Umi

Very happy that Luxembourg is back but I'm anxious to see how long it will be for. They don't strike me as a country which would persevere through a bad start so they will need to hit the ground running, which is going to be tough after a 30 year absence. The good news is that if they do want to throw money at it, they have all the money in the world to do that with, and they have a noticeable population advantage over reasonably successful countries like Iceland and Malta. Leaving aside their own chances, their return has fairly significant televote implications for numerous countries (most notably Portugal, who could do with the help). In terms of leavers I am definitely worried for Azerbaijan at this point unless Turkey make a comeback next year. No juries in the semis and Turkey, Russia and Belarus absent is going to force them to either raise the quality back up or give up.

Do we reckon there's still any chance of 'Escapism' making top 20? It's a shame it's stalled just outside it for several weeks now.

Amusingly I feel like the song builds perfectly well but the performance gets a bit stuck about halfway through. The last chorus feels huge but the staging doesn't feel like it grows with the song at all after a certain point.

This could be good but I am somewhat alarmed that they are course-correcting quite this hard after Fulenn. Hyper-stereotypical working once doesn't mean it'll click every year.

Great analysis. Pan-Slavism is a really interesting topic in relation to this song because I think there's absolutely value in a message of support to Ukraine coming from a place of shared Slavic experiences of suffering under Russian violence. But as you said, it's maybe not the best idea to appeal to in the midst of a war for which one of many justifications Russia has offered is that Pan-Slavism inherently justifies Russian dominion over its neighbours. Leaving that aside, the song in general just feels both overly direct and quite vapid at the same time. I like how it sounds but I'm not sure the message really works at all.

What was the story with Nonsense and Until I Found You? I missed this.

Wow, I didn't expect 'Shirt' to ever make it top 50 on pop, let alone when SZA has two other singles being pushed to the format. It's amazing to see SZA taking three slots at once as a lead artist on pop and I'm glad 'Shirt' is finally approaching decent numbers on radio considering how slow a build it's been.

I might be being a complete idiot, but I'm getting a file does not exist error when I try to access this!

Top 10 in 11 countries in its first week! Insane success. Streams are very stable as well.

Spain were 3rd on the jury and on the televote, and notably behind Ukraine on the televote but not the jury. It's worth noting that Ukraine's enormous haul on the televote will have suppressed every one else's figures. With a less extreme result for the televote winner, I'm confident that Spain would have gained more points from the televote than from the jury.

I'm wondering if Greece didn't have a fantastic semi result based on that. So happy Spain and Serbia got great slots though!

Embarrassing.

It feels increasingly likely that we'll reach the peak of this situation very soon. I was up until 5:30 watching the nuclear situation last night, and it feels hard to view it as anything other than a purposeful terror tactic for Europe.

I've been unable to stop thinking about this invasion since well before it actually came to pass, and naturally 95% of my thoughts have been about the suffering of Ukraine, but I'm despairing for Russia tonight. I would love for the Russian posters on here to correct me, but it feels like the country is rushing past the point of no return right now. I just can't help but find it chilling that despite such a serious deterioration in Russia's position and its domestic quality of life, there is still no wind of change. This is absolutely not a critique of the Russian people, but it worries me that the country is mid-transformation into a much larger North Korea (not just in terms of the economic and cultural isolation, but also the last gasps of independent media and curtailed freedom of movement for Russians), with the added bonus of inflicting its regime on neighbouring countries and threatening nuclear war (and therefore the destruction of the Russian people), and ... the response is extremely passive. I just can't fathom a situation in which a formidable domestic response to the Russian government can ever again be mustered up if this situation prompts only some small scale demonstrations. Again, I want to stress that this is not a "jeez, why aren't you guys rebelling?" post. My full sympathy is with the Russian people and I am extremely privileged to be able to comment on this from afar. It's just one of the most hopeless situations I've ever seen, to see a regime do this much harm to its people and have those people be just this helpless in the face of it. If Ukraine ever gets out of this war, they have a path (if vague and difficult) towards a stable democracy and a brighter future. Russia feels like it's going quietly into the night and I don't want this international pariah imprisoning its citizens to be the status quo for the coming decades. I don't know. If the above is totally ignorant and/or offensive, please do correct me. I'm just unable to comprehend the damage that one man is doing to so many nations at the moment. My thoughts are with all Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian posters. I'm proud of the international response to this, but I wish we could do so much more.

So relieved. Thank you to the broadcasters who forced them into this position.

Shameful decision. I hope the other participants boycott over this. Letting Russia compete this year is a political stance just as much as kicking them out would be. You can't just pretend that politics doesn't exist, and allowing a country invading another European country in a contest about bringing Europe together is extraordinarily political.

This is fabulous and I'm very happy that we're going to see this kind of representation at Eurovision. I just hope Israel manage to find a way to get this to the final.

"You're what Adele should sound like" was absolutely iconic.

