Is tonight's Eurovision final a joyful tribute to pop culture or a ludicrous joke? John Waters, in Helsinki, wonders who would not be proud to take part
What is Eurovision? We all think we know what it is, maybe even feel we could make a fist of describing it. But how to begin? A carnival of culture? Whose culture? What kind of culture? European culture? Pop culture? European pop culture? Crass European pop culture? But whose and which Europe? Old or new? Old or young? East or west? Is Eurovision now an anomaly, a throwback to a time when the pop horizon lay ahead, and the contest offered itself as a whipping boy to the hubris of pop's then glorious elite? Or is Eurovision a measure of pop values dictated by people who otherwise have no interest, much like holly-and-ivy drinkers?
And whatever Eurovision is now, after half a century, can it ever be anything else? Perhaps the most irritating and the most interesting thing about Eurovision is that it ticks all these boxes but is confined by none of them. Eurovision has its own trajectory, its own history, intersecting with the various popular cultures of Europe and yet not coinciding with any. Every year, it reserves the right to be relevant or otherwise, and usually decides against. But it doesn't have to be like it is. It doesn't have to be anything in particular. For all its limits and occasional ludicrousness, it remains a blank canvas.
On the surface, Eurovision seems too frivolous to be spoken about in the language of serious socio-cultural analysis. It is, in a precise sense, daft. And yet, at another level it is deeply serious, though it can be hard to discern what, precisely, it is serious about. It has the potential, occasionally, to articulate some shadow of the zeitgeist, now and again to produce a great song, but generally it tends to vindicate those who seem never to tire of disparaging or making repetitive jokes about it. Perhaps the great tragedy of this year's Eurovision was that Morrissey, despite signs of serious interest, did not make it as the UK's representative. If he had, the contest might well have been revolutionised, as the snobbery built up in layers over five decades melted away.
The welcome party at the Finlandia hall on last Monday night was a good place to try to pin it down. All night, people were asking me two questions: what had I been expecting, and was it anything like I'd been expecting? The answers, in reverse order, were, No, and, I'd been expecting to find people going a bit crazy for no particular reason. I had no idea how intensely, strategically crazy Eurovision could be, how focused the craziness becomes. The event in the Finlandia hall was like a massive marketplace with finger food, with all the groups from contestant countries selling their wares, doing impromptu turns in front of anything resembling a camera, vying for attention like hyper-active children. But what - again - were they selling? Culture, yes, though in a particular sense. Entertainment, of course. Fun, definitely. Irony, perhaps. But above all, desire, the expression of a confused, magpie longing, born of an eclectic past and a seemingly boundless future.
The theme of this year's contest in Helsinki is "True Fantasy". This, according to the executive producer from YLE, the Finnish national broadcaster, "will embrace Finland and Finnishness in terms of the polarities associated with the country: light versus darkness, northern fells versus islands in the south, our strong bond to nature versus fast technological development, taciturnity against inner strength and creative madness, as showcased [ last year] by Lordi in an original way". A similar set of opposites could be tabulated to describe the Eurovision's role in European culture: trite and well organised, embarrassing and sensational, sad and fun.
EUROVISION IS, THEN, about human desire, in all its complex reality. Desire as fantasy, but also desire for something real, substantial and inspirational. It is a strange mix of superficiality and profundity, of light-heartedness and solemnity, of trash, tinsel and intensity. It strikes a pose, yes, but not a straightforward one. It is certainly not about hipness, or cool, but is not unaware of what these disciplines might entail, while seemingly unconstrained by their tyrannies. It goes beyond them, but in a calculated way. It is smarter than you might have been led to believe. It seeks a new level of cool, beyond solemnity and self-consciousness, as though experimenting with what might be acceptable inside the outer boundary with excess. It is frontiersmanship of the popular imagination, seeking simultaneously new limits and new indulgences, experimenting with old styles and new ones, mixing tradition with the froth of the pop marketplace and old-fashioned showbiz values with postmodern kitsch.
In his wonderful book Words and Music: a History of Pop in the Shape of a City (Bloomsbury, 2003), Paul Morley advances the argument that the spirit of Elvis and the Beatles is furthered nowadays not in the rock music we hear after the teatime watershed, but deep in the pop mainstream. In a cross between a poem, a song and a book of lists, Morley argues that the cutting edge of pop music, in the sense of seeking a radical sonic expression that takes risks and evokes surprises, is represented nowadays not by Coldplay but by Kylie. Rock has become jaded, narrow-horizoned and self-referential, while pop "carries on as always, blasting the past into the present, caring only about the thrill of sound and the speed of fashion". It is a daring thesis, though by no means implausible.
It turns on its head the flat-earthist view of musical integrity as necessarily dogged and workmanlike, and opens up the possibility that the real breakthroughs are occurring in moments that are, for the moment, fated to be looked at askance, if not with contempt. I think it was ever so. Being of a certain age, I can cast an unrevising mind back to the emergence of Abba at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, remembering that Waterloo was greeted at first as a silly pop song, and Abba a shallow mix of saccharine and sex. Gradually, over a decade or so, they came to be recognised as perhaps the best European pop band since the Beatles.
I hesitate to offer this as an apologia for Eurovision, freely admitting that one supergoup in 52 years is not much of a trawl. But it serves to underline something we tend to ignore: always this annual festival of spectacularity and excess contains the possibility of the unexpected, the radical and the new. Mostly, it fails to deliver, of course, but then, mostly, so does everything. In fact, the main explanation for why Eurovision does not yield a more bountiful harvest of trend-changing music may well be connected to the deep-seated prejudices which have been inculcated in western European culture by a cynical and derisive media. What a waste this represents, that the largest audience for pop music on the planet, for a supremely well-organised and long-established competition, are ignored by most of Europe's most talented musicians and composers because of a fear of being laughed at.
Right now, digesting Thursday's semi-final results, I feel even better about the Irish song, They Can't Stop the Spring. It is traditional, in several senses, and yet radical, experimental and, above all, unique. We have sought to construct a modern European song in the earth of our own tradition.
Other European countries are already watching closely to see whether it works out. And so it might. The sameness of a large proportion of Thursdays's songs seemed to result in a splitting of the vote for, say, metal and disco, so that the songs that emerged were ones defined by clear identities. This is promising for us and interesting in terms of the immediate future of Eurovision.
No matter what happens tonight, I am chuffed beyond measure by getting here and taking part. It is a strange and wondrous thing to be walking around a European capital and hearing, from time to time as you go, a song you wrote within the past six months while driving your car or sitting up in bed, as it blares from video screens on every corner. Who would not want to do this? And why would they not want to do it? How could it possibly hurt Bono or Chris Martin to be singing one of their own songs here in Helsinki tonight? It isn't possible to lose at Eurovision; only to win.
Eurovision Song Contest 2007 is on RTÉ1 and BBC1 at 8pm