[music]

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone with On the Media's midweek podcast. This week, we talk about a 70-year-old global phenomenon involving music and politics, about which I knew absolutely nothing. Well, recently I was asked by my old friend Charlie to take part in a new podcast born of his love of and obsession with Eurovision, an international national song contest organized annually by the European Broadcasting Union, or EBU, with some reps from some 70 countries.

Maybe you already knew that, but did you know that exactly 50 years ago, ABBA won the contest for the song Waterloo? Now that I understand that what was once, in fact, a mystery to me actually means the world to tens of millions of others, I offer up this episode of the podcast Mysteries of the Euroverse, because maybe some of you out there will find this as intriguing and bizarre as I did. Here's my friend Charlie and his friend Magnus.

Magnus Riise: Something you're going to hear us reference a lot in this episode and future episodes is rule 271.

Charlie Sohne: That songs and acts need to be apolitical, right? Eurovision was started in the aftermath of World War II, and part of at least the self-mythology of Eurovision is that the goal of Eurovision was to try and help stitch Europe back.

Magnus Riise: What's the EBU's favorite line? It's like stitching Europe back together through the universal language of music.

Charlie Sohne: The way the EBU talks about that history is, they marry it to this idea that the festival is apolitical, right? There had been too much fighting and too much arguing. I think that, actually, that's the opposite of what really happened. I was very surprised to find out that the idea that an act should be apolitical did not come about until the year 2000. When you think about those other European institutions that were founded around the same time or before, the UN, what became the EU, those are bodies for navigating disagreement.

Magnus Riise: Right, and I would say that-- I think it's fair to say in the first 44 years of life, you develop a strong identity.

Charlie Sohne: I wouldn't know that.

Magnus Riise: [laughs] I do think for something that is seen as such a big part of the identity of Eurovision, 44 years, it didn't exist. When Eurovision was created, it was a time when everyone had to be able to gather on the TV for one set of programming, and I think because of that, people had to be more comfortable being uncomfortable. I think the thing about Eurovision is, in times when you see that shows can't live up to the viewership of their heyday, or whatever they would call it, Eurovision really still has those numbers.

It really brings together everyone.

Charlie Sohne: I think that the thing that we're really going to be tracking over this episode is, if you're bringing everyone together, to what end? If we're going to talk about what I would say a more political version of Eurovision looked like, which is basically up until the year 2000, we're then going to talk about how and why that changed in the late 90s, early 2000s.

Then, finally, I think we're going to talk a little bit about why we might be returning back to the model that existed from 1956 up until the year 2000, and why that actually might be a good thing, given what's changed about Europe in the last 23 years.

Magnus Riise: I think many people might say, "Oh, it was apolitical in culture, and then it became apolitical by rule," but I think, really, what we're going to dig into now, that it wasn't apolitical by culture and that's really defined by the fact that politics is very present in the very first edition of the contest.

Charlie Sohne: One of Germany's songs that they sent that year, it was sung by this man, Walter Andreas Schwartz. His father was murdered by the Nazis. He himself was persecuted by the Nazis. The song is about how his country, that he was representing, was not properly dealing with its recent history.

[MUSIC - Walter Andreas Schwarz:Im Wartesaal zum großen Glück]

Charlie Sohne: Imagine if you were watching American Idol and someone walked out and sang a song that was like, "I cannot believe there are still memorials to the Confederacy in this country." When I talked to Jean Philip De Tender, who is the deputy director of the EBU, he made a really strong argument for not making politics explicit, letting these values sort of exist underneath the surface, and then you can maybe bring more people into the fold, and that's how you achieve unity.

Literally, the history of this contest starts with a German Jew stepping on an international broadcast and saying, "My country is not dealing with what happened to me."

Magnus Riise: Do you think in Europe there's been a much stronger willingness to say, "I am ashamed of what my family history has taken part of." I think it's also important to highlight the fact that Germany sent that number. Germany, as a broadcaster, was willing to have the debate, and then the EBU, on top of that.

[MUSIC - Walter Andreas Schwarz:Im Wartesaal zum großen Glück]

Charlie Sohne: In the waning years of Salazar's dictatorship in Portugal, which, you know-- longest lasting authoritarian rule in Europe, Portugal sent Fernando Tordo with a song called Tourada, which was an attack on the regime that used the metaphor of a bullfight.

[MUSIC - Fernando Tordo: Tourada]

Magnus Riise: There's another moment of the EBU saying, "Listen, if the Germans want to decide whether they want to criticize themselves, have at it." In Portugal, it's like this dictator wants to try and stop them from sending this number. That's a Portuguese issue. You don't have as much fighting between nations.

Charlie Sohne: Although you only need to look at something like Mariza Koch's Panaya mu, Panaya Mu.

[MUSIC - Mariza Koch:Panaya Mu, Panaya Mu]

Charlie Sohne: Which actually was a criticism of Turkey's invasion of Cyprus. This is a Greek singer criticizing Turkey, And it really has kicked off this long, tense back and forth between Greece and Turkey.

Magnus Riise: In Italy. 1974, Gigliola Cinquetti, Si.

[MUSIC - Gigliola Cinquetti: Si]

Magnus Riise: At the time, divorce was on the ballot in Italy, so it was a pro-divorce song. Italy censored its own act, like they didn't show their own act on TV.

Charlie Sohne: They were worried about it swinging the election, right?

Magnus Riise: Every country, except Italy, saw Italy's entry.

Charlie Sohne: Yes, yes.

Magnus Riise: Not only that, they came in second place behind this little, tiny little band called ABBA. Also, I'm not going to say that their song is extremely political, but still, a song about war, not about peace.

Charlie Sohne: Okay, you know what? I'm going to table the argument over whether Waterloo is a political song. All right, we got to move on real quick. The worst moment, I think, of the early years of Eurovision was when Francisco Franco hosted the contest in 1969, right? He basically got what he wanted, which was a huge advertisement for his regime that made it look progressive. It was this huge gift to a dictatorship. Franco actually bribed the jury in the year before.

Magnus Riise: Even though Eurovision might argue, "We didn't pick it, they won. This happened," they found out about the bribes too late. I don't know. There are many arguments you could make, but you still let it happen, because here's the thing. There's requirements for the size of the arena. There's a requirement that an international airport needs to be nearby.

Charlie Sohne: If you're going to put other hosting requirements on countries, maybe not killing your own people through extrajudicial killings should be a requirement. Going back to our chronology here, we had the fall of the Iron Curtain, because you had this whole new set of countries that suddenly were being integrated into the contest, and--

Magnus Riise: Who also were kind of changing their identity and affiliation.

Charlie Sohne: Right. Europe needs to talk about politics again. Maybe Europe needs to sing about politics again.

Magnus Riise: How international relations, not just accidentally, but directly gets involved in Eurovision, is really wild.

Charlie Sohne: I know. It's oppression set to music. When you think about the idea that Eurovision songs should be apolitical, and this being codified in the year 2000, thinking about that broader political context is important, and it's this idea of the end of history. Essentially, there was no competition to small l liberalism and democracy. I think that we all really internalized this, that it was not super important to have big conversations anymore.

This all goes hand in hand with the EBU's desire to expand the contest, to commercialize it more. The early years, the EBU, and the member broadcasters having this self-conception of being government-licensed public broadcasters.

Magnus Riise: Most European countries are smaller than the US. In a lot of these countries, the reason you had a TV license and a public broadcaster was because there wasn't enough commercial interest, first of all. Then you get to this era where commercial TV channels start launching. In Norway, many people would talk about this, "Well, I have three TV channels that don't charge me money. Why should I pay a TV license?" It became this pressure for viewership.

There is-- Publicly, we have a responsibility. Behind closed doors, we really want to make sure that viewers are tuning in. If you want to win in the cultural space, go after young people. That's what the new TV channels did. The commercial TV channels, they went for young people.

Charlie Sohne: If you think about the stereotypes of different youth generations-- Late '50s, '60s, '70s, what we're talking about, broad brush, are hippies. Dylan, Joni, all those, right? Then in the '80s and '90s, Gen X was considered to be deeply apolitical. Now that we see Gen Z and the level of engagement that you get from them, there's a way in which the rules of Eurovision probably have just changed to keep up with the audience. Eurovision had adjusted to this new apolitical reality, I think.

Then in 2008, we had the global financial crisis, which-- if you think about the end of history, it's like suddenly you have a financial crisis that shakes everyone's belief in this globalized market system. We don't have major land wars in Europe anymore. Then, 2008, we get the Russian-Georgian war, which is an early indication that maybe Vladimir Putin isn't just this great guy who's going to bring market capitalism to Russia and be less drunk than Boris Yeltsin was. Then, in 2009, we have Netanyahu's return to power in Israel.

Magnus Riise: A year later, in 2010, we also get Orbán 2.0 in Hungary, which is also more authoritarian.

Charlie Sohne: Then four years after that, we have Erdoğan becoming prime minister in Turkey. Capping off that period from 2008 to 2014, of course, is Putin's invasion of Crimea. We are, again, looking at a fractured Europe, but now we're looking at a fractured Europe where the institution designed to exist in that world has tied its own hands.

Magnus Riise: It's easy not to implement a rule, but it's hard to remove one.

Charlie Sohne: I kind of feel like they're all sitting there being like--

Magnus Riise: "We're political."

Charlie Sohne: Yes, we're seeing where this is going, probably doing it right now, for some reason, they're scared to pull the trigger. You don't have a band like Let 3. They constructed a statue of Angela Merkel taking a dump. You don't have that band come and sing a song that is very directly a reference to Putin, and that calls him a moron and a crocodile.

Magnus Riise: In a competition where you're heavily featuring Ukraine.

Charlie Sohne: I think that's the problem with the rules still being on the books. It really does mean that they're kind of flying blind right now. I think it does leave people with the impression that certain countries are allowed to voice their opinions-

Magnus Riise: And others not.

Charlie Sohne: -and others aren't.

Magnus Riise: Totally. I think that's the challenge.

Charlie Sohne: Eurovision is doing the exact same thing that all of these other institutions have to do, which is regain their ability to think about themselves as liberal institutions where speech is something that we value. Europe is coming apart at the seams and we need some fucking power balance, okay?

Magnus Riise: I think it is that thing of-- in the modern day we live in, where one member of your broadcasting union invades another member, you can't go back to a time where that hasn't happened. That is now part of your identity and your future, if you want to continue existing as an organization.

Charlie Sohne: I think that's a great place to end this segment.

Magnus Riise: With that, let's get to our guests. First is Ukrainian singer Jamala, as she tells us about her Eurovision win and her latest album, which is really a response to Putin's attempt to erase the history of Crimean Tatars. The album, QIRIM is a collection of Crimean folk tunes backed by a full orchestra and a group of Crimean folk musicians.

Charlie Sohne: Actually, shortly after our interview, Russia officially banned Jamala for her activism.

Magnus Riise: Wow. That's insane.

Charlie Sohne: It's crazy.

Magnus Riise: Then we talked to Brooke Gladstone, host of On the Media, and we really get into what makes the song political, and how Eurovision can best approach an increasingly divided Europe.

Charlie Sohne: All right. First, we're going to listen to part of Jamala's 2016 Eurovision hit 1944, and then jump right into the interviews.

[MUSIC - Jamala: 1944]

We've got a very special guest with us on this episode. She is not Gaga. She is not Amy. She is Jamala. Jamala, [crosstalk] how are you? Thank you so much for doing this interview. I am so excited to get to talk with you. I'm such a huge fan of-

Jamala: Thank you.

Charlie Sohne: -all of your music. I guess I just want to start right off. You competed first to get into Eurovision with Smile.

Jamala: Oh, the Smile. It was me in that time, at that moment, it was huge inspiration for me. Charlie Chaplin's song Smile, smile though your heart is aching, smile even though it's breaking. It really resonates with me in that moment. Nowadays, I see that the song is still alive. On my concert, I didn't sing it because it's not me nowadays, because it's not what resonates with me today.

As you know, a story about the Bobby McFerrin, Don't Worry, Be Happy, that stopped pushing me to sing this song, sing this song, because it's not me in this moment.

Charlie Sohne: When you talk about the change in who you are as an artist, from Smile to now, do you think of that more in terms of how you've changed, or how the world has changed, or both?

Jamala: I think it's both. In that moment, I had a huge inspiration from Amy Winehouse, [unintelligible 00:17:02] record, 60s. I was in Kyiv. Today I'm in Warsaw, today I'm a mother. All these things inspired me. They changed my mood and that's why my music is like that.

Charlie Sohne: I did want to talk about QIRIM. What was the research process for that like? How did you find the folk songs? How did you go about choosing which ones went on the album?

Jamala: I can say that I work on this album over decades. This album is my desire to create a strong voice from my homeland Crimea, to tell a story that were previously unknown, rewritten, forgotten. Because each song in this album, from different parts of the Crimea Peninsula, from Yalta, Simferopol, Sevastopol, Dzhankoi, from sea to the mountains. I found more than music, more than unique melodies, [unintelligible 00:18:06] I found characters.

For me, it was inspiration from Game of Thrones, Seven Kingdoms. Each of these kingdom sounds different. In this album, the song from the seashore, from the Yalta, Sudak, Alushta, they are full of the emotions. They are so romantic. Something completely different than people from mountains. Can you imagine all these composers, like Avatar by James Horner? They have illusion on some folk song. I have even better. I have these songs, and they are real. These songs are more than hundreds years.

Charlie Sohne: I think you've said this before, that even not understanding the language, when you listen, you feel those emotions. You feel the sort of universality of this song, written so long ago, could, in a contemporary world, still speak to people.

Jamala: More than 80 musicians joined to the work on this album, and five of them are folk musicians. Crimean Tatar folk musicians. Then the full war started. We almost lost it. The album remained under the fire in Kyiv, literally. Literally, it was under attack.

Charlie Sohne: How were you able to rescue it?

Jamala: My friend, my sound engineer, sound producer, Sergey Krutanka, he was in Kyiv in that moment. Then the Russians' full invasion started, he called me and said, "Oh, my God, Jamala, forgive me, I didn't save anything. All information are in recording building, I tried to save it," and he did.

Charlie Sohne: Whoa. That's good.

Jamala: Unfortunately, he died in this January, because it was really hard for him to live with all these horrible things in our life nowadays.

Charlie Sohne: I'm so sorry to hear that.

Jamala: Thank you.

Charlie Sohne: Obviously, this brings up Putin's war, and I was thinking that so much of what it seems that your project is, and so much of what you do, both with QIRIM, and with 1944, is about history. Preserving history. The image that everybody remembers of the roots and the tree in 1944, and then the whole idea of taking all of these folk songs and preserving them. Why is preserving history so important to you as an artist, particularly right now?

Jamala: If we are taking away meaning in pop music, it will be just noise. I think artists can speak about social issues, about pain, in a slightly different language. Especially in this moment, humanity is going through very difficult times. Pandemics, wars, natural disease, and all of this is reflected in pop music. It's our way to speak with each other. That's why I adore this contest.

I decided to tell the story about my great-grandmother, to tell the story about Crimean deportation, because my kids are fifth in my generation who were forced to flee because of the Russian aggression. My great-grandmother was deported with the five kids in her arms, in a cattle train to Central Asia, without any chance to survive, but she survived. She survived. After I released this song, Russia tried to say that it's political, and so on.

In the beginning, for me, it was the moment when I can say that I can spread this story, not just for Ukrainians, for the whole world to see.

Charlie Sohne: I think that's why people find Eurovision, right?

Jamala: Exactly, because they understand me, exactly what I'm fighting for. I performed in this national selection in Berlin and we collected more than €67 million for Ukraine.

It was Eurovision community. They asked me to sing 1944 in this national selection, in Berlin. I said, "Oh, my God, how can I sing? I'm so sad," but they said, "We can collect money for Ukraine." I said, "Okay, I'll try." Again, it was Eurovision.

Charlie Sohne: Because we're a podcast that talks mostly about Eurovision, how do you think the organization can continue to support artists who are doing the kind of work that you're doing, and are there changes that you would like to see?

Jamala: We can't lose our empathy. Why I decided to leave, in 1944, part without any language, English or Crimean Tatar. Despite of that, it was for the very first time that Crimean Tatar language sounded on the stage. I decided to show that this part is emotional language. You will understand me without any words. You will understand my pain, and that's why, on your question, I believe that Eurovision Song Contest, not is just about the fast, about the pink colors.

Of course, it's a good features of this contest, but in the same time, it's a great platform for showing that we are human being. It's a good platform to show-- this month is LGBTQ rights. We are all together. Another month is about someone else. It shows us a little that we are not alone in this fucking world.

Charlie Sohne: That's the perfect place to end because I think that speaks to why people come to Eurovision, and certainly, why I fell in love with your music, is just the humanity that pours out of everything that you do, which I think is so lovely. Thank you so much for taking the time. We are here with Brooke Gladstone, who is the host of On the Media on public radio.

Her list of accomplishments are way too much to talk about here, but I do want to highlight a couple of things that are very relevant to our podcast. She's written two books about the relationship between the media and democracy and history--

Brooke Gladstone: That's a comic book and a pamphlet.

[laughter]

Charlie Sohne: A graphic novel [laughs] that I would pull out, except it is holding my microphone upright. I also want to highlight that Brooke spent several years reporting from Russia in the immediate aftermath, or a few years after.

Brooke Gladstone: One year after. Exactly.

Charlie Sohne: One year after.

Brooke Gladstone: '92 to '95.

Charlie Sohne: Of the Soviet collapse. The perfect guest for our Eurovision podcast.

Brooke Gladstone: Absolutely. Especially because I know absolutely nothing about Eurovision. It was like America and soccer in the 1950s, when I might come along. I've seen an occasional clip, and it's usually about a controversy. Someone who has had an intensely political record either elevated or suppressed, and there is a very powerful global reaction to it.

Magnus Riise: That is really the perfect segue into what we're going to do today.

Charlie Sohne: I was going to say, this is why you bring a radio host on. She does your segues for you. This episode primarily concerns this rule that Eurovision is a non-political festival and that all acts must not be political.

Brooke Gladstone: That's insane on its face, because anybody who knows about--

Charlie Sohne: I love you both.

Brooke Gladstone: Anybody who understands about art, it's usually propelled by a kind of passion for the life that an artist is living.

Charlie Sohne: I want to say right now that we can just end the episode.

Brooke Gladstone: Too much phrasing.

Magnus Riise: It is an interesting combination, I think, with Eurovision, that it had a political purpose of bringing Europe back together after the Second World War through the universal language of music, which you'll hear them say a lot.

Charlie Sohne: It's stitching Europe together under the banner of these internationalist values.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, precisely. That's it. You have to have some agreed-upon values.

Magnus Riise: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: It's the problem with keeping the United States of America stitched together. Those values have atomized.

Charlie Sohne: Speaking about America, there's a parallel that I keep thinking about to the Supreme Court. The idea that textualism is just like, "We're looking up these definitions, and we happen to choose this dictionary." What it allows the Supreme Court to do is hide the underlying values underneath their decisions. It takes it out of the realm of articulated debate.

I do think part of why we're talking about all of this now is also that, for a while, those values that Eurovision claimed to represent were taken for granted. It was the end of history.

We thought democracy had won.

Brooke Gladstone: How old is Eurovision?

Charlie Sohne: Eurovision was started in 1956.

Magnus Riise: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: What?

Magnus Riise: This is the thing that's so interesting about-- When the American Idols and those competitions came out, Eurovision had been doing this for already 50 years, almost, at that point.

Brooke Gladstone: Spoken like a Norwegian.

Magnus Riise: Exactly. Everything we just talked about goes into the game we're going to play.

Charlie Sohne: Because as a very serious podcast, we deal with very serious political issues via trivia games.

Magnus Riise: Exactly. Yes. The game is called-- Is it Political? We're going to describe a Eurovision song, and then we want you to tell us if you think the European Broadcasting Union, also known as the EBU, saw the performance as a violation of Eurovision's rules and sanctioned, censored, or rejected the performance in any shape or form. Sounds good?

Brooke Gladstone: Sounds good.

Magnus Riise: First up, we have--In 2013, the Finnish singer Krista Siegfrids submitted Marry Me, which centered around a lesbian wedding. For context, gay marriage was illegal in Finland until 2017.

Brooke Gladstone: Oh.

[MUSIC - Krista Siegfrids: Marry Me]

Charlie Sohne: The iconic moment of that is the gay kiss at the end of the song.

Brooke Gladstone: You said that gay marriage was illegal and this song was called Marry Me.

Charlie Sohne: Yes, correct.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm going to say not political.

Charlie Sohne: Sure. Nailed it.

Magnus Riise: Yes. Correct.

Charlie Sohne: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Partly it's because the landscape was changing so absolutely convulsively at that point, you could barely keep up. It was about love. It was two attractive white women kissing each other, what could go wrong?

[laughter]

Charlie Sohne: Which, actually, is what the EBU said in response.

Magnus Riise: Verbatim.

Magnus Riise: Verbatim.

Brooke Gladstone: Really?

Charlie Sohne: We're going to move forward to our next video, which is 2003. Brooke, I don't know if you were still following Russian pop culture then, but the group t.A.T.u. performed at Eurovision and ended their song with a same-sex kiss.

[MUSIC - t.A.T.u.: Ne Ver, Ne Boisia]

Brooke Gladstone: Different night, different people, does he want to, doesn't? Does he love me or not?

Charlie Sohne: The early 2000s were a great period for lyrics, let me tell you.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay, 2003?

Charlie Sohne: Yes. This is a decade before the Finnish song.

Brooke Gladstone: But not sanctioned by the government?

Charlie Sohne: Yes, actually.

Brooke Gladstone: Sanctioned by the government? It's just about the kissing?

Charlie Sohne: Yes, it's just the kiss.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm going to say, not political.

Charlie Sohne: They called it political. Actually, the one thing that I did not say in my setup is that they actually were not allowed to perform that kiss at Eurovision.

Brooke Gladstone: What was the explanation? What was the political-

Charlie Sohne: Eurovision said that they were a family show.

Brooke Gladstone: This is just homophobic, basically.

Charlie Sohne: Yes, essentially.

Brooke Gladstone: It's not about a legal institutionalized, this is just a kiss in 2003.

Charlie Sohne: Exactly. In 2003, it was considered a political issue. Lawrence V. Texas was recently overturned. Eurovision can back away from its values.

Brooke Gladstone: I should have paid more attention to the time. I needed to think of what else was going on.

Magnus Riise: That brings us to the next entry, which is in 2009. Georgia submitted its entry, We Don't Wanna Put In, in the direct shadow of the Georgian-Russian war.

Brooke Gladstone: The lyrics that you just read?

Magnus Riise: Yes.

Charlie Sohne: We don't want to put in.

Brooke Gladstone: We don't want to put in?

Magnus Riise: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, was it a reference to the war?

Charlie Sohne: We don't want to Put-in. What do we think, Brooke?

[MUSIC - Stephane & 3G: We Don't Wanna Put In]

Charlie Sohne: Oh, my God, she's just in love with the song.

Brooke Gladstone: It's so obvious, but it's a disco song, We Don't Wanna Put In, We Don't Wanna Put-- Come one, it's political.

Charlie Sohne: Yes, it is. It definitely, as a double entendre, has definite vibes of Britney Spears, If U Seek Amy. Where you're like-- it actually doesn't work the other way. Staying with our Putin theme, in 2016, Ukrainian artist Jamala submitted the song 1944, which told the story of her great-grandmother being expelled from her home during Stalin's ethnic cleansing of Crimean Tatars. It's Jamala, who had just fled her home in Crimea after the invasion, performs this song.

[MUSIC- Jamala: 1944]

Charlie Sohne: What do we think?

Brooke Gladstone: So political.

Charlie Sohne: I know, right? It was not political, and in fact--

Brooke Gladstone: Because it's historical?

Charlie Sohne: Because it's historical and it's a personal family story.

Brooke Gladstone: Crimea was '14.

Charlie Sohne: Crimea was 2014.

Brooke Gladstone: Two years later. You talked to her?

Charlie Sohne: Yes, she's incredible.

Magnus Riise: She's amazing.

Charlie Sohne: Quick plug. Her latest album is this orchestral arrangement of these Crimean folk songs. It's very much, "Putin is trying to erase our history," and erase the idea that Crimean Tatars have been here forever, creating this giant album that researches and preserves all these folk songs, as a direct response. Again, another reason why art, storytelling, history, if you try to take the politics out of it, you're left with a very small ramp.

Magnus Riise: I think, also, it's interesting, because before they banned that gay kiss, it was an openly trans woman who won the competition. I think the argument there is that she was just existing, while the kiss felt like a protest.

Brooke Gladstone: I do understand the impulse to try and thread that needle, because it could instantly dissolve into nothing but another front for warfare, whether cultural, social, or political. These sorts of international forums are perfect places, and especially of any place where artists gather, and presume to speak for their generation.

Charlie Sohne: For their generation. I think you're right. Which is, actually, why I think there are people who see this as a censorship issue. I'm much more on the side of-- I actually think that Eurovision should go farther in terms of just articulating what its values are.

Brooke Gladstone: The trouble is that they're not consistent, Charlie, as you've demonstrated to me during these contests.

Charlie Sohne: You're right, they're inconsistent about these values, and maybe that means that they don't actually believe them, but I interviewed the deputy director general of the EBU. From his point of view, these are all values that they believe in, and it's just important to keep them implicit, so, "We invite people in, and we don't repel people."

Magnus Riise: It's worth putting in context the Ukrainian winner, because they won, they are now the host for the next year's competition. Russia sent an artist who had violated Ukrainian law by visiting Crimea.

Charlie Sohne: This was a masterful PR move on Putin's part, as she was wheelchair-bound. All of the press around this was, "Look at these Ukrainians refusing to let in this Russian Pop star, because she visited part of Russia that's maybe Ukraine, and look at her, she's in a wheelchair."

Magnus Riise: Russia basically pulled out of the competition that year, [inaudible 00:37:18] [crosstalk]

Charlie Sohne: The EBU was happy to have them back the next year. Thank God.

Magnus Riise: Also, ever since the annexation of Crimea, when they would call Russia for their votes, people in the audience would boo.

Charlie Sohne: What was the apolitical EBU's response to that? To introduce anti-booing technology on the broadcast.

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: There's really no way to win this, because even if you're a good game player, and you realize, "Okay, these are the rules," it changes every time.

Charlie Sohne: Exactly. The point of this is not that Brooke is a bad game player.

Brooke Gladstone: Is an idiot?

[laughter]

Magnus Riise: I think, if anything, this is designed to prove the inconsistency.

Charlie Sohne: We do have one more. We can't talk about political controversy in music without talking about Madonna. In 2019, Eurovision had Madonna perform during the interval act.

Brooke Gladstone: She actually wasn't a contestant.

Charlie Sohne: Not in the competition. In 2019, the competition was in Israel. Essentially, what happened was, in the middle of her medley, two of her dancers turned around to reveal that one had an Israeli flag on his back, and the other had a Palestinian flag.

Magnus Riise: There were also some tensions leading up to this because it was announced, without EBU, that the competition was going to be in Jerusalem.

Brooke Gladstone: Who announced it?

Magnus Riise: The winning artists from Israel that sang, See You Next in Jerusalem.

Brooke Gladstone: Just like Passover.

[laughter]

Magnus Riise: Then Netanyahu also-- Wach host country has to whittle it down to two viable options, and the EBU picks between those two. The EBU's way of handling it was not to say anything about, "We can't host this in Jerusalem," they just picked Tel Aviv.

Charlie Sohne: A great way to avoid the controversy. I think the problem was they do this thing called postcards, where you show off the host country. Quite a few of their postcards were filmed on a disputed territory.

Brooke Gladstone: Who's they?

Charlie Sohne: The Israeli broadcaster, who's a public broadcaster, essentially, in Israeli government.

Brooke Gladstone: What is the penalty for being ruled political, you get kicked out of the contest?

Charlie Sohne: Different things. We Don't Wanna Put In was not allowed to perform. The competitor who pulled out a Palestinian flag on stage, it's a live broadcast, so they got fined. Madonna--

Magnus Riise: Let's watch Madonna.

Charlie Sohne: We'll watch Madonna. We can talk about what happened to her.

Brooke Gladstone: Here we go.

[MUSIC - Madonna and Quavo: Future]

Brooke Gladstone:

I think the controversy over Israel is all well and good, but I think we should discuss auto-tuning, because it sounds horrible.

Charlie Sohne: All of the press about this afterwards was, "Madonna used autotune." I was sitting there being like, "Wait a minute."

Brooke Gladstone: Oh, really? Okay. I'm going to say that, mostly because I feel like you gave away the [unintelligible 00:40:31] [crosstalk] that this was judged political.

Charlie Sohne: Yes. This is now a performance that is not included in officially EBU materials, like the DVD.

Magnus Riise: I think, also, during the dress rehearsal, she didn't do that. It's like a surprise that could--

Brooke Gladstone: Run through.

Magnus Riise: Yes, exactly.

Brooke Gladstone: This was deliberately a surprise.

Charlie Sohne: Yes. Correct.

Brooke Gladstone: They were going to penalize her just for defying the rules of the-- what you have is an institution thwarted, and they won't tolerate that. I think that it probably was on the fact that she violated their rules.

Charlie Sohne: I think, particularly, given that Israel was using it as a platform to justify settlements.

Brooke Gladstone: Using it as a platform to normalize position in Europe.

Charlie Sohne: Yes. They're very explicit. Right. You put an organization that wants to keep its values implicit up against a country that is totally comfortable saying like, "No, no, no, these are our values. We own this territory." Your platform is going to get used for stuff that you claim to keep your hands clean of.

Magnus Riise: Look at the reason why Turkey is out of the competition. They've said that as long as a bearded drag queen can win the competition, which happened in 2014, they want nothing to do with it.

Charlie Sohne: Turkey's a perfect example in the election that just happened. Erdoğan's opponent made it part of his platform, that he was like, "I'm bringing Turkey back into Eurovision." In that context, it was very clear what Eurovision stood for. This has been your--

Brooke Gladstone: Maiden voyage.

Charlie Sohne: Maiden voyage. Your Eurovision introduction. What are your impressions?

Brooke Gladstone: I think it's like so many things, a perfect prism to look at a very fractured part of the world. Every part of the world is fractured, but here, you really have a chance to see it play out on a stage. This is a real dumpster fire, sometimes. It would be interesting to know if there were years when they didn't have these kinds of controversies, was there a time of calm? It's so hard, in 2023, to recall that time. I guess it's the end of history. It's 1991 to--

Charlie Sohne: Right. That brief period when--

Brooke Gladstone: You know what would be so good for the world? Now that I understand what Eurovision is, if it became Globalvision.

Charlie Sohne: It is actually a thing that Jamala talks about a lot in the context of why Eurovision should be a little bit more permissive about the politics, is that it's like-- the potential for it, as a platform, to communicate, particularly from countries or peoples that get ignored by the media.

Brooke Gladstone: Like the entire global south.

Charlie Sohne: Like the entire global south.

Brooke Gladstone: It would be an opportunity to endow those people with complexity, to show them in full color rather than the black and white that they're usually depicted. I see it now after my maiden voyage as another avenue for learning about each other, but any institution that's run by bureaucrats, however well-intentioned, it's going to fall on its face again and again. I guess it's a tribute that it keeps going.

Magnus Riise: Yes. In that, Eurovision is a metaphor for the world.

Charlie Sohne: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: So far.

Charlie Sohne: With that, we should say, thank you so much, Brooke, for being on the podcast.

Magnus Riise: This is amazing.

Brooke Gladstone: My pleasure.

[Music-Euroverse]

Brooke Gladstone: Charlie Sohne and Magnus Riise are hosts of Mysteries of the Euroverse. Join us on Friday for the big show this week. In the meantime, sign up for our newsletter @onthemedia.org, or follow us on Threads. See you Friday. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

[Music-Euroverse]

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.