By Steve Hanson
In one sense, Eurovision is a strange thing, a glimpse into
the exotic cornucopia of European pop. But in another sense, Eurovision
actually just highlights the bits of ubiquitous, daily mainstream culture that
I usually ignore.
It struck me yesterday evening,
when watching Eurovision, that the functions of those climactic, vocoder-driven
stadium house tracks, are both obvious and complex. Their videos especially are
fascinating, glimpsed in working class pubs with televisions. They often
contain scenes of audience climax, at a faked live performance or festival, a
mass celebration, in front of an often blonde, female, western, half porn star,
half fitness workout instructor figure. This says everything we need to know
about the assemblages of labour and leisure most of us now tolerate,
historically, in the western first world, as well as their dominant, nauseating
assumptions.
However, this music’s aesthetic
is also highly classed. These mass celebration climaxes function to
symbolically re-include the excluded, those who inevitably consume the videos
in the first place. Via doing so, they are placed, as vicarious members of the
audience, at two stages removed, into the mass and therefore global story they
are inevitably marginalised by. The tracks are always about overcoming
obstacles to get somewhere (baby), but the consumer of them is inevitably
stranded in a declining and very local present, both geographically and
temporally, smoking outside a bad pub where the bus service has been cut.
However, when this musical and
visual aesthetic becomes the form and function of Israel's Eurovision entry,
which last night included moorish floor projections, the Israeli flag, and a
lyric about everyone having 'one heart' (I edited my bloodier metaphors from
this draft) it is the concealment of ideology we are concerned with. As with
the stadium house track genre, the intended unitary sentiments cover a much
larger and more complex story.
In some ways then, the moment
when Austria won last night, with an undoubtedly cheerful, beyond
heteronormative performer, it felt wrong to snipe. The performance cut right
through the dominant gendering of the standard Euro-pop or stadium house
number, which I outlined above. But the bearded lady (or ladied beard) is also
a mask, as much as it is a revelation. Queen Conchita dripped with all the
tacky baubles of a culture presenting the conspicuous consumption of luxury
goods as a default set of values.
Austria’s win was
world-historical, and genuinely progressive, at one very fundamental level, but
the supposed 'transgression' of transgender, is at that moment so easily
re-incorporated into the new normal of wars, shopping, wars and shopping. The
expanded spectrum of sexuality and gender risks becoming just another part of
the flattened smorgasbord of cultural values, and even this is an illusion: As
we can see, both Eurovision songs and stadium house present highly identifiable
genres. By which I mean that they are very far from limitless in what they can
say or present, even when they ‘go further’, re-including what was excluded
before, symbolically speaking. What was Marx saying about both the culture and
economics of liberalism?
But I don’t want to sound
intolerant or unaccepting here. What we need is more radical and opened-out cultural
forms and avant-gardes, not the smooth assimilation of them into an amnesiac,
eternally-recurring, politically and ethically dubious cultural mainstream.
Music and the landscapes of
Europe have so often been bleak combinations, with good reason. If we think
back to Bartok, and much of the eastern European folk music his pieces often
borrow from, then we only have to think forward again to the Serbian and
Bosnian conflicts, or Israel and Palestine, to understand what Eurovision
conceals.
But it would also be naively
worthy to suggest that the symbolic landscapes of Eurovision, temporarily
rushing into the minds of millions like a mass hallucination, should now
evaporate its hyper-real form into some misguided idea of ‘authenticity’,
replacing these strange hybrids of aesthetics and athletics with, say, folk
music, or an indie band. Although I wouldn’t mind seeing some UK hip hop
performing for Britain, Mystro and Braintax perhaps.
No, the mythical and almost
mystical nature of Eurovision is both useful and crucial. These symbolic magic
lantern shows, performed in the interior of a busy and perhaps politically
agnostic mind, need be recalibrated to better reflect the daily struggles and
experiences of those who consume them, instead of masking and anaesthetising
them. There is a very different way that culture like this could connect the
local to the global. But that, as we saw last night, is a very big job.
