Too much unsmudged love… FYR Macedonia’s 2018 Eurovision Entry.

April 13, 2018

Eye Cue

Whenever I hear the official nomenclature of “FYR Macedonia” announced, I keep wanting to mishear it and then misquote it as “FYI Macedonia”. “For Your Information Macedonia” sounds more redolent of this country’s definitional squabble with Greece than “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”.

Eye Cue are successful enough in Macedonia I hear, and this competition will help shift quite a few records for them. The band consists of Bojan Trajkovski on lead guitar and Marija Ivanovska on vocals and whoever they can scrape together on an ad hoc basis. Good for them. I wish them every long term success. What they won’t actually do is win – or even threaten to win – Eurovision 2018.

It’s not quite or exactly that this song is too raunchy – it’s that it’s too individuated. She’s not singing to the world – she’s singing to someone very specific – and that very specific very sexy someone is most definitely not you or I. This is a “get a room” ballad. Except that they already have a room, and you and I feel a bit awkward about being in it with them.

The song itself is actually quite interesting and repays repeated hearings. There are reggae verses and techno-blast choruses and soft and isolated vocal passages as well. It manages to do rather a lot in three minutes. There’s an admirable formal eclecticism at work which may result in appreciative nods from jury voters.

Here’s the video…

The Eurovision problem with this song is that its raunchiness is too exclusionary. When Bulgaria sings about “Bones” they seem to be trying to reach some universal truth about personal intimacy. When Marija Ivanovska sings “come and take me…” it’s more like we’re overhearing something we perhaps shouldn’t. She leans against a bed and closes her eyes (whose lids are darker than anything Dusty Springfield dared attempt) in a telling millisecond of orgasmic abandonment. And when she talks repeatedly of the “deeper, deeper, deeper love” that she wants then any adult (or adolescent) viewer of this video will infer something other than metaphysical profundity.

So the problem with this song, from any sort of competitive point of view – is not that it’s sexy – the problem is that it’s not Eurovision sexy. When singing of love at Eurovision, it’s important for “eros” to occasionally smudge into “agape” – for binary intimacies to somehow hint at something a bit more collective.

Otherwise we can’t really feel we can join in the chorus.

I’ve some thoughts about some other 2018 Eurovision entries.

Estonia: