a Chat with Kat about Eurovision
a Palestinian representing Iceland and the limits of Eurovision's politics
Eurovision: you either know about it or you live outside the European union and have never heard about the annual international song contest that launched ABBA, Celine Dion, and Måneskin’s careers.
The draw of the contest is that it is unapologetically kitsch. The pop-leaning performances are specifically created for Eurovision — and so you can’t quite judge the songs by the same standards you have for “real world” music — and they range from the emotional to the folksy to the downright strange. It’s a family friendly contest that showcases the singing talents of around forty participating countries (which include contestants from across Western and Eastern Europe, the Caucuses, Israel, and … Australia), who typically perform their songs in English.
Ten years ago, when I was still living in Armenia, Eurovision was a big deal to me. Each May, we’d send a performer to represent Armenia on an international stage. Each year, I’d hope for a win, but each year, we fell short. Still, it was a big event, something everyone would talk about it throughout its three day duration (two semifinals and a final round), something worth staying up for and worth rooting for.
Unlike the Olympics, there isn’t a cash prize or gold medals for the winner. Instead, the winning performer snags a glass microphone and bestows their country with the honor of hosting Eurovision the following year, which is a lucrative boost for that country’s tourism economy.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU for short, “an alliance of public service media organisations whose countries are within the European Broadcasting Area,” per Wikipedia), the organization responsible for hosting Eurovision, insists that the performances must remain strictly apolitical. And yet, every year, there’s a political debacle. I want to dive into the limits of Eurovision’s anti-political standing and the drama surrounding the contest this year.
To help, I interviewed my friend Kat, who’s been a dedicated Eurovision fan for four years. Kat has watched and ranked (with their own points system) every single Eurovision since the year 2000 as well as around a third of contests from the 20th century (Eurovision started in 1956), making them the foremost expert on the topic, at least within my circles of friends.
There are a couple parts to Eurovision, and below I talk with Kat specifically about the Icelandic national selection competition, Söngvakeppnin, where Icelanders vote for which performer to send to Eurovision to represent their country in May on the international stage.
For context, every single participating country holds their own national selection competition in the winter, which is hosted by that country’s own national broadcasting service (equivalent to NBC in the USA).
During each country’s national selection competition, viewers cast their vote (by phone or text) for their favorite performer from their country. During the international Eurovision song contest in May, however, viewers may only vote for performers outside their country of residence. So if you’re viewing Eurovision from Armenia, you can’t vote for the Armenian performer but you can vote for literally any other country.
I desperately wanted to talk to Kat about all that was going on this year: about the possibility of a Palestinian man (Bashar Murad) representing Iceland with his cowboy song to Eurovision refusing to ban either Israel or Azerbaijan this year, despite both actively committing ethnic cleansing as I write this, in comparison to how they immediately banned Russia from participating after they invaded the Ukraine. For the first time in over a decade, I feel like I have stakes in the competition again.
This year, Bashar Murad, a Palestinian singer, competed in Iceland’s national selection competition for a chance to represent Iceland at Eurovision this May. Bashar’s relationship with Iceland began in 2019, when Eurovision was hosted in Tel Aviv. Hatari, the techno punk band representing Iceland that year, famously waved the Palestinian flag during the contest and were later fined. While audience members are allowed to fly flags during the contest, Eurovision has banned the Palestinian flag since 2016 (along with Artsakh’s flag) due to the area being a “contested” territory.
Hatari later contacted and collaborated with Bashar Murad, a Jerusalem-born singer songwriter on a song called “Klefi / صامد” (read “samed.” If you’ve seen the word “sumud” a lot on Instagram, it’s this same word, meaning steadfastness) that focuses on the occupation of Palestine by Israel.
In August of 2023, Bashar submitted a song called “Wild West,” co-written by Hatari’s Einar Stefansson, to Söngvakeppnin. Since Iceland doesn’t have a rule demanding that their Eurovision representative be of Icelandic origin or citizenship, Bashar was allowed to compete in Söngvakeppnin and even represent them if he wins.
Regarding Bashar’s song, “Wild West,” I’ll say this first: it’s not his best song, and it’s not the best Eurovision song, but it is an excellent performance and a song that *would* have done well at Eurovision. The lyrics are a bit cliché, yes, but remember that this is being sung for an audience of 180 million viewers whose first language is not English.
“Wild West” is about going out west to seek opportunity and the struggle to prove oneself. The iconography of the Western is an excellent metaphor of the one who doesn’t fit in, adamant to carve their own path, leaving everything familiar behind to travel unfamiliar roads alone. The choice also subverts American values (who gets to succeed out “west”? is it enough to just “prove” yourself and who gets to “pass the test”?) and the heteronormative role of the cowboy, what with Bashar being queer himself.
While the lyrics of the song aren’t directly about Palestine, the performance itself was rich with symbolism that — despite Eurovision’s strong “no politics” rule — drew attention to Palestine. His backup dancers briefly perform a dabka and they portray the eight-pointed star of Bethlehem. The screen behind them is lit up in red, green, white, and black, and shows orange slices in reference to jaffa oranges. The audience loved the performance, and he cleaned up the votes during Söngvakeppnin’s first round, where he competed against four other Icelandic representatives to get one of two spots in Söngvakeppnin’s “superfinal” round. It was during the superfinal round, where he competed against Iceland’s Hera Björk, that the trouble started.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. The bolded text connotes my questions to Kat and the [bolded brackets] contain my post-interview interjections and research.
Lala: Kat, how’d you get into Eurovision?
Kat: I started getting really into Eurovision during the pandemic. Other people that were doing things that were probably a lot more useful with their time like baking bread or making crafts and I was like I’m going to get really into the musical cultures of Europe. To the point where now my music makes people go hmmmm.
Lala: What was your 2023 Spotify Wrapped again?
Kat: It was more Estonian than most people’s.
[in the audio transcript, you can hear me losing it in the background.]
Kat: I stand by it though! Nick Pedaja is an incredible singer and it’s a shame that nobody knows who he is.
Lala: Let’s start with the the bad news: today is March 3, and as of nine hours before this interview, Bashar Murad posted on Instagram that he didn’t win the Icelandic national selection competition.
Kat: I’m so annoyed. So annoyed.
Lala: I don’t understand what happened. He was slated to win with how much he scored during the first round.
Kat: There were rumblings and rumors — I cannot confirm or deny this — that a bunch of Israeli-run Facebook groups were campaigning and pushing Icelandic people to vote for the Icelandic representative, Hera Björk.
[Reader, it’s important to note that Kat hinted about this on March 3, a full week before Icelandic newsite, Manliff, wrote a piece exposing an Israeli man named Yogev Segal, who runs a Facebook group he started this January called Israeli-Icelandic Conversation, had actually campaigned members of the group to vote for Hera Bjork. Reader, what’s even more unbelievably important to note is that Yogev lives in Israel and works for KAN, Israel’s national broadcasting service, the same channel tasked with running Israel’s national song contest to pick their country’s representative and the only channel allowed to broadcast Eurovision in Israel come May.]
Kat: I was watching Iceland’s national finals where Bashar and Hera competed and my roommate walked in and watched both performances and said there’s a clear winner here, it’s no contest, and then of course, Bashar didn’t win, and my roommate was like, that’s racist. And obviously there was a crowd of people there loudly cheering for Bashar. Like the crowd was going ballistic.
Lala: Going ballistic while holding watermelon piñatas!
Kat: Holding watermelon piñatas! I got really emotional because it was clear that these fans ran to the closest shop Iceland has to a Party City and bought the closest thing they could find to a watermelon and it was these watermelon piñatas. I got emotional about it.
They interviewed Bashar right after he got off the stage, and he was clearly overwhelmed and extremely grateful and he was like “It feels really weird to be here celebrating when my people are being exterminated.” How incredibly difficult must it be to be in that position, and probably want to talk about [Gaza] 24/7, because what else is there to talk about, but there was kind of a feeling in my gut that the racists are gonna jump on this. They’re gonna jump on this, and they’re gonna say oh he’s making a political statement.
Lala: I mean, the thing about the Eurovision contest though, like the voting is always political. Since you can’t vote for your own country’s performance, you tend to vote for your country’s closest allies instead.
Kat: Oh 100%.
You have 40 different countries, with 40 different perspectives, with 40 different histories, a lot of them quite messy considering the ebb and flow of European borders and the genocides they love to do against each other and other countries. You can’t ever have an apolitical situation. Human beings are political. A human being existing is always going to have a political element. And as much as Eurovision says it’s apolotical, it can never be apolitical.
And I know that Eurovision and the EBU are a business, and they are there to make money, they are there to sell ads and sell airtime. But [the contestants of Eurovision], they are all writing from an artistic perspective, they are all writing from lived experience. Like when Jamala [a Ukrainian singer] sang about the 1944 expulsion of Crimean Tartars from the Crimean Peninsula by the Soviets.
Lala: So the Ukraine’s Jamala was allowed to sing “1944” (an anti-Russia song) because it was about a historic event, rather than a current-day political one. Was this the 2015 or 2016 contest?
Kat: 2016. [Two years after Russia invaded the Crimean Peninsula,] Ukraine sent “1944,” a song about building “a future/Where people are free.” The song asks listeners, “Where is your heart?”
