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Ukrainian delegation around the Kalush Orchestra celebrates the final qualification
Photo: MARCO BERTORELLO / AFP
It seems longer, so much longer than just a year - even if the pandemic has of course turned the sense of time into an unreliable, arbitrarily elastic tapeworm anyway.
It must be much longer ago that the Russian singer Manizha climbed out of a mobile tent dress in a red boiler suit in an ESC semi-final in which she had previously rolled across the stage - half Easter egg, half "Doctor Who" Dalek - to be believable to sing her powerful feminism rumble »Russian Woman«.
This year, in another world, Russia is excluded from the European singing competition.
About a competition that never wants to be political and of course has no other choice.
Now, wearing a heartbreakingly silly pink bucket hat, Oleh Psiuk, the lead singer of Ukrainian group Kalush Orchestra, is on stage in Turin rapping the folklore crossover song "Stefania," dedicated to his mother.
No one can break his willpower, because he got it from her, it says.
And that he will always find his way home, »even if all the roads are broken«.
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Kalush Orchestra at the semi-final performance
Photo: YARA NARDI / REUTERS
Of course, his bandmate's merry long-pipe, which he wields a bit as if he were going on an elephant safari with a stun gun, and two other musicians' skirts made from dog activity sniffer carpets, signal that we're still in the slob-and-camp-safe here. space of the Eurovision Song Contest, but there is much more at stake.
Because the oblivion of the world that this competition always manages to bring about so reliably can no longer work if you are not served the bizarre career of a singer or the correct name of a horn as usual as an information morsel for a contribution, but learn that a Band member fighting on the front lines of a war.
Whether the musical quality of the contribution alone would justify the band's entry into the final,
may non-empathic bean counters discuss as silently as possible.
Nothing could matter more.
New trend color: lurid flamingo
Above all, the dominance of the more subdued, lightly padded songs stays in one's mind from this semi-final: The Icelandic sisters Systur with their sovereign, fluffy country folk in the local language (which, however, irritated with a slightly robotic permanent grin), the very reduced Dutch contribution of the singer S10, who sang about gloomy times (and with her »Dardardardardar, Uuuh-Aaah!« delivered one of the most enticing sing-along passages of the evening) and the Portuguese melancholy women of Maro (who stood on stage in an occult formation, as if they wanted to with their Saudade- chants summoning a tear goblin) all made it to the semifinals.
Likewise Marius Bear from Switzerland, whose song came up with the oh look at message that men can also feel heartache,
The fantastically bullet-haired Monika Liu from Lithuania and Rosa Linn from Armenia also made it into the final – the Armenian provided a tutorial for an interior design DIY with music, with which you can use all the hoarded toilet paper for creative wall design with plenty of space for notes: multi-layer lamella technology is the new sponge scrawl, you read it here first.
Please also make a note: The new trend color is undoubtedly the harlequin flamingo, and in case you are wondering who she subconsciously reminds of presenter Laura Pausini's hairstyle and make-up: It may be Disney villain Gundel Gaukeley.
Two of the rather rare nonsense contributions that evening will also be heard in the final on Saturday: The Norwegian subwoolfers also get the honorary title for »Give that Wolf a Banana« for the most cheeky pun band name, the most anatomically dubious wolf masks and the most senseless use of one People in astronaut costume.
Moldova proved to its wildly fiddling après-ski bastard party band Zdob și Zdub & Fraţii Advahov, whose song was about the reopening of the railway line between Chișinău and Bucharest, that you can really sing about anything - but please continue to sing about sex only in English if possible.
It's a bit of a shame about the retired Albanian frivolous gymnast, the cute Slovenian schoolboys and the Danish reminiscence of the women's band from the film "Bandits", which was so successfully suppressed until yesterday evening.
And, of course, we also mourn the generic rock man from Bulgaria: just before we were tempted to exclaim »Hey guys, there's Jesus!« in view of his carefully curled, long curly hair, he was taken from us again.
