbers of us, the grief that the virus itself has brought, and with what it has meant for any of our working lives, our everyday affects and moods are governed by the politics and economics of our intimate space – the size and quality of our homes, who we live with and how, the gendered dynamics of power and even violence within households, and the structural factors that stratify access to private gardens and other amenities by race and class.
Even more so than in other emergencies, there can be no such thing as a collective experience of coronavirus when some have lived through it with those emotionally closest to them and others will have spent months without face-to-face conversation or touch.
National and transnational media, nevertheless, continue to be driven by a guiding logic of addressing – or inventing – a collective community, which (as Benedict Anderson first noted about the readership of national newspapers) was always too large by orders of magnitude for its members to have ever personally met. Even as multi-channel broadcasting, social media and streaming television have fragmented the mass audiences that television used to count on, media scholars have looked to live events and festivals as the sites where what Angharad Closs Stephens calls the ‘affective atmospheres of nationalism’ (and transnationalism) are most likely to be charged, in person, through the screen and on the keyboard or the phone.
But what happens to the ability of live music and sporting events to bring collective communities temporarily together and invite them to share the sentiments brought out by particular representations of national and transnational identity – the very thing that Eurovision researchers have long argued the contest is famous for – when they have depended on gathering crowds, presenters, participants and technical crew together in sizes that could be banned for months or even longer?
As sports teams and national governing bodies began to pull out of international fixtures even before governmental travel restrictions started making them impossible (one of the last fixtures involving an Italian team, Atalanta’s Champions League match against Valencia in Milan on 19 February, has been blamed for coronavirus outbreaks in both Valencia and Atalanta’s home city of Bergamo), Eurovision fans grew increasingly aware that the live contest in Rotterdam’s 15,000-capacity Ahoy Arena would not be able to take place as scheduled in the middle of May.
During the early stages of lockdown, as celebrities posted stay-at-home appeals from inside their own houses and bands found ways to play together while physically separated (Dubioza Kolektiv, the Bosnian band ‘sick of being European just on Eurosong’, have been streaming their weekly ‘Quarantine Show’ from their homes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia), fans speculated whether Eurovision could still go ahead with remote presenters and the pre-contest videos for what was already a complete slate of songs. The European Broadcasting Union, in charge of Eurovision, announced the inevitable on 18 March, recognising that the size of the event made it too complex to postpone for later in the year.
While the annual Eurovision broadcast brings a temporary affective community into being through television and social media for the length of the contest, fandom (or the many fandoms that now criss-cross various online and offline spaces) sustains an affective community year-round – where keeping up with and sometimes travelling to national selections and pre-Eurovision events as well as the contest itself is an annual ritual, and fans forge friendships, relationships, work and study plans (my own PhD on Croatian popular music and national identity wouldn’t have looked the same if the scandal of Severina’s 2006 Croatian Eurovision entry hadn’t happened in the middle of my research). Fandom’s annual anchor being cancelled for the first time in its history, without even a scoreboard to argue about in years to come, was one more blow in a collapsing social reality.
That weekend, journalist and Eurovision fan Rob Holley organised the first of what’s become a weekly synchronised watchalong of a past contest, #EurovisionAgain, to help fill Saturday nights – because, ‘why not come together every Saturday night and share the moment anyway’? First up was the Malmö contest in 2013, where most fans outside Sweden had first encountered now-legendary presenter Petra Mede; Athens 2006, Moscow 2009, Vienna 2015, Dublin 1997 and Helsinki 2007 have followed, with their own online voting countdown devised by Ellie Chalkley from fan site ESC Insight (for which I’ve written a few times), and the EBU even co-operating to stream new high-definition versions of the 2000s contests and help make older finals temporarily available online.
(Eurovision’s social media channel has also been sharing #EurovisionHomeConcerts where recent contestants share versions of their own and each other’s songs, and a special show on the original date of the grand final will celebrate this year’s entries and ‘link Europe through other familiar songs from the past, performed in iconic European locations’ – to end with a joint performance of the UK’s last Eurovision winner ‘Love Shine A Light’, to be seen on most participating broadcasters except the BBC, which will produce its own Eurovision celebration instead.)
After trying to detach from social media for the few Saturday nights of the lockdown, I joined in #EurovisionAgain for the Helsinki rewatch, livetweeting and making a short video explaining some of the background behind Marija Šerifović’s historic win.
Even watching a contest for the first time brings complex layers of memory and imagination together into the meanings viewers make out of what’s on stage – from memories of other contests and social experiences around those ritual times, to impressions of past or future travel to countries and cities involved, and narratives about international politics that we or the media project on to performances to affectively connect them with identities of ours (the way that Conchita Wurst’s victory in 2014 immediately became bound up with narratives of ‘Europe’ as a tolerant, LGBTQ-friendly space contrasted against ‘Russia’, after the Russian Duma had passed the so-called ‘gay propaganda’ law in 2013).
Rewatching a contest adds temporal distance to those layers of emotional meaning, on both personal and collective levels. In 2007, I was entering the last year of my PhD, and starting to draft the articles on Eurovision and pop-folk music I published in 2008 without knowing what a snapshot of that particular moment in the cultural politics of European integration they’d become, or that I’d still be actively researching Eurovision as an academic thirteen years later as a result of them; Šerifović’s win, for viewers with feminist or queer awareness and some knowledge of Serbian politics since then, may well call to mind the ‘tactical Europeanisation’ of the Serbian state’s shift towards securing Pride marches in the 2010s and the appointment of Ana Brnabić as the region’s first openly gay prime minister in 2017.
In the middle of a pandemic, the emotional experience of watching a past Eurovision might also contrast what each of us and our communities took for granted then with what it has become impossible to do now, with no certainty about when or how gathering in public will be safe again or crossing international borders will be allowed. Like the spectres that Meta’s pleading hands and Moro’s clenched fist brought into the undercurrent of his performance, these are affects that have to stay beneath our consciousness in order to feel the joy we probably turn to Eurovision for.
But it is the ways viewers have created affective experiences and rituals with each other around the annual rhythm of the contest, through digitally mediated communities, which have let those communities invent new rituals even when no live contest can take place at all.
Before anything else to do with the international politics of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest was overtaken by the likelihood that Eurovision 2019 will be held in Israel (with reverberations that will link the call for a cultural boycott of Israeli state-funded arts to the spectacle of Eurovision for the first time), the most unexpected – and unnecessary – collision between Eurovision and the history of colonialism came when some fans noticed during the first live rehearsals that the staging of the Dutch entry looked… at best, uncomfortable. And, at worst, downright racist.
Some of my most recent research is about stereotypes and fantasies of race, blackness and Africa in European popular music – the first chapter of my new book Race and the Yugoslav Region traces them through examples from Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav pop, and refers to the work of Gloria Wekker, a black feminist in the Netherlands who uses evidence from historical media alongside her own observations of racism in Dutch society to debunk myths of white Dutch ‘innocence’ about race.
When the Dutch song, Waylon’s ‘Outlaw in ‘Em’, unexpectedly qualified from the second semi-final on the Thursday night, I spent two hours writing a Twitter thread on why viewers had been finding the performance racist, to help explain why some of them had felt discomfort without necessarily knowing why, and so that users who wanted to call attention to how it looked on their own feeds didn’t have to make the argument from scratch.
(Parts, at least, of Eurovision’s many overlapping digital fandoms are no stranger to conversations about cultural appropriation on the Eurovision stage – including the Native American war bonnet worn by the Dutch representative Joan Franka in 2012, the East Asian visuals problematically surrounding this year’s winning song, and the dancing gorilla that joined Italian favourite Francesco Gabbani on stage in 2017, apparently as an allusion to ‘the naked ape’. Early reactions in the same circles to how the four black men around Waylon, a white Dutch country singer, had been asked to dance were suggesting its impression was a different order of unacceptable altogether.)
Dozens of people since then have tweeted me to explain why I was wrong.
It isn’t automatically racist to have one white guy and four black guys on stage. (It isn’t, which is why, say, Swedish boy-band Panetoz, who have one white band-member and four black, haven’t made fans who notice racial representation on stage feel uncomfortable like this. But then their four black guys aren’t always arranged around their one white guy.)
It’s demeaning to the dancers, who are showing off their talent. (Has anybody asked them? How freely do they feel they can speak about racism on Dutch TV, if they want producers to book them again?)
Waylon thinks it suits the song, and the dancers think so too.
The producers chose the most talented dancers. They didn’t think about race.
I’m insulting Waylon.
I don’t know what the intentions behind the act were, so I can’t comment. (I don’t know. I do know how it was looking to viewers who remarked on it, which kind of matters in a competition where 50% of the points come from an international public vote.)
I don’t even know Waylon. (This is true.)
Waylon is a very kind man to his fans. (That doesn’t prevent someone staging a racist show.)
They don’t get angry easily, but it makes them angry when they read this nonsense. (It made me angry to be staying up two extra hours before I ought to catch an early morning train because nobody on the Dutch production team realised this looked racist. It would have made me angrier if I’d been a black viewer getting the message that Eurovision didn’t care whether the party includes me or not.)
Waylon is half-Indonesian, so this isn’t a white guy with black dancers like I said. (I didn’t know anything about his family background when I wrote the thread, describing the impression Waylon’s placement on stage makes as a white man. But in a contest where family heritage is often part of the narratives that contestants give to try and connect with the public, that part of Waylon’s background hadn’t reached me (we heard much more about his love of country music and the US country singers like Johnny Cash who had inspired him). Most viewers who didn’t already know him well as a singer would also be perceiving him as a white man. And we can still say, via the history of images of race, that a performance where he seems to be in control over four black men identifies him with images of whiteness. Also, anti-black racism expressed by other people of colour is a thing.)
Waylon is half-Indonesian, therefore he can’t be racist. (The same; also, anti-black racism expressed by other people of colour is a thing.)
I’m taking the song out of context: it’s about standing up for yourself (‘When they knock you to the ground, you ain’t gonna let nobody keep you down’). (The viewer hasn’t heard that when they see a bare-chested black man seem to lash out at the camera, the very moment they hear ‘knock you to the ground’.)
I obviously didn’t listen to the lyrics. (Obviously.)
The dancers are krumping because young people on the krumping scene use those moves to transform violence into dance.
If you don’t like it, don’t vote for it. (I didn’t.)
It’s four handsome black guys, spicing up a dull performance. (Do you really want to bring up the racial politics of spice now? Because we can if you want.)
It’s a shame I’m bringing up their skin colour, not how well they can dance.
Americans and Europeans aren’t the ones enslaving male African refugees in Libya. (Somehow, this is meant to have something to do with Europeans designing a dance routine that calls to mind racist stereotypes of black men.)
Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet don’t come at Christmas like I said, they come on the 5th of December. (OK, I had said ‘every Christmas’ there are protests in the Netherlands over the blackface of Zwarte Piet. The date is the least important thing in that sentence, I’d suggest.)
Zwarte Piet gets his black face from coming down the chimney to deliver presents, not because he’s meant to represent black people. (Here we go.)
The people calling Waylon a racist are the ones seeing colour.
I’m seeing racist things where there aren’t any.
Waylon wanted the best krump dancers, and they happened to be black.
If Waylon was black and the dancers were white, would I still be saying he was a racist?
Waylon wanted to be multicultural.
I shouldn’t be commenting because the UK has only ever sent white acts. (Not true, though the last UK featured act at Eurovision with a black band-member was in 2011 and its last non-white soloist was 2009.)
Finding racism in every little thing is more racist than that.
It’s a shame that I’m a lecturer.
I ought to get therapy.
It’s a shame that I’m a lecturer and not responding to the people who have calmly taken their time to inform me of all of the above.
A lot of quote-tweets in Dutch, which might have made their authors feel better, but didn’t make whatever they wanted to call me have much effect on me because I can’t read them. (That doesn’t mean I ought to get a free pass to make comments about the cultures of countries where I don’t speak the languages. Far from it – I need to be even more sure that I’m right before I speak, not less. But I was rather grateful that I couldn’t read them.)
I was cheered by this picture of a talking gammon.
I was also cheered by the number of tweets I got from people who did find the performance uncomfortable and hadn’t been sure why, or who had enjoyed the song but changed their mind after reading more about the context.
Especially those second people, who were open to seeing something they liked from a more critical perspective even in something they love as much as Eurovision, where fans identify so much with their favourite songs! YOU ROCK. Loreen, or your Eurovision patron of choice, would be proud.
Things people on the internet have not said to me for explaining why the staging of the Dutch Eurovision entry look racist:
[Racial slur.]
Go back to your own country.
[Another racial slur.]
Any words the BBC wouldn’t be allowed to broadcast before 9 pm.
Six years ago, in 2012, the dramatised arrival of the ‘Windrush Generation’ provided many British viewers with one of the most moving moments in the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games. The dozens of black Londoners and the giant model of the Empire Windrush, which had docked at Tilbury in June 1948, entering the stadium during the ceremony’s historical pageant stood for the hundreds of thousands of black Britons who had migrated from the Caribbean to Britain, which was then still their imperial metropole, between 1948 and 1962.
The moment when the ‘Windrush Generation’ joined the pageant’s chaotic whirl of characters drawn from modern British social and cultural history symbolised, for millions of its viewers (if not those people of colour with more reason to be suspicious of British promises), a Britain finally inclusive enough to have made the post-Windrush black presence as integral a part of its national story as Remembrance or Brunel. Today, however, members of this same symbolic generation have been threatened with deportation – and some have already been deported – because they have been unable to prove their immigration status despite living in Britain for more than fifty years. The Daily Mirror’s Brian Reade was far from alone in wondering where it had all gone wrong since 2012.
What kind of British government would deport the children of the Empire Windrush? Not the openly fascist regime that the National Front took to the streets for in the 1970s, or that Alan Moore imagined taking control of a near-future Britain in his 1988 comic V for Vendetta (written at the height of the Thatcher years). Rather, as most of the British public only realised after the revelations of the Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman connecting dozens of individual stories into a chilling pattern, the answer lies with the Conservative government of Theresa May.