2015 was the year that Russia’s performer got booed practically off the stage. They made the Russian singers cry. The audience was really mean, because they’d seen Russia’s invasion of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. [What Russia had done] was very fresh in people’s minds.
Georgia sent in a song in 2009 called “We don’t wanna put in” right after the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 and the EBU was like no you can’t do that. And Georgia said “fine we just won’t be at Eurovision then. We hate Putin.”
Lala: It’s not easy for a small or “lesser known” country to make the decision to refuse to participate in Eurovision. I wanted to talk about the weight that Eurovision holds for smaller countries —
Kat: It legitimizes them. Eurovision is built on diversity and open mindedness and bringing people together. I watched a video from ESCGabe where he talks about Israel and Azerbaijan’s participation and he said “that for a country to be in Eurovision is to signify ‘I have your same [Western] values, I agree with democracy, I agree with LGBTQ rights, I agree with open-mindedness and inclusion.” Even though notoriously some of these countries [participating in Eurovision] are not like that. I mean look at the anti-LGBT stuff that’s happening in Poland right now. It’s a really good way for them to promote [their country as progressive] without doing any work.
Lala: It’s pinkwashing. But that international platform is hard to resist. During Eurovision, before each song, we see a 50 second pre-filmed clip called a “postcard” showcasing the country where the performer is from. Usually, the postcard shows the capital or natural landscape of a country. It’s a powerful built-in tourism ad for each nation.
Kat: The smaller countries see the contest as a way for them to get a snippet of their culture “out there.” Take Moldova, for example. Americans and British people do not necessarily think of Moldova often. But when you see them in Eurovision they’re usually doing some pretty crazy stuff. Like the epic sax man meme. That was Moldova.
Lala: That was Moldova! His sax solo plays in the background of my thoughts.
Kat: You get three minutes to tell the world what you’re up to.
Kat: Going back to Bashar Murad for a second. In 2022, Estonia sent Stefan. He is part of the Armenian diaspora, and his song was called “Hope,” and it was a country western song about feeling disconnected from where he was, his parents having to leave Armenia, but the hope he felt that there was gonna be something better. Bashar Murad’s song is very similar. It’s about leaving your home and seeking greener pastures.
Lala: Out West.
Kat: Out West. For both of them. They’re very smartly taking an American mythology about promise and freedom and life, but also they are people who have been chased out of their indigenous lands. Which is also a humongous part of the American cultural mythology. Especially in Westerns. I think it’s a very salient comparison to make. I find it really fascinating that they both evoked that American mythology through country music, specifically spaghetti western sound.
Lala: Bashar sings “my spaghetti guitar.”
Kat: He’s clearly evoking it. It’s a really interesting comparison between two people who are both talking about being chased out of their homeland, cultural genocides, the hopefulness they feel, the sadness they feel. And they’re using that VERY American sound for it.
That’s the thing I love about Eurovision, there’s just so many stories. And that’s why it can never be not political. And even a song like this that’s not “inherently” political (“Hope”) is still political, because it’s about somebody’s life, and lives are political.
Interesting fact about this year it’s probably one of the most diverse years I’ve ever seen. There are so many people with dual citizenship, there’s representation from multiple African countries. Like France, who’s sending Slimane, who is Algerian-French. Denmark is sending Saba, who is Ethiopian. Greece is sending a Sudanese-Greek woman, Marina Satti. There are two nonbinary people, there’s multiple gay people, multiple gay people of color. But [who they choose to send] is also a political choice! So it’s like, Israel’s ruining this for everybody.
Lala: Israel is bringing so much drama this year. They sent in a song called “October Rain” with lyrics clearly referencing the victims of October 7th. Israel’s KAN broadcasting company said that they wouldn’t participate at all if the EBU rejected the song. Well, the EBU did reject “October Rain” and asked for a second option. Israel’s president intervened and asked KAN to revise the lyrics so they may compete, so they sent in a new song that the EBU accepted (even though the revised song is nearly identical to the first).
There were calls to bans Israel from participating before their second song was accepted and now that they are participating, there’s calls for boycotting Eurovision altogether. Would boycotting this year’s show also mean boycotting the most diverse year in Eurovision’s history?
Kat: Yes and no. Because at the end of the day you can still go and support all of the musicians. In probably more tangible ways, like listening to their music, buying their merch, supporting them as people. You can go on Wikipedia and see who’s going and start listening to them right now. So it’s not like by boycotting Eurovision you’re boycotting these artists. I remember you being shocked when I said this, but Morrocanoil is Eurovision’s biggest sponsor.
