2015 Eurovision Song Contest

[Chilton]

Forget Kanye, Sufjan and Kendrick. Today was the day we celebrated real music ( ) and I'm shocked nobody here has already mentioned it: the 60th Eurovision Song Contest!
As campy and trashy as it may be, it's still incredibly fun and I'm under the impression the quality of the songs is improving every year (but they're not quite there yet )

Sweden won it for the sixth time (and with this song). I didn't like it very much, still I ranked it 11th.

This was my personal top 3:
1. Latvia
2. Belgium (but maybe I'm biased)
3. Estonia

Does anyone else have a favorite from the contest? Has anyone here überhaupt seen it?


Edit: I just want to mention that none of these will probably make my EOY-list. I'm not a complete lost cause

[Otisredding]

Eurovision is a rare thing.

It is a show of the highest quality, where the worst thing is the music and the voting system (there are a large part of the vote that is repeated year after year: the proximity of countries - Russia area, the Balkan area, Scandinavia , etc, etc and the location of emigrants decides a large part of the vote). But there are always 5 or 6 nice songs.

I've only heard the song once.

According to this first impression, this is my choice:

1. Belgium
2. Latvia
3. Australia

[bonnielaurel]

I always watch the summary at the end, when they show ten seconds of every song. If there's something I want to see I watch it afterwards on the Internet. Latvia, Germany and Russia seemed reasonably good; Sweden was awful.

The best winners of the past fifteen years were Emmelie de Forest (Denmark) and Ruslana (Ukrain). Noa also participated once with Mira Awad. They finished fifteenth. Pearls before swine.

[Maschine_Man]

Go Australia! The song wasn't as bad as me and my friends expected. This was the first time I have ever watched it, and I think I picked a good year - everyone I watched with said the quality was higher than usual.

Belgium was probably my favorite of the night and I also liked Serbia.

Slovenia were just awful... I take that back, England was the definition of awful.

[DaveC]

I watched it by accident when I found it was on while I was eating my breakfast (I guess because Australia were involved). I missed the first 5 songs. I hadn't heard any of the songs before. This is the first time I've seen it for a very long time - that might have been when Abba won.

For me Sweden, Latvia, and Belgium seemed like frontrunners due to their more contemporary sound, although Sweden's vomit-inducing self-empowerment lyrics would have worked much better for me if they had been rendered in Swedish. Latvia could have tried harder to hide their FKA Twiggs influence. Belgium did try harder by replacing Lorde with a man, but then threw away their advantage by dressing him the same way.

Lots of the other songs/performances seemed to have been created by committee with many voices chipping in about what voters may want to hear/see. Never-the-less, I liked Russia and Spain, but I thought they had no chance due to their adherence to the consensus formula.

Guy Sebastian is a good singer and performer and gets plenty of exposure here (in New Zealand), but by the time they got to voting I couldn't remember his song at all.

Most likely, if I heard all the songs a couple more times my feelings would change completely, but I am not motivated to do that.