Song Contest Research Articles

Starting young: Multimodal gender presentation in children’s pop music

A recent quantitative study (Smith, Choueiti, and Pieper 2018) demonstrates the hegemonic discrimination in today’s popular music scene, particularly but not exclusively in gender and race. This paper builds on that study, taking it not only into a multimodal dimension (where musical and visual performances are taken into account), but also extending it to children’s popular music, here defined as popular music performed by children for an audience and market primarily made up of children and their guardians. 
 The annual Norwegian popular music competition for children aged 8-15 Melodi Grand Prix Junior (MGP Jr) is the children’s equivalent of the adult competition to be Norway’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). It has been running since 2004, with 10 entries in each final, and those from 2007 onwards are available for public viewing on the national television channel’s website (tv.NRK.no). The resulting 130 songs thus provide a meaningful corpus from which to study current and recent multimodal gendered presentations of child performers. 
 Preliminary multimodal gender analyses (cf Maxwell and Mittner 2018) show that the performances are based around traditional gender binaries (i.e. boys and girls). While both presented genders sing, except for rare exceptions it is only boys who play instruments. This both complements and contrasts the study of the ESC (Isaksen forthcoming) which also shows a clear dominance of singing, particularly among female and female-presenting artists (including drag queens). 
 When these results from children’s pop music and from the ESC are set in relation to Smith, Choueiti, and Peiper 2018 in an interdisciplinary mixed methods approach, it is clear to see that the discrimination in the industry not only begins at a young age, it is also presented as normal, indeed attractive, to child viewers. This is borne out by the decreasing uptake of music tuition at Norwegian kulturskoler (the provider of state-sponsored lessons in the arts), particularly among school-age girls (Utdanningsdirektøret 2017). 
 In this paper I will present multimodal analyses of a selection of songs from MGP Jr in order to provide both examples of and exceptions to the norms shown by the statistics. In addition, an analysis of the (gendered) presentations of standard Norwegian instrument textbooks (cf Blix 2018) provides background context, with an emphasis on the gendered meanings that surround children in their everyday musical lives. 
 With thanks to Matilda Maxwell (age 11), aspiring instrumentalist, fan of MGP Jr, and research assistant.

Palestine Unbound

Published each issue, this section strives to capture the tenor and content of popular conversations related to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict, which are held on dynamic platforms unbound by traditional media. Therefore, items presented in this section are from a variety of sources and have been selected because they either have gone viral or represent a significant cultural moment or trend. A version of Palestine Unbound is also published on Palestine Square (http://palestinesquare.com), a blog of the Institute for Palestine Studies. Stories from this quarter (16 May–15 August 2019) include the international boycott of the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest, held this year in Tel Aviv; the viral reaction to Palestinian American model Anwar Hadid's first music video, which was filmed in the occupied West Bank, and Palestinian's chagrin at the Israeli-sponsored visit Saudi influencer and Zionist activist Mohammed Saud. Trending hashtags this quarter are #DareToDreamTogether and #Motabi‘_saudi_fi_Filistin.

Capturing the role of societal affinity in cross-border mergers with the Eurovision Song Contest

This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of voting bias in the Eurovision Song Contest as a means of capturing societal affinity. More than 180 million viewers from more than 40 countries watch the Eurovision Song Contest every year and vote for their favorite songs. Societal affinity between participating countries leads to systematic bias in voting patterns as each song represents a country. Using cross-border mergers as a proxy for international business exchanges, we demonstrate how voting bias provides a simple, freely available, and dynamic means of capturing societal affinity between countries that complements other metrics of affinity and distance.