The way the Irish jury tried to tank her and then had to congratulate her on her winning *.*

I think Spain have made the right decision tonight. I loved Rigoberta too, but I was not confident in it translating in Turin, and I just don't think 'Terra' was going to have any appeal outside of Spain at all. Chanel winning despite being third on the televote is definitely an eyebrow-raiser, but I don't think 'Terra' would have topped the televote without the politics that surrounds it either, so...

This post is extremely callous and you would do well to be less proud of your total ignorance of a situation that causes hurt to so many. Here is an article explaining what blackfishing is. You can watch Jesy's music video on YouTube and draw your own conclusions as to whether or not she's guilty of it, and whether or not you think that blackfishing is actually problematic. What you cannot do, though, is dismiss the concerns of a marginalised group by pretending that they are absurd and laughable. It is really an extremely ugly thing to do. I am disappointed in general that this issue is even controversial on here because it's not been my experience elsewhere. I appreciate that a lot of you have affection for Jesy but there are people in here who are more angry at black people for being offended than they are at a white woman for having done something offensive. I absolutely sympathise with those who can condemn Jesy's actions while also worrying for the consequences of this on her mental health, but this woman literally went on an Instagram live with Nicki Minaj to incite a black aggressor vs innocent white victim narrative. It is indefensible.

I keep trying to write a lengthy post on this and I just can't get it right so I'm just going to boil my opinion down to a couple of bulletpoints. While there are issues with Labour leadership and situational issues that can be brought up as relevant, I believe that the issues the Labour party faces are structural to the left, and therefore the Labour party is simply playing a game that is rigged against them at this point. The left globally has gone through a schism, so you have (super-simplified) a side of the political spectrum populated with social progressives whose #1 priority is climate change, but also social conservatives who are still just pissed off that their coal mine was closed. To expect those to share a party is ludicrous, and that's fine in most places, but not a first past the post country. Labour is asking groups of voters who are fundamentally opposed to each other to share a party, while a healthier system would simply see the progressives vote for Greens/Lib Dems and then enter into a coalition with the more conservative Labour party.The easiest way to unify left-wing voters is "more money for the poor, less for the rich", but the left has no credibility on this subject in a post there-is-no-alternative world. Leftist politicians in the late 20th and early 21st century roundly failed to argue against the idea that an increasingly impotent state in the face of globalisation is inevitable and even desirable, and so they have ceded the definition of credible economic policy to the right. Corbyn is decried as a socialist for ideas that were mainstream right into the late 20th century, while Hollande cannot even get his ideas to pass after election. As such, you can't energise voters to vote for traditional leftist parties based on financial concerns, because there is no reason to believe that they will be better off under the left than under the right. This is particularly acute in the UK, where the most recent Labour prime minister is infamous for being "Tory-lite".Lots of relevant stuff has been brought up in this thread and in particular it's essential to note that the UK's press is stunningly biased politically to the point of being a huge elephant in the room when it comes to the health of British democracy. For me though, the core issue is that the Labour party is going through the same malaise that socdem parties are globally but without the release valve of smaller and more diverse leftist parties being able to pick up the votes that Labour drops. First past the post destroys everything but the most unified political fronts and it takes a Trumpian figure to unite the left in 2021. Labour had a number of years to reform the electoral process to avoid this and they did not do it, and they had years to establish themselves as a credible party of the poor and similarly failed to do that. The British left are just now paying for the mistakes of the past. My personal preference for the future of the party would be for them to establish a firm and consistent identity of basically being less vicious Conservatives, and leave the progressive agenda to the more natural fits in the British political system. It would guarantee Conservative government in perpetuity, but if every major leftist party argued passionately for vote reform in the face of that there may eventually be some meaningful change. Alternatively, if Labour can scam their way into government for a single mandate and reform the electoral system while there, I'm fine with that if they can somehow make it work. Broadly though, I have very little hope for any FPTP democracy at this point in history. It astounds me that the Democrats in the US barely scraped over the line against a comically evil and incompetent Trump in 2020 and yet they see no urgency to change the system. I am very concerned to see where both the US and the UK go in the future. On a lighter note, I learned recently that Ireland's electoral system was designed by the British to give fair representation simply to prevent the protestant minority from being totally disenfranchised politically. It is a fun quirk of history that the UK could give a colony a politically healthy system while locking itself into a system that would eventually lead to the corrosion of its democracy.

Is radio actually giving up on 'You Right' in favour of 'Kiss Me More' already or is this a random blip?

Are they getting any airplay or playlist support or is this all totally organic in the UK? I'm curious if there's anything to indicate career longevity in the UK or if they'll burn out as soon as the current hype fizzles.

Speaking of Malta (from a bit earlier in the thread), we've got a scandal emerging around the broadcaster paying foreign people to place bets on Malta to win to inflate Destiny's odds and therefore hype: https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/je-m...rovision.874813 This isn't personally too shocking for me, as it reminds me of Ryan mentioning a couple of years back that the Maltese delegation was famed among the juries for being the nicest, and for bringing gifts to the juries. I often wondered if Malta's "underperformance on the televote" was actually a persistant and dodgy overperformance on the jury, and seeing blatant corruption like this brings me closer to the second hypothesis. Any thoughts?