I don’t think I’ve made this clear before, but I’m the kind of Eurovision watcher who doesn’t like to see or hear any of the songs before the actual contest happens. In fact, there were many years when I didn’t even watch the semi-finals, because I wanted to get the first impact of all the songs at the contest itself. I’ve long since changed my mind on the semis, because I did at some point realise that by not watching those I was missing out on nearly a third of all the songs, but I still stick to my guns otherwise. I’ll follow all the hype, and I will always be really looking forward to seeing some of the hyped up songs to see if I like them as much as other people do, but I will resist the temptation to watch or listen to them.
Well, I usually do, that is. The only previous time I broke this rule was when I heard that Jedward were going to represent Ireland, so I wanted to hear what kind of crap they’d come up with. (Instead I discovered an insanely catchy song, but we’ll save that story for when I get to that year.) And then the hype started building about the Netherlands’ entry for this year…
Let me start by saying I was pretty excited when I heard that Joost Klein had been selected to represent my country. I’d never heard of the guy before, but I looked up a couple of his songs and read some background, and I took away three main things: 1) whatever he was going to bring would be completely different from the Dutch entries of the past few years, which were all sad boi/sad girl/sad duo ballads. 2) He’s an experienced performer and knows how to work a crowd and 3) he is absolutely stoked to be going to Eurovision, because it’s something he’s wanted to do since he was a kid. All of these are really good things.
Let me continue by saying that I wasn’t really expecting to actually like his song. From my research I gathered that he’s very nineties and into gabber, and neither of those are up my street. I’m an eighties girl, and I’ve never been into gabber at all. Still, whether I was going to like it or not, I knew it was going to be something different, and something pretty good.
So yes, the hype. I’m normally pretty good at resisting hype. Käärijä was a massive hype last year, and I managed not to listen to it until the semis (and was blown away, but again, that’s another story). But this is my country that’s being hyped. So two days ago I caved in and I watched the official video for Joost Klein’s Europapa on YouTube.
Oh. My. Fucking. God. This song is fucking awesome, and the more I listen to it, the more awesome it gets. Yes, it’s ridiculously nineties, and yes, it’s got some gabber in it, but it’s insanely catchy, and the lyrics are fucking genius. He doesn’t just effortlessly mix in several other languages, the lyrics flow amazingly well and have some genius rhymes in them, including a few internal rhymes. The video is bonkers and stuffed full of famous Dutch people, including S10 from two years ago, and it’s just impossible to not sit there and bounce along to the beat. All the European references also make it an absolutely perfect song for Eurovision.
And then you hit the end and you get the lines about his dad, and the whole mood ends up unexpectedly melancholy, and it just adds a whole extra dimension to the song. Up until that point it was just a totally bonkers entry along the lines of Verka Serduchka or Little Big, but when you then look deeper into it you find that it’s stuffed full of references to his dad (Euro-papa, anyone?), down to the mention of Papaoutai by Stromae, and that it’s unexpectedly deep.
So yeah, I’m totally and completely over the moon about this entry. Is it going to win? I doubt it – it’ll score well with the televote, but there are several other countries that have quite a lot of hype around them (hello Croatia!). I’ll also have to see what he does live to see whether he might win over the juries. However, I will be incredibly surprised (and disappointed) if it doesn’t qualify, because this is without a doubt the most Eurovision entry I have ever seen, and I absolutely love the fuck out of it.
Go Joost! Dream big!
Theft and Sorcery 
When I review Eurovision 2024, can I copy-paste this blog post for Europapa? You’ve absolutely nailed why the song is so great. The ending is what really makes the song special. I can understand the ending lyrics well enough to get their meaning and it hits so different. (Note that I won’t review Eurovision 2024 until I’ve done all previous years, though I might make a short blog post about it after the contest. Or maybe even a video about my Eurovision trip.)
I’m so fucking jealous of the Netherlands this year. And more than that, I’m jealous of you for being so excited about your country’s entry. The Netherlands sent literally exactly the kind of song I wanted Germany to send! Native language song, hypes up the audience, and most crucially has a deeper meaning behind it. And it even has some lyrics in German!
The German national final this year was so shit. NDR picked the six most radio-friendly pop songs from the selection pool (all in English), as well as two mediocre German-language songs (a schlager and an electronic rap thing) to give the illusion of genre diversity. This means the national final consisted of three beige radio ballads that are all interchangeable, three beige radio pop songs that are just as interchangeable, and two native-language songs that obviously weren’t going to become the German entry. Oh, and one wildcard that’s another beige ballad. I’ll get to that later.
Now among the beige radio ballads, “all interchangeable” might be harsh. Because there was one ballad called “Oh Boy” that was somewhat more interesting than the rest. A small part of me thought it had the potential to reach the left side of the scoreboard, but at the same time I thought the same about Lord of the Lost. Then again, with the announcement that the Big Five and host are going to perform in the semifinals too (a long overdue change!), then maybe Oh Boy would have stood more of a chance. But it bears repeating that I thought the same about Lord of the Lost.