THE PROFILING OF CONCEPTS OF PROPER NAMES AS STUDY OF PSEUDONYMS OF UKRAINIAN PARTICIPANTS OF “EUROVISION”

This article focuses upon studying of the proper names in terms of cognitive linguistics, which is comparatively recent science and is at the sight of many linguists nowadays. The key concept of cognitive linguistics considered to be the phenomenon of conceptualization. There exist many concepts intertwined with each other in our brain, forming branched structures connected associatively or in content. Information in the brain is stored in the form of characters, symbols, associations, schemas-images: we remember the subject or phenomenon, as well as the emotions, feelings and caused impressions. According to above mentioned to define a complex concept, which refers to concentrating the interweaving of verbal and non-verbal information in our memory, linguists introduced the term “concept” in the scientific usage. In this article we aim to consider the possibility of conceptualization process based on an example of individuals’ personal names. The pseudonyms of the Ukrainian participants in the Eurovision Song Contest served as the material for the analysis. It is dealt with conceptualization of pseudonyms, investigated the ways to create mentioned names, revealed their connotative profiles. The following conclusions are drawn: own names as well as generic names can become concepts; the congestion of the concept with connotative profiles depends on the degree of “information”, the popularity of the carrier name; connotative profiles characterize the singer from different sides, expressing the features of their creativity. In the context of cognitive onomastics, further studies of the process of conceptualizing of proper names in the media are promising (for instance, pseudonyms of athletes or politician) and issues of the elaboration of the typology of anthroponymic concepts are relevant. The article is of interest to philologists, who explore cognitive linguistics or onomastics, sociologists, psychologist.

Volunteering as Media Work: The Case of the Eurovision Song Contest

This article explores volunteering in relation to the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), which took place in Stockholm in 2016 and in Kyiv in 2017, with the aim of shedding light on volunteering as a form of “media work”. Following from this, the article aims to problematize the theoretical concept of free labour and analyse the symbolic exchanges and currencies involved in employing a “free” labour force. Through interviews with volunteers, this article explores what volunteers at huge media events do, how their work is organized, and what motivates them. The empirical basis for this article is an interview study with volunteers and volunteer organizers of the ESC in Stockholm (May 2016) and in Kyiv (May 2017), complemented with a document analysis of volunteer guidebooks and organizational reports. The article shows that eventfulness is an essential part of what volunteer labour brings to an event such as the ESC. It is also a key element in the production of economic value: eventfulness is a currency that expresses the value of the event itself and is a key feature of place branding. Furthermore, eventfulness – along with the feeling of being a part of an event, of something bigger, as it unfolds in time – is a key feature of the motivation for the volunteers who contribute with unpaid labour. As such, eventfulness can also be understood as a form of currency or symbolic capital that forms the main remuneration or “wage” earned by volunteers at an event such as the ESC.

Creating Europe through culture? The impact of the European Song Contest on European identity

The UK’s Brexit vote marked a major institutional crisis for the EU and re-opened both the scholarly and the popular debate about the importance and drivers of a “European identity”. We use quasi-experimental data to estimate the immediate impact of the biggest pan-European cultural event, the Eurovision Song Contest, on whether people in Europe consider themselves to be Europeans. Using data from several Eurobarometer surveys with tens of thousands of observations, we find little evidence that the contest at current provides a sizeable immediate boost to the share of Europeans who feel European, feel EU citizens, or have a positive image of the EU.

The power of violins and rose petals: The Eurovision Song Contest as an arena of European crisis

This paper explores the interconnection between European crises and the Eurovision Song Contest, the largest non-sports-related TV show on earth, which has run as an annual music competition of European countries since 1956. The paper explores the development of the actual show, based on existing audio and video recordings, as well as selected aspects of the respective media coverage. Special focus is paid to the creation of the contest in a post-catastrophic Europe, specifically the first show in Lugano in 1956; the apparent decline of the show’s appeal in Western Europe in the 1980s and 1990s; and finally the contest held in Moscow in 2009, when the global financial crisis had just reached Europe. This research shows that ‘crisis’ is less an objective state, but rather a rhetorical strategy to communicate one’s perceptions of the time, illuminating the significance of the Eurovision Song Contest as an arena for European affairs.

Latent space modelling of multidimensional networks with application to the exchange of votes in Eurovision song contest

The Eurovision Song Contest is a popular TV singing competition held annually among country members of the European Broadcasting Union. In this competition, each member can be both contestant and jury, as it can participate with a song and/or vote for other countries' tunes. Throughout the years, the voting system has repeatedly been accused of being biased by the presence of tactical voting, according to which votes would represent strategic interests rather than actual musical preferences of the voting countries. In this work, we develop a latent space model to investigate the presence of a latent structure underlying the exchange of votes. Focusing on the period from