Greece’s Eurovision Entry

http://www.eurovision.tv/page/history/year/participant-profile/?song=31513

If, like me, you find nothing more profoundly depressing than a motivational poster, then this repetitive instruction to “Rise Up” will pretty much nail you to the floor.

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve a shrewd suspicion that last year Greece offered something like a Brechtian cabaret on the tragic-comedy of austerity as its Eurovision entry.  The 2013 performance had a defiant bad-taste Dario Fo quality to it.  Those guys really didn’t care whether they won or lost (and they lost big time), they just had a bleat of defiance they were anxious to emit in the three minutes they’d been allocated.  They weren’t trying to get the rest of Europe to love them.  They just wanted Angela Merkel to sleep slightly less soundly that night. I wanted them to win.

This year we have a boy band doing a boy band thing.  The bitterness and the rage have been bled out.  This feels less like a happy ending than the lobotomizing conclusion to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  I can’t look at these boys without wondering what happened to last year’s contestants.

Last year, Greece offered despair and it felt like hope.  This year they seem more hopeful and this makes me want to despair.  A conventional looking boy band  that cannot help but affirm some essential normality does not convince me that all is normal in Greece but rather that tyrannical austerity has been normalised.  They’ve moved from rage to resignation it seems and if they win with this, then they will have lost.