Suddenly, in mid-April, public sympathy mobilised in support of the ‘Windrush Generation’ alongside an eviscerating parliamentary intervention from David Lammy MP, who has taken up the cases of dozens of black Britons who have lost jobs, been refused medical treatment or even been deported. Lammy’s challenge in parliament (and ongoing pressure through Twitter) would force the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, to admit that the government’s actions have been ‘appalling’ in forcing potentially thousands of Windrush-era citizens to prove their right to reside in Britain all over again by requiring evidence none ever anticipated they would have to provide.
On 23 April, Rudd promised to help the Windrush generation ‘acquire’ citizenship by waiving application fees and test requirements, though Lammy continued to emphasise that their citizenship had been ‘taken away by your [Rudd’s] government, not something that your government is now choosing to grant them.’
Much of the white British public had not appreciated the harsh realities that black families had seen hitting their elder relatives for months until the plight of the ‘Windrush Generation’ became national news. The policy of extending border immigration controls into everyday life, which government officials themselves termed the ‘Hostile Environment‘, has caused dire consequences for this historic and symbolic group of citizens. Members of the Windrush Generation have lost their jobs because they could not show a UK passport; they have been charged thousands of pounds for NHS care under rules targeting ‘health tourism’; and some have even been detained awaiting deportation to countries they have not visited for fifty years. An unknown number of people, the immigration minister Caroline Nokes suggested last week, have even been ‘deported in error’.
The crisis has even been linked to at least one death. The mother of Dexter Bristol, a Londoner born in Grenada who died suddenly last month aged 57, blamed government racism and the ‘hostile environment’ policy for the stress her son suffered after losing his job and access to benefits: ‘My son is British. We didn’t come here illegally… No one expected this country to turn into what it is now.’
Why has public sympathy mobilised so quickly around this group when thousands of others, including younger migrants from the Caribbean, have been caught up by these regulations ever since Britain’s ‘everyday borders‘ started to tighten? Largely because the Windrush Generation is already a national myth that the British public had been invited to rejoice in celebrating – never more spectacularly than at London 2012.
Yet if the Home Office’s attack on the Windrush Generation feels like a shocking and disorienting reversal, this is because the ceremony’s triumphant story about Windrush was not even what the whole country believed in 2012 – rather, the difference between 2012 and 2018 is a matter of which narrative has had more power to be heard.
By 2012, Windrush had already been worked into many versions of Britain’s national myth – part of a liberal, ‘post-racial’ UK public commemorative culture, a mythic voyage at the beginning of a story about tolerance and progress where Britain’s colonisation of the Caribbean and its enslavement of the Windrush Generation’s ancestors could be absolved.
This progress, one must remember, had been hard-won. Black activists had had to campaign for years for Windrush to be taught in schools and marked by local councils, before public institutions began to take it up. Arguably, Windrush commemoration gained momentum after the 1999 Macpherson Report, which had popularised the phrase ‘institutional racism’ to describe police inaction after the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993; museum and heritage professionals’ own anti-racist engagement combined with the impact of Labour equalities legislation to make institutions keen to show they were serving a diverse community by marking Windrush as the turning point (or, more problematically, the beginning) of black history in Britain. Even though in 2012 commemorating Windrush might have seemed like consensus, when black history campaigns first gained pace in the 1980s it had been a radical demand.
Commemorating Windrush as part of Britain’s national narrative meant telling a story about Britain where black Britons belonged on the same terms as white Britons – a story about a Britain which was comfortable with having a Commonwealth not an Empire, and had moved on from the racism the Windrush Generation had endured when they were young.
Remembering how Britishness had supposedly become multicultural and racism had supposedly been defeated, by celebrating Windrush, participants were invited to join in the happy feeling of how far ‘we’ had come.
The London 2012 opening ceremony was a pageant of history-from-below that imagined a nation made up of its oppressed groups as well as its elites: groups like the workers of the Industrial Revolution, like the suffragettes, and like the Windrush Generation. The ‘mosaic history’ Danny Boyle, with scriptwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, depicted through the ceremony, alongside celebrations of children’s literature, the NHS and a modern-minded Queen, readily lent itself to liberal readings. The arts critic Charlotte Higgins, for instance, wrote of Boyle’s ceremony the next day that it was an ‘impassioned poem of praise to the country he [and ‘we’] would most like to believe in.’
The heritage of this mode of representation was demonstrably left-wing, dating back to leftist traditions of ‘radical patriotism’ (including pageants) from between the World Wars, and to the socialist principles that inspired historians like Raphael Samuel to suggest the heritage of ‘ordinary people’ could be a leftist way of linking the public with the national past.
Indeed, one thread even links Samuel’s vision of the nation directly to Boyce: Samuel edited a three-volume collection on Patriotism: the Making and Unmaking of British National Identity in 1989, assembling suppressed and everyday heritage into a national past, and a young Boyce contributed a chapter on the I-Spy books while researching his English PhD.
In 2012, the BBC’s broadcast of a ceremony tugging quirky cultural heartstrings to a cheering stadium made it feel as if the whole country was celebrating the spectacle of a creative, confident and multicultural nation too. And yet, it wasn’t; the story of London 2012 was already being contested on the night itself, when Conservative MP Aidan Burley tweeted that it had been ‘leftie multicultural crap. Bring back red arrows, Shakespeare and the Stones.’
Where public narratives are concerned, the contrast between 2012 and 2018 is not so much ‘Where did it go so wrong?’ as ‘Which narratives had the strongest platform then and now?’
And narratives about Windrush do relate directly to the fact that the Home Office has deported black Britons who came to the UK with British passports before their islands became independent, because national identity itself is a story about who belongs. Or rather, national identity is a story about who belongs unconditionally on the land inside the nation’s borders, and whom the hosts might graciously extend the right to stay.
The Windrush Generation who came to Britain, and the children they have had there, spent decades hearing racists like Enoch Powell and the National Front openly call for them to be repatriated. The slogan of sending black and Asian Britons ‘back home’, to the Caribbean or South Asia, implied that they had no right to belong safely ‘at home’ in Britain at all.
The very members of this symbolic generation who listened with dread as young people to the possible consequences of Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968, had to relive the experience a few weeks ago when BBC Radio 4 had Powell’s words read in their entirety by a star actor: a broadcast that the journalist Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff and many other British people of colour argued only normalised Powell’s rhetoric, empowered the far right, and represented a ‘particularly jarring… resurrection’ just as the Home Office was ‘unceremoniously booting out’ some of the very people who had arrived on the Windrush or the ships that followed.
Today, when many of the Windrush Generation have retired – and some might have looked back and thought they were living in a better country than the Britain they had known in their youth – tens of thousands of them now find they cannot prove their citizenship to the degree that ‘hostile environment’ policies require. After all, why would they have needed to before, outside dystopian nightmares? Not only has that nightmare become a reality; it might also grow more chilling yet with the news that, as long ago as 2010, the Border Force destroyed thousands of the very landing cards that could have proved when they arrived in the UK.
Their situation has moved the British public so much more than other inhumane deportations because of the power of the Windrush myth itself.