The one ballad that was more interesting than the rest? That didn’t win, of course. Why would it? The winner of the national final was the beigest, most cookie cutter radio pop song of all: Always on the Run. Maybe it’s a little less beige than Love on a Budget, what the fuck do I know. Now I know how you feel when trying to decide which ballads are blander than which. Anyway, when I first heard a snippet of “Always on the Run” it felt like I had already heard this song a hundred times before. I was totally baffled when it won both the jury and televote in the national final. I genuinely thought to myself, “were these people watching the same show I was?” as Terry Wogan would so often say.
I think that next year, Germany should take notes from the Netherlands and internally select a quality song in German. But I don’t think that’s gonna happen, because the televised national finals give NDR (or maybe ARD as a whole? I don’t know) some extra free money. Proof of this lies in the side series to the national final called Ich will zum ESC. I haven’t seen it but I know it featured eight or so people competing for a wildcard slot in the national final. The winner of that was a dull beige ballad, even duller and balladier than anything else. It got minimum points from every single country’s jury and was second last in the televote.
NDR (or ARD maybe) could have used the money and time spent on “Ich will zum ESC” to create a grandiose, multi-episode national final where a bunch of promising songs and artists are whittled down till they arrive at a winner. In 2010, Germany selected their song in a multi-episode series of exactly this type, and they WON THE EUROVISION SONG CONTEST! Our king Stefan Raab deserves thanks for this, and while he’s moved on from anything Eurovision related, there has to be another Stefan Raab out there with similar drive to select a good German entry.
Overall, it feels like Germany in Eurovision is a joke country. We participate solely to pay money for everyone else to send flashy, exciting, culture-showcasing, and utterly Eurovisiony songs (which 2024 is absolutely PACKED with), while we send forgettable beige radio pop in English. This year in particular has so many countries that I never expected to send a native language song! When we sent something different with Lord of the Lost (whose song I had high hopes for), bad luck struck us, so apparently radio pop is once again the answer now. Our broadcaster doesn’t give the slightest fuck about winning this thing or even scoring well. Other countries’ broadcasters are passionate about Eurovision, but NDR just views it as a chore to get out of the way each year. There’s been talk about NDR passing Eurovision to a different regional broadcaster, but I have absolutely no idea if any of them will do a better job.
I really hope that a few years from now, I can reread this comment and laugh about how pessimistic I was. Just like I can laugh at “Europe hates us” rants from British fans pre-2022.
I really feel for you with how crap Germany’s been doing, and let’s face it, the Netherlands were stuck in the same kind of rut until we sent Anouk – that seems to have been a turning point. I also really thought that Germany had reached that turning point when they sent Lord of the Lost last year, which is why it’s extra heartbreaking that they got nothing for it. They should not have ended where they did – they were way better than that (even if I didn’t like the song, but I’m just not into hard rock).
I can’t offer any words of comfort, other than that I also hope Germany will see the light at some point. I do love the fact that the Big 5 will be performing live in the semi-finals this year – that’s something that is long, long overdue and I’m really happy that they’ve finally decided to include them properly rather than just with a snippet and an interview. Let’s hope it will help them out a bit.
Also, feel free to copy when you get to 2024 – more than happy for that. I actually can’t quite believe myself how excited I am about my country’s entry this year!
I actually kind of hate that it was Anouk that broke the Netherlands’ NQ streak, when the Common Linnets’ song the next year was so much better in every way. “Calm After the Storm” is one of few Eurovision songs that makes me want to cry.
When reviewing 2009 and 2010, I’ve been writing my first impressions of each song (and second impressions, if they qualified to the final) in a notebook to save my future self some trouble. It’s annoying that I can’t do the same with the Big Five, aside from the first impressions that snippets give. I could of course look up the Big Five entries on YouTube, but that’d be clunky and annoying to do every time.
I won’t actually copy your review for 2024, but I will definitely link to it, since it’s valuable to know how exciting the song feels for a Dutch fan. And yes, I sometimes do plagiarize not just your Reddit reviews, but the reviews of your commenters (especially the British one with the untypable name). It especially helps when I have absolutely no idea what to say about a song. If I see someone else say something that makes me think “now that you say it, that is quite true”, then I’ll add that into my review.
Something else that I should probably have mentioned is that the Netherlands are currently doing things right with regards to Eurovision. They won with Duncan Laurence in 2019, sent a few similar songs after that which qualified but didn’t do great, and then after last year’s NQ they realised they needed to change their approach, and next thing you know there’s Joost. Germany really should take notes here! That said, they did try with LotL I suppose…
If Germany switches to internally selecting (which I think we should), we should use the Netherlands as a role model. But if we must keep doing national finals, maybe take an approach similar to Finland. The Finnish national finals in recent years have 8 or so different songs and each has a different personality to it. They have a generous amount of Finnish-language songs, and even the English-language songs have a Finnish feel to them.