Efentix Is Out, KRIJAN IS IN

Efentix is out, KÄÄRIJAN IS IN

I've been thinking about this for a while, not just in terms of Eurovision, but it's a good context to explore the idea in.

I'm not sure it there is an actual term for this, but I've come to think of it in terms of genre literacy, where for certain musical genres you need a base of understanding (and experience) to work from, in order to fully understand or appreciate the more complex or derived works within a particular genre.

This doesn't negate those moments when you're introduced to something outside of your normal experience ("What the **** was that?!") and it completely knocks your socks off, but even then, chances are you're going to be inspired to do more exploring around that song/artist/genre, thus providing you with more background and musical context.

This is why I get so excited seeing variation in some of the less well-trodden genres in Eurovision; to me, Viszlát Nyár by AWS (Hungary, 2018), in addition to being one of my favourite Eurovision entries ever (and being one of the few to reliably make me cry), is wildly different from anything we've seen before or since, including the examples you gave from 2021, Zitti e buoni by Måneskin (Italy) or Dark Side by Blind Channel (Finland, of course).

As much as I would like to feel slightly smug about my taste in music, I very much feel this applies to 'pop' music as well; with a few exceptions (Lizzo, Lana Del Ray, Miley Cyrus, and a smattering of Carly Rae Jepson and Cardi B) I've barely listened to anything approaching the mainstream musical canon for a few years, so turning on the radio it all sounds like a bit of a homogeneous blur. That doesn't mean that mainstream pop music is objectively bad, or less complex or worthy than the music I enjoy, more that I don't have the experience and the background knowledge to judge whether it's good or bad in context.

A lot of my musical taste is so niche, I'm also just really happy seeing other people finding music that they enjoy and that means something to them (even if I would love to have more people to talk to about Epic Nautical Funeral Doom Metal ;) )

This gets further complicated when you consider artists and songs who are deliberately pushing (or breaking) the boundaries or tropes of a genre; you need that grounding in order to fully appreciate what they are doing differently!

One of the reasons I love Eurovision so much is because it's one of the few arenas where we get to see a wide variety of genres (and cultural contexts) in one place, and I feel that has been invaluable for me in terms of my overall musical genre literacy.

That said, if we did ever see a doom metal entry in Eurovision (unlikely, and I'm not convinced it would do well), I would absolutely flip my lid! :D

I sometimes get annoyed at how eurofans trend to treat all rock/metal songs the same, putting very different songs into the same box/genre, while for instance Zitti E Buoni and Dark Side were very different songs. Meanwhile, when listen to the pop entries my reaction to pretty much all of them is “it’s pretty catchy, I could listen to it but I would not seek it out”, and I get baffled when half of them are written of as masterpieces and half of them as trash.

(to be clear: this post is meant to be about how people tend to view music they listen to more “complexly” than music they don’t listen to, and how I can be hypocritical, this is not an attempt to claim that I have superior taste in music)

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