Aidan Burley, tweeting in 2012, had wanted to turn the clock back on multiculturalism. So did the UK Independence Party, on the ever larger platform the BBC gave it after the 2014 European Parliament elections; so did many of the voices backing Brexit. In 2012, the idea that that progress could be thrown into reverse, and Britain in a few years’ time could become ‘more racist’ not less, was very far from most people’s minds apart from those who longed to make it happen.
Yet visa rules for non-EU citizens became even tighter than New Labour had made them; Brexit stripped 3 million EU citizens of freedom of movement rights they had never had to think that they would lose; and Caribbean-born elders are facing now what Powell and the National Front threatened them with in their youth. The threat to deport the Windrush Generation does not just disturb the myth of multicultural Britain that grew between the 1990s and 2012 – it has torn it up, and some have watched the reversal of the myth with glee.
A citeable version of this article including an academic bibliography originally appeared at e-International Relations on 20 April 2018.
Music video reveals how people imagine world politics. This claim is hard to contest given the documented geopolitical influence of other popular cultural artefacts including superhero films and comics, counter-terrorism procedural dramas, military shooter video games, or satirical cartoons. On one level there is a politics of what examples of these popular cultural forms these media depict, as well as the geopolitical imaginations or militarised attachments that the pleasures of engaging with them might help to produce. On another level, such media forms have all allowed researchers of world politics and international security to derive new theoretical and interpretive insights from the kinds of artefacts they are and how their viewers, readers or players interact with them.
While music video has been a major popular cultural force since the (global) rise of MTV in the 1980s, it has been subject to little study within the popular culture-world politics (PCWP) continuum even when compared to popular music in general. Perhaps the art form (a combination of a recorded song with dance performances and/or short narrative or non-narrative film, which may or may not directly reflect any of the song’s lyrical content) seems bereft of enough meaning to be worth analysing, particularly in contrast to a big-budget Hollywood movie about US soldiers in World War II or a videogame that places virtual weapons into a player’s hands. That being stated, we should not ignore music video as a medium for providing narratives of military masculinity, American exceptionalism and the ‘Good War’ – or other significant narratives in world politics.
Perhaps part of the problem is that music video needs not depend on narrative for making sense. Moreover, its aesthetics have often been seen as a collapse of meaning, with its textual content being fairly simple and rendered in the form of lyrics that the images may dramatise. Even when popular culture and world politics research manages to account for images as well as plot and dialogue, many music videos might seem too trivial even for empirical analysis. Often, in commercial music video, all performers seem to do is dance or mime the words as if they were actual singing. And yet from feminist and postcolonial perspectives, the spectacle of bodies moving to music in a transnational economy of desire cannot but be political: the fashions and fantasies of music video exemplify societies’ gendered and racialised ‘cultural archive’.
Historically, conceptually, and methodologically, therefore, studying music video makes new contributions to the wider and wider literature on how popular culture and world politics are intertwined. It shows how the emergence of music video as a promotional and communicative technology was constructed by cultural critics as the manifestation of ‘postmodernism’ in practice, and how this imagination became a way of making sense of the confusing apparently new dynamics of conflict after the Cold War. It focuses our attention towards performance and stardom, and spectators’ affective relationships with the performing body, as often neglected aspects of audio-visual meaning. And, when we go on to consider how music video mediates spectators’ affective relationships to performing bodies, it reveals that geopolitical imaginations take their emotional charge from the intimate politics of identification and desire that popular music taps into even more effectively in audio-visual form.
Music Video, MTV and the Cultural Politics of the Late Cold War
The history of music video, for most scholars who deal with it, conventionally divides itself into pre- and post-1981, before and after the launch of MTV. Technologies for screening ‘illustrated songs’ had existed since sound began to be synchronisable with film, including the almost-forgotten Panoram visual jukebox of the 1940s. In fact, pop and rock bands in the 1960s and 1970s had increasingly filmed promotional clips to reach international audiences that they could never have performed for in person. MTV represented a platform that affirmed music video as a specific type of cultural artefact, and an early global application of the medium of satellite TV, which possessed the potential to disrupt terrestrial broadcasting’s dependence on the nation-state as its main level of organisation (scholars of media and transnationalism would debate throughout the 1990s and 2000s how far it succeeded in doing so). It also represented, and did not even try to conceal, a mission of consumerist enlightenment and an expression of US soft power. From the start, its branding and visual identity connoted an ‘American’ militarised imagination of technological modernity and the supposedly inevitable spread of US cultural influence, famously announcing itself to viewers with the image of an Apollo 11 astronaut planting an animated MTV flag on the Moon.
During the 1980s, music video worked in tandem with film to communicate the aesthetics of the post-Vietnam ‘remasculinization of America’, broadcasting war and action movies to audiences outside as well as inside the USA. Amanda Howell has written that the heavy presence of electric guitar on the Top Gun soundtrack associated its imaginary of jets, flight and US technological dominance of the air with the ‘rock masculinity’ of Tom Cruise’s motorbike-riding pilot: the circuit of associations flowed back to let the legitimacy of US air defence spending benefit from the cool factor of the leather flight jackets and Ray-Bans whose sales were poised to soar. Clearly, the duo of music video and film was responsible for popularising Top Gun’s style. Top Gun pioneered the use of music video as an additional form of film advertising (using film footage in three smash-hit videos for Kenny Loggins’ ‘Danger Zone’, Berlin’s ‘Take My Breath Away’ and the ‘Top Gun Anthem’ itself), meaning many viewers encountered these invitations to gaze on the eroticised masculine cool of US airpower through music videos before they even saw the film (as the videos were meant to entice them to do).
In many instances, music video was interwoven with cinema to inject this stylised militarism into the popular geopolitics of the late Cold War. However, the cultural imaginaries that music video could document and help to generate were not confined to America: the sexual revolution of the movida madrileña in post-Franco Spain, and the last burst of Yugoslav socialist consumerism amid the economic and constitutional crisis after Tito, were mediated through the medium as well. Via similar cultural translations associated with television formats, transnational media history demonstrates how national pop industries filtered the aesthetics of MTV through local cultural meanings of style and consumption to signify aspiration and modernity however those were locally understood.
The aesthetics of Anglo-American music video in the late 20th century readily equipped it to symbolise postmodernism as a practical aesthetic. Its heavy use of montage and jump-cut techniques, its often-dizzying sense of context collapse, its frequent intertextuality and its attitude of pastiche were an everyday manifestation of what theorists such as Frederic Jameson seemed to be talking about. Critics such as E Ann Kaplan bound MTV in particular to the idea of ‘postmodernism’ so successfully that by 1993 postmodernism had become what Andrew Goodwin called the ‘academic orthodoxy’ for scholars of music television. As Goodwin and his fellow editors of the Sound and Vision music video reader argued, this was often at the cost of engaging with music video’s place in the wider music industry’s political economy. At the same time, war itself was starting to appear postmodern, by differing from Cold War expectations of ‘modern’ and ‘conventional’ war.
Music Video and ‘Postmodern’ Conflict: New Aesthetics for ‘New Wars’?
