For those new to the contest here is a blurb from the English language Wikipedia:
"Each member country submits a song to be performed on live
television and then casts votes for the other countries' songs to determine
the most popular song in the competition.”
I have issues with the word ‘represent’ in the case of Eurovision and the case of the Idol franchise. For example, in “American Idol” we have the notion of a ‘general consensus’ of the public of USA (I don’t even want to go into the misleading properties here of the term ‘America’) – thus ‘idol’ here is associated with notion of a deity or a fantasy representative of the public. So it is taken for granted that the winner of the show and the pop music this person will churn out is what ‘America’ wants, idolizes – or at least that is how the show is packaged. Interestingly we do not get much of the personalities of the contestants (Sanjayah perhaps being one of few who seems to try to visually represent his in an odd way?) however what we DO get is a very clear understanding of who the judges are – their (constructed) personalities – and how they relate to us. And they all have a role to play – Simon is the authoritative ‘father’/’god’ who is in the right, Randy is the cool streetwise guy who you want to listen to because he knows the lingo and Paula is the mother hen worrying about and caring for all the contestants, in other words you should take eat your soup when she tells you. If these personalities weren’t kept up, the record company would lose money. What the judges ARE doing is telling us what music we should listen to; what is representative of the society; what records we should buy – they are RIGHT. Every one of their comments counts! It is the judges who play the part of ‘idol’ who we admire and follow. It is in a way a song contest: we are not buying the winning artist, instead, we are buying the songs the record company creates along with the created personality of the performer. Song is going to be sold, it is just a matter of who will sing it.
On a much larger and more culturally endangering scale, the (mis)representation of the ‘masses’ is what worries me about the Eurovision song contest. For a start Eurovision with all its French meaning implies a vision, a common goal: and idol. A (ONE) song is meant to represent an entire nation in competition against other nations. Does anyone think POP would be representative of Native Americans? No, but in Eurovision (like in Idol and all the others) Pop always prevails. This year for example Serbia put forward a THE MOST MEDIOCRE pop tune I have ever heard, which won the contest! Yet I can assure you that kind of music does not stay at the top of the charts in Serbia nor does it sell the most records. So this means that the original Serbian broadcaster put forward a song which CONFORMS to the judges tastes based on track record: It does not help that the ‘big four’ (UK/Spain/France/Germany) are guaranteed finalists – being that they are enormous pop markets. And the (financially) major participating broadcasters of the EBU surely have a financial interest in maintaining and expanding that market. With the vote handed down to the audience texting in their favourites for the last few years, in years to come a ‘representative’ song of say Turkey may well sound like the next Spice Girls release.
If you’ve missed my point, what I’m trying to say is that unlike other reality TV shows where you may or may not idolize the contestants (you may also be watching it to laugh at the stupidities) the ‘reality’ music contests construct an identity for the individual and/or the community watching which it expects to be followed by creating prestige around themselves – and it does so through the most quickly digest-able format: MUSIC! Popularity is thus not representative but constructed. $$$
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