Lala: Morrocanoil. The fucking hair product company. Which I assumed is an American company appropriating Morocco. I didn’t know they were an Israeli company appropriating Morocco. It’s hard to imagine Eurovision banning Israel from performing when their biggest sponsor is an Israeli company. The EBU is a business, like you said. They need to make money and make their sponsors happy.
Kat: They need to make their sponsors happy. In 2022, Eurovision wasn’t even going to ban Russia. It was only when broadcasters legitimately threatened to pull out and Eurovision’s money was threatened that they finally banned Russia from performing [after invading the Ukraine that same year].
Lala: Broadcasters as in the TV stations in individual European countries refusing to air Eurovision if Russia performed?
Kat: Yes. That Youtube video I mentioned, ESCGabe was talking about why broadcasters this time around aren’t calling for boycotts, and it’s because they’re always going to defer to the state. So when Russia invaded the Ukraine, every [international government] slapped them with sanctions immediately. So the broadcasters had nothing to lose by threatening to refuse to air Eurovision if Russia performed.
With this, unfortunately we’ve seen a massive divide between governments and the will of the people. The people obviously are overwhelmingly pro Palestine, but their governments are not willing to draw that same line in the sand against Israel. So the [European] governments are very pro Israel, so the public broadcasters of those countries unfortunately are going to follow in the footsteps of the state. And no country in Europe has slapped sanctions against Israel yet, except maybe Ireland.
There’s another side to it too, because Eurovision is a humongous platform, the performers who are representing Finland said “we thought really really long and hard about it, we’re not going to pull out, because we’ve realized that we can probably do more with our influence as current competitors and with the air time we have. If we refused to perform, we don’t know that that would be as helpful.”
[Thousands of artists from Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and Slovenia, along with Ireland’s (Bambi Thug) and the UK’s (Olly Alexander) Eurovision performers have signed petitions calling for the exclusion of Israel from this year’s Eurovision.]
It’s a very interesting year. I don’t want to say that with Ukraine, it was more clearcut, but Russia is a country that people were happy to sanction. People were really invested in disliking Russia, they were waiting for it.
I see this year’s Eurovision as a microcosm [of what’s happening in the world]. I’m curious to see how it goes down, but I’m not going to watch the contest in May. And I’m certainly not going to vote through the new “rest of the world vote” option from the USA.
[Four hours after our interview, a story broke after several Icelandic voters posted on Twitter and Tiktok that their phone votes for Bashar were getting marked as spam calls and not going through, while their text votes were going to his competitor, Hera, instead.
Iceland’s national broadcasting service, RUV, has yet to conduct a thorough investigation into all this, but the deadline for choosing a national contestant was on March 11, at which point they chose Hera as the performer to represent Iceland at Eurovision in May. Hera won Söngvakeppnin’s “superfinal” by a margin of 3,340 votes.
With Bashar Murad initially predicted to win the Söngvakeppnin superfinal, the Eurovision betting sites predicted Iceland had a chance of scoring third place this year at Eurovision. Once Hera was selected as the official representative, Iceland’s chances plummeted to number 18.]
Huge huge thanks to Kat for letting me interview them for this piece and teaching me so much about Eurovision (and big thanks to Kat’s mom for bringing this amazing person into the world 😭). You can find Kat’s art on Insta and Twitter @katatomicart .
There’s been a kind of enormous (at least to me) influx of new readers since my last piece on women’s day. I’ll keep it short: thank you so much for reading and subscribing, it means the world to me and really does motivate me to keep writing!
I highly recommend watching ESCGabe’s video titled “Israel and Azerbaijan are Exploiting Eurovision” for a fascinating analysis on these two countries’ strategies of Palestinian/Armenian erasure and colonization during Eurovision “postcards” segments. Kat highly recommends watching “The [Queer] Politics of Eurovision”.
Kat’s 2024 Honorable Mentions:
Gåte (Norway) “Ulveham” - Kat’s top song this year
Windows95man (Finland) “No Rules!” - pure Europop fun
Bambi Thug (Ireland), “Doomsday Blue” - A witch’s song evoking a curse on their rapist
Nebulossa (Spain) “ZORRA” - Kat loves the meaning behind this song
LADANIVA (Armenia) “Jako” - meaningful lyrics [Lala’s note: I’m biased but this song is SO fun with a wildly unexpected feminist message. Watch the video just for the modern take on Armenian traditional dress alone! Plus, you can’t beat a band name like that]
Mustii (Belgium) “Before the Party’s Over” - best ballad
Baby Lasagna (Croatia) “Rim Tim Tagi Dim” - real chance of being a cinderella story win with an entirely self-produced song [Lala’s note: this one is my favorite. Look up the lyrics AFTER your first listen. Baby Lasagne has the highest likelihood of winning this year.]
Is there anywhere Israel's tentacles don't reach?