Notions such as Mary Kaldor’s ‘new wars’ drew from conflicts at the dawn of the 1990s, when both the first Gulf War and the apparently multiplying number of ‘civil wars’ and ethnopolitical conflicts seemed to epitomise as postmodern warfare. The Gulf War, relayed as spectacular entertainment by the international news network CNN, famously made the arch-postmodernist Jean Baudrillard argue that the war had been constituted by its televisual representation to such an extent that it effectively had not taken place. The ethnopolitical violence and urban warfare of conflicts such as the Yugoslav wars also seemed to fit their own postmodern script: such wars and their causes appeared jumbled and surreal both to Western eyes accustomed to perceiving those regions as unknowable, and to citizens of the countries where everyday life seemed to have turned into a baffling new reality almost overnight. Boundaries between civilian space and the front line had been blurred, laws of war were being violated by design and the strategies belligerents used to forcibly change the ethnic map looked very different to the large-scale clashes of regular state armed forces under nuclear shadow that Cold War strategists had anticipated. The surreal mixture of globalised youth culture – symbolised by MTV – and ethnic hatred that confronted war correspondents interacting with many of these wars’ rebels and paramilitaries seemed just one more layer of this conceptual frame for explaining what seemed to be changing about global security and war.
Music video, in tandem with advertising and fashion photography, had meanwhile circulated styles and masculinities transnationally to which participants in post-Cold-War conflicts could turn in defining cultural identities of ‘self’ and ‘other’. In fact, the media on different sides of these conflicts that represented combatants and other participants in conflict, aggregating individual experiences into collective narratives in the process, perhaps used these transnational frameworks of style as a basis for contrasting ‘self’ and ‘other’ more often. The young volunteers who Croatian media turned into patriotic symbols of a nation with a modern, Western cultural identity rising in self-defence supposedly went to the front with Guns ‘n’ Roses songs on their lips and Walkman headphones in their ears as readily as British Tommies in the First World War had (just as mythically) marched towards the front line singing ‘Tipperary’.
The image of Sarajevo’s underequipped defenders as a highly-motivated, ragtag band of peace-loving rockers forced into war was not untruthful – rock music was already a symbol of the city’s cultural identity, and the Sarajevo rock scene in the 1980s had given rise to nostalgically remembered last-ditch attempts to reinvent multi-ethnic Yugoslavia – but quickly became myth, first through the work of local and foreign war photographers, then via Danis Tanović and Zvonka Makuc, the director and costume designer of Ničija zemlja (No Man’s Land) [2001], who dressed Branko Đurić’s reluctant Bosniak soldier in a mismatched uniform and tattered t-shirt bearing the logo of the Rolling Stones.
Today’s configurations of what James Der Derian has called the ‘Military–Industrial–Media–Entertainment Network’, meanwhile, do not even require music video to be transmitted through broadcast television. Online video platforms, with YouTube chief among them, have decoupled music video from TV and catapulted it into the realm of digital media. Just as popular culture and world politics research has inseparably become research into digital communications and new media, music video scholarship has also taken a new digital turn.
Music Video and Digital Media Today
The frequency with which journalists compare the editing, pace and soundtrack of ISIS recruitment videos to MTV as well as Hollywood starts to reveal that, without realising how music video’s aesthetic practices engage the viewer (via an affective, embodied politics of spectatorship that feminist film scholars already understand), it is hard to grasp how these audiovisual artefacts which so perplex security services create the bonds of identification that persuade sympathisers towards militancy. This goes equally for Islamist networks and the far-right and white supremacist groups that synchronise videos of their mobilisation and training with tracks from the libraries of epic ‘trailer music’ that give video game and film trailers their characteristic soundscapes.
Yet digital media’s effect on how music video operates in world politics reaches further than networks of extremism and militancy. YouTube has supplanted MP3 blogs as the chief site of music micro-archiving – an important practice of digital memory and postmemory for many diasporas, including post-Yugoslav ones – offering users new audiovisual possibilities for creative remembering by synchronising audio with their own montages of still or moving images depicting their community or nation. Digital video cameras and editing software render it much simpler and cheaper to make, let alone disseminate videos, democratising music video production: hip-hop musicians, above all, have been able to use digital platforms to record and spread their simultaneously globalised and intensely localised affirmations of identity and expression and social critique.
Music video’s increasing convergence with other forms of audiovisual media (including YouTube and digitally generated cinema) is even being said to have produced a distinctively new audiovisual and digital aesthetics. The music video scholar Carol Vernallis calls it the ‘audiovisual swirl’, while Steven Shaviro has theorised as ‘post-cinematic affect’, a new structure of feeling emerging from how digital as opposed to analogue technologies depict and stimulate experience. The digital music video, Shaviro argues, blurs the traditional boundary between filmed action and post-production, ontologically altering what it means to construct and (re)produce audiovisual meaning (even if audiovisual meaning in analogue music video was already more obviously artificial and less mimetic than in other media). This will have its own implications for spectatorship and its embodied experiences, which – games researchers such as Matthew Thomas Payne have led the way in showing – are part of the political.
Throughout these decades of change in technology platforms, the economies of media and international politics, music video exhibits all aspects of what researchers argue makes popular culture political. It plays a role in popular geopolitics, offering frequently fantasised depictions of space and place, though (Vernallis notes in Experiencing Music Video) differently to many spatial settings in film and television: while narrative audiovisual fictions usually aim to represent an identifiable existing or imaginary geographical location, even if it has to be filmed elsewhere, music video very often conjures a type of place, as cultural imaginary or ‘place-myth’. A video set on a beach has (normally) been filmed on one particular beach with its own spatial location and history, but represents its action taking place at the beach, a spatial trope on to which viewers project their cultural imagination. The beach, the luxury hotel and the club are all characteristic settings in music video; at certain moments and in certain genres, so to have been the military base or the spaceship. To break the norm, spaces have to be directly marked as extant material locations, such as sites well-known to ‘tourist gazes’ or places extra-textually known to be the performer’s home town. Music video is therefore one more form of media through which viewers produce popular geopolitics and the politics of desire that, as Cynthia Enloe and Debbie Lisle both argue, create the fascinations around militarised and fantasised tourist sites that they do. But all popular cultural forms can do this – is any world-political work particularly characteristic of music video?
Embodied performance, Stardom and Celebrity in World Politics
One element of meaning particularly prominent in, though not exclusive to, meaning-making in music video is stardom and celebrity. International Relations scholarship seems more able to talk about celebrities as political operators off screen (especially as humanitarians), than either the labour they do as performance or the influence that narrative understandings of stars and their personas have on how viewers make sense of the characters and performances that stars embody. Music video need not of course feature the music’s performers at all, especially for musicians and genres claiming an alternative ‘cool’ which generates subcultural capital from rejecting commercial ‘celebrity’: MIA’s controversial video ‘Born Free’, directed in 2010 by Romain Gavras, was a short film depicting the rounding-up and execution of white ginger-haired men by US paramilitary police where the singer did not appear on screen at all, though it conformed to other music video genre conventions by cueing the editing of its action to the song. When performers appear, as in commercial pop, R&B and hip-hop they are most likely to do, videos produce their imaginative space by combining costume and place, mediating setting through the embodied performances of actors and dancers but even more so through those of their star(s).
Andrew Goodwin, whose early 1990s writing on music video may have outlasted some other studies from the MTV era more concerned with the aesthetics of the postmodern, drew on Richard Dyer’s work on film stardom to argue in his 1992 book Dancing in the Distraction Factory that one of the most important ways viewers interpret music video is through the ‘metanarratives’ of stardom and identity that stars’ images and bodies bring. Star personas are built up over time as the sum of their most iconic performances plus the most recirculated representations of their image off screen: many musicians’ persona-making images will be the styles of their most famous music videos, in tandem with or separate from the look of their most famous albums, tours, or publicity campaigns. Music video has contributed more and more to the on-screen dimension of star image as the physical album’s importance in music sales has declined. Goodwin argues that ‘the storyteller, rather than the story’ is what constitutes the ‘central fiction’ of popular music, a form of entertainment that leverages the authenticity of feeling listeners are supposed to perceive in vocal expression. Viewers thus make sense of music video both by using their knowledge of a star’s persona to make narrative connections between videos’ interleaved sequences of many videos, and also by wondering what contribution the image of this video is meant to make in the ongoing story of the star.
Using popular culture in a ‘narrative’ or an ‘aesthetic’ approach to security studies – especially if that narrative or aesthetic approach already, like Annick Wibben’s or Laura Shepherd’s, constitutes itself as feminist – means therefore that part of the narratives and aesthetics in front of us is this metanarrative of star persona, in any popular cultural form where an economy of stardom is at work. Neither meaning, nor the affective pleasures of spectatorship, come solely from what is happening and being said on screen, or how it looks and sounds; they also come from who is performing it and who is watching. They ask us therefore to take account of the politics and emotions of identification and desire (indeed of the desires that identification invites) that feministandqueer gaze theorists already seek to explain. Combining music, audiovisual fiction, performance and fashion photography, not to mention less or more concealed forms of advertising, spectatorship in music video involves the affective relationships sustained by all these cultural forms.
Making stardom and the politics of spectatorship more central to how we think about music video (and other popular culture) thus helps ask deeper questions about common ‘popular culture and world politics’ themes seen in music video, such as its mediation of war memory and its often contradictory position in and/or against dynamics of militarisation.
Music Video and Militarisation
Music videos may depict war as adventure or duty, war as trauma, or even create an imaginary space that invite the viewer to feel powerful affects towards war but in contradictory directions, what Cynthia Weber might term perversely ‘and/or’. Cinematic conventions of war narrative reverberate through music video, from the small-town-to-boot-camp-to-Iraq narrative of Green Day’s ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ (and most US Iraq War cinema), to the cinematic–literary interplay of Metallica’s ‘One’, released in 1989, which remediated the pacifist tragedy of the 1971 film adaptation of Johnny Got His Gun but as a song in live performance introduces itself to the audience with recorded machine-gun fire, explosions and other ‘belliphonic’ sounds of war (and according to Jonathan Pieslak was a favourite of US troops in Iraq reading themselves for danger during vehicle patrols). The ambiguity of how distanced or immersed the listener is ‘supposed’ to be from imaginaries, ideologies and masculinities of war is arguably metal’s stock-in-trade, from the heavy metal era to millennial folk and power metal or the relativistic military-history-making of Sabaton, affectively manifesting the and/or.
Amid the ‘increasingly explicit visualisation’ of warfare that Lilie Chouliaraki and others detect, and the ‘qualitatively new’ expression of older ‘feedback loop[s]’ between military and civilian technology that Der Derian argues digital media provides, music video and its strategies for representing spaces and bodies are not quite like any other cultural artefact within what Rachel Woodward and Karl Jenkings call ‘popular geopolitical imaginaries of war’. There are the videos we would expect to be embedded in these imaginaries because their songs’ themes are already nationalistic or patriotic, like the just warrior/beautiful soul storyline that accompanied Jura Stublić’s video ‘Bili cvitak’ (‘White flower’) during the Croatian war of independence (the soldier’s bereaved girlfriend ends up joining a fictional, victorious Croatian peace monitoring force), and those we might not: nothing in the assemblage of music and lyrics that formed Cher’s song ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’ in 1989 would have determined that its video needed to be filmed as a staged concert to hundreds of cheering US sailors on board the USS Missouri, or that Cher needed to pose straddling one of the ship’s guns, yet there in her fishnets she unquestionably is.
Video also permits musicians to mediate gendered histories of nationhood and war by taking the roles of soldiers or other archetypal participants in significant national wars from the past, again whether or not the song itself has a patriotic theme. The Armenian singer Sirusho inserts herself into a continuum of ancient, late-19th-century and post-Soviet heroism by leading a band of armed men in (neo-)traditional feasts and dances in the mountains in her 2015 video ‘Zartonk’ (‘Awakening’); while the Czech model-turned singer Mikolas Josef plays a fallen Czech soldier (from WWI, being buried under the Czechoslovakian flag and/or today’s identical Czech one) and a contemporary young man in a 2016 song ‘Free’ that imagines a dream of world tolerance (including Putin waving ‘the flag of the gay’ to reconcile with a Pride parade) but has nothing ostensibly to do with Czech nationhood or Czechoslovak liberation during the First World War. Their ideologies of gender, war and nation could and do appear in any popular cultural form: yet how they depict them, via the singing, costumed body of a performer who invites the viewer to make sense of this persona as an image within the star’s metanarrative, is distinct to music video.
At more apparent distance from actual conflict, but not from militarisation in Enloe’s broader societal sense, are videos that become vehicles for the affirmation of camouflage and uniform as fashion (where Enloe encourages us to start unpicking what has made people think that camouflage prints and military references are attractive things to wear). The fashion industry and the construction of popular music stardom are interdependent, as much in the remediation of historic and contemporary military uniform into fashion as in anything else (take Jimi Hendrix, Sgt. Pepper, The Clash and above all Michael Jackson; the vehicle for women’s tops with padded shoulders and militaristic epaulettes to transfer from the Balmain catwalk into high-street fashion in 2009–10 was above all the star image of Rihanna). To queerly ‘trouble the soldier as an object of desire’, as Jesse Crane-Seeber does in rethinking the relationship between actual soldiers’ bodies and the state, involves understanding the militarisation of desire, identification and self-fashioning outside as well as inside the military – and music video, as what Goodwin called a ‘technocracy of sensuousness’, helps form this framework, albeit in complex configurations of irony and resistance. If Jane Tynan suggests that fashion photography referencing military uniform and activity invites its viewers to identify with imaginaries of war by recreating ‘images of social and sexual power’ through the ‘seductive qualities’ of elements of military uniform, the more multisensory involvement of audiovisual spectatorship makes the invitation to identify more intense.
The glamorous female combatant indeed became a stock character for music video treatments in the 2000s and 2010s, just as ideas about women’s capacity for violence were beingcontested across political and cultural spheres. Katy Perry’s ‘Part Of Me’, Rihanna’s ‘Hard’ and Beyoncé’s ‘Run The World’ each position themselves differently towards the embodiment of US militarism (Perry’s character is a jilted lover who finds empowerment in joining the Marines, in a video made with Marine Corps cooperation; Rihanna’s self-proclaimed ‘couture military’ video is set in a hyperreal, desert battlefield and advanced the narrative reconstruction of Rihanna’s persona around fantasies of female excess, revenge and violence after she had survived intimate abuse; Beyoncé’s places in her in a post-apocalyptic setting, commanding a defiant, high-fashion, black-led women’s rebellion against heavily armoured male police) yet produce stills and animated gifs which, abstracted from the narrative, move even more flexibly along the and/or. Their configurations of race, gender, nation and mimesis/fantasy belong just as much as the television dramas Laura Shepherd discusses in Gender, Violence and Popular Culture within an aesthetic approach to gender and security.
As well as being representations with transnational origins, they also have a transnational and potentially global reach. The singer Helly Luv, part of the Kurdish diaspora in Finland, filmed two videos in 2014–15 in Kurdistan using a similar bank of sonic and visual imagery to the aesthetics of ‘Run The World’ or MIA’s ‘Bad Girls’ but incorporating real peshmerga fighters and equipment and dramatizing a fight against terrorism and repressive fundamentalism, celebrating peshmerga women at a time when their image was already the subject of problematic fascination in the West. Western journalists covering the Liberian civil war, Katrin Lock writes, often compared the style of the Liberian female militia leader Black Diamond to stars of hip-hop, soul and Blaxploitation cinema, and indeed the girls in the militia ‘adopted the symbols of this global and universal visual language, which is so familiar from music videos and Hollywood films’, in fashioning themselves for war.
As popular geopolitics, as war memory, as vehicle for the political economy of fashion or desire itself, music video is already world-political. At the same time, as digital communications have become part of statecraft, state and non-state actors (from ISIS to the manufacturers of fighter jets) have become increasingly skilled at using techniques that mark audiovisual artefacts as music video to enhance the appeal and impact of their own political and strategic messages. Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein describe the Israeli military’s production of content tailored to the visual aesthetics of digital media platforms, intended to be shared organically and virally through social networking, as ‘digital militarism’. The Chinese military recruitment video released with a nu-metal style soundtrack in 2016 uses music video conventions such as the slow-motion introduction of a hero dressing themselves in uniform, and the synchronisation of a missile hitting its target with a musical break, which even to a non-Chinese-speaker show the video aiming to attach its intended audience’s identificatory pleasures of spectatorship on to the Chinese military.
Music video, therefore, is not just useful for understanding popular culture and world politics because it increases the number of interesting popular cultural texts to analyse, because it offers historical insights into how people were imagining the apparently changing nature of conflict and security at the turn of the 1980s/1990s, or because ‘MTV-style’ is still a buzzword for the translation of aesthetics from entertainment media into propaganda and diplomacy even though MTV’s major contributions to audiovisual culture since the millennium have been reality TV: it also shows how deeply connected aesthetics, visuality and emotion in international politics are. Popular music is and has long been a nexus of visuality, identification and intimate affect, as well as a cultural form so intimately connected to the politics of sexuality and race that a ‘queer intellectual curiosity’ ought to recognise it as even more important to IR than it has already been said to be.
Music Video and Studying World Politics
The relatively small international politics literature on music, as Matt Davies and Marianna Franklin noted in 2015, has been slow to take up any objects of study beyond song lyrics with overtly political messages or state treatment of politicised musical movements, let alone the ‘embodied affects and experiences of sonic, audible worlds’ that distinguish music from other cultural forms. Even Davies and Franklin, however, do not theorise the nexus between sound and audiovisual aesthetics of music video. And yet it is clearly embedded in the pop-cultural ‘archive’ where gendered understandings of war, violence and security are produced and contested; in the networks of capital, ideology, technology, representation and power in which the defence and entertainment industries are mutually implicated; in the ‘everyday geopolitics’ of militarism and anti-militarism that Critical Military Studies research brings to light. Music video, arguably more than any other popular cultural form, puts the political economy and aesthetics of fashion, style and desire, and the narrative dimensions of celebrity and stardom, into the fore. Recognising what is political about them requires more than transferring typical questions about film and television to music video: it also proceeds from largely feminist and queer inquiry into the relationship between spectator, audiovisual image and performer that could usefully be brought into studying more conventionally ‘narrative’ audiovisual forms as well. Music video is a technology of fascination, fantasy and desire which, if we are seeking to explain the ‘fascination with militarized products’ that so troubles Enloe, condenses the militarising potential of audiovisual narrative texts on to an aesthetic and stylistic fulcrum; it animates the seductions of empire that so alarm Anna Agathangelou and L H M Ling.
Music video thus not just encourages but forces us to follow Roland Bleiker’s encouragement for scholars of music in world politics to go beyond the places ‘where references to the political are easy to find’, that is beyond the layer of text and language which conventional ways of knowing about global politics find most accessible. Bleiker resolved this for himself by studying instrumental music, asking explicitly ‘What can we hear that we cannot see? And what is the political content of this difference?’ Music video is conversely about what we can hear and what we can see at the same time, and the political content of these senses’ convergence rather than their separation: it is the synchronisation of editing with sound, Matthew Sumera suggests while discussing soldiers’ own amateur digital montages of war footage set to metal soundtracks, that creates music video’s unique aesthetics and affects. While music’s ‘embodied affects and […] sonic, audible worlds’ certainly offer more scope for incorporating music into IR’s ‘aesthetic turn’ than if musical lyrics simply counted as another written text, it is not even just the sonic and audible dimensions of musical worlds which matter: music video’s symbiosis of moving image and sound, and its intimate political economy of stardom, identification and desire, create modes of imagining international politics which are not quite matched by any other cultural form.
This post originally appeared at History Matters on 14 August 2017.
I’ve been researching the 1990s since the beginning of my academic career, when I wrote my PhD on popular music and national identity in Croatia after the break-up of Yugoslavia. (This was published in 2010 as my first book, Sounds of the Borderland.) As a queer writer and academic who was born in the early 1980s, I’m also someone whose consciousness and identity were shaped by the queer cultural politics of the 1990s – or by the lengths I went to in trying to distance myself from them.
Some queer historians become historians to investigate a personal past. My experience was the opposite, or so I thought: sometimes, while reading archived Croatian newspapers and magazines from 1990 to what was then the present during my PhD, I’d note abstractly that an issue’s cover date in 1996 or 1997 coincided with a personally significant day, or realise that, if I’d been the same age and Croatian, this or that pop video instead of this or that performance on Top of the Pops might have played a part in the protracted process of me trying to prove that, even though I kept noticing androgynous-looking women, I wasn’t queer.
At the same time, on a macro level, I’ve always believed that the histories of the Yugoslav region and the society where I live are much more connected than most British public discourse in the 1990s about the former Yugoslavia would suggest. During the Yugoslav wars, Cold War east–west geopolitics overhung older, semi-orientalised tropes about ‘the Balkans’ in the minds of many commentators who implied that Britain and the Balkans travelled at two separate historical speeds.
The more expansive and transnational view of the 1990s as cultural history that I take now has as much to do with Britain as the Balkans, and sometimes more. The period we can now name as ‘the post-Cold-War’ was defined by changing ideas about conflict and security, and how gender might determine who participates in conflict in what ways, who ought to protect whom, and who threatens whom. Also important were narratives of capitalism and progress that held out the hope of prosperity to many more young (and older) people than felt it in the 1980s or feel it today; rapid changes in the technologies through which people experienced popular culture and communicated with each other (it is already an imaginative leap for a student in their late teens to put themselves in the trainers of a young person the same age organising a night out in 1991); and also by the visibility and ambiguous position of queer identities in media and society. This, it turns out, is where I come in.
The project I conceived a year or two ago on how representations of the Yugoslav wars fed back into Western cultural imaginations of conflict, and how Western cultural imaginations of conflict also circulated through the Yugoslav region, needed me to start defining what did distinguish the 1990s or the ‘post-Cold-War’ as a period.
Meanwhile, the conceptual contribution I wanted it to make – what can cultural historians and scholars interested in the aesthetics of international politics learn from feminist and queer media studies? – sent me back to scholarship in feminist film theory and in cultural memory that was being written during the 1990s and was being produced within the very historical context I was trying to understand. Meanwhile, as a researcher embedded in 2016, I was becoming ever more conscious of how easily queer visibilities in the past and present can be erased, and starting to explore the 1990s’ and 2000s’ interlinked transformations of media technology, imaginations of conflict, and queer politics creatively in ways that even began pointing to new linkages in my academic work.)
Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing (on women’s identification with Forties and Fifties women film stars) or equally Graham Dawson’s Soldier Heroes (on boys’ identification with military and imperial heroes through adventure play) both came out in 1994. Both books have passages that read like darts of recognition; both books have passages that my own embodied knowledge leaves me annotating, ‘What about masculinities?’ or ‘Can’t this happen with women?’
Together, they help me pursue a hunch that the dynamics of identification that can make people so invested in the characters and narratives of popular culture and the dynamics of emotional attachment to the nation that states and militaries depend on, have a lot in common with each other.
A thread of articles and book chapters in feminist and lesbian ‘gaze’ theory (which inform how I understand identification with the nation and with militarism) came out between 1994 and 1997: work by scholars like Caroline Evans and Reina Lewis on identification, desire and spectatorship (theorising things like what the pleasures of looking at fashion spreads in the British lesbian magazine Diva might have been for lesbians in the mid-90s).
In other words, in the mid 1990s, people were already writing about and answering questions that had been confusing me for years at exactly the same time – when I still had no idea they could even be spoken, let alone asked with academic authority. (I still wouldn’t even have dared touch a copy of Diva at the newsagent, in 1997, in case it meant I was a lesbian…)
And yet the first encounter with Croatian popular music that I remember, through the Eurovision Song Contest, is already entangled with my own history of queer spectatorship and not-coming-out. I would have seen Croatian entries in the 1994 and 1995 Eurovisions, but the first one I remember seeing is Maja Blagdan’s performance of ‘Sveta ljubav’ in 1996, for reasons that would have been quite obvious to me at the time.
(Not having had the foresight to press ‘record’ at the start of the song on the video tape where I used to collect highlights of Top of the Pops, I expected with disappointment never to see again, until a viewer who had written to the BBC about Terry Wogan speaking over the singing meant they played thirty seconds of it a few weeks later on Points of View.)
Blagdan went on to be one of the first Croatian singers I wanted to find out more about, and so the trajectory towards me becoming able to write a book that a BASEES prize panel judged ‘exceptional in both its originality and its careful research’, a book which has helped to inspire younger researchers to develop their own projects on post-Yugoslav nationalism, music, media, or sport, doesn’t just involve me as a historical subject trying to understand how a new nation like Croatia could suddenly appear out of what had seemed to be an old one like Yugoslavia. It also involves me as a queer viewer and teenager at a very specific moment, when lesbian visibility coexisted with an intense cultural anxiety over women as agents of the gaze towards other women.
Historicising the theoretical work I wanted to use for one project, in other words, has already pointed me towards another: what was the relationship between queer women and popular culture in the 1990s? This feels all the more urgent, not just because it belongs to a Very Contemporary History that’s already different from the present, but also because it denotes a past I managed to simultaneously live through and push aside.
Eurovision 2017 was a contest with politics much further in the background than many viewers would have expected at the end of last year’s show: the 2016 contest saw Jamala win Ukraine the right to host the following Eurovision with a song that commemorated Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944.
Russia’s last-minute selection of a contestant, Yuliya Samoilova, who had visited Crimea in 2015 without crossing the Russian-Ukrainian border and would therefore be ineligible for entry under Ukrainian law, generated almost a month-long stand-off before Russian television decided in mid-April not to accept any compromise solution or broadcast the show. This meant the greatest reverberations of the Russia–Ukraine conflict for Kyiv 2017 had subsided before they could preoccupy the bubble of journalists, bloggers and fans that generates many of the framing narratives for every Eurovision during a fortnight of rehearsals in the host city.
While visitors to Kyiv were surrounded by architectural and visual reminders of Ukraine’s increasing cultural separation from Russia and the memory of coexistence in the USSR, Ukrainian nationhood in the broadcasts themselves came across largely through citations of folk tradition. There was no equivalent of the moment in Eurovision 2005 where President Viktor Yushchenko, presenting the winner’s trophy, reminded viewers that the Orange Revolution had only ended four months before. Even the Ukrainian entry by rock band O.Torvald had abandoned the ticking countdowns, flame and rubble concept of its early performances – calling to mind iconic photographs of the Euromaidan – for an abstract, utilitarian design.
The European Broadcasting Union, for its part, contributed to the politics-free atmosphere by preventing Portugal’s Salvador Sobral, who had been urging European governments throughout the week to accept more refugees, from wearing an ‘SOS Refugees’ sweatshirt in his last press conferences on the grounds that it broke Eurovision rules against ‘political or commercial’ messages. This was despite the fact that last year’s Eurovision had contained a segment, the acclaimed ‘Grey People’, which was no more and no less political in its depiction of the dangers refugees subject themselves to in order to reach the very ‘Europe’ that Eurovision viewers are celebrating.
The nature of live television nevertheless creates occasional ruptures in this increasingly tightly regulated ideological space. Israel’s spokesperson Ofer Nachshon’s farewell to Eurovision from the soon-to-be-closed Israel Broadcasting Authority left many viewers wondering if he was also announcing the departure of Israel itself. Perhaps the most alarming moment I can remember on a Eurovision screen occurred during the interval, when a man wearing an Australian flag climbed on stage and dropped his trousers in front of Jamala as she performed her new single, ‘I Believe In U’.
While no-one was readier than the internet’s Australians to take self-deprecating credit for the display, the man was a Ukrainian ‘prankster’, Vitalii Sediuk, with a long track record of confronting and assaulting mostly female celebrities in public. With Ukraine in direct conflict with another country where opposition politicians and journalists are liable to become targets of attacks in the street – and with tennis fans in the Yugoslav region especially likely to remember a spectator’s attack on Monica Seles in Hamburg 24 years ago – the fact that a member of the public could get this close to any performer on stage, let alone as politically symbolic a figure as Jamala, overshadowed a contest where in many respects the politics remained off screen.
Catherine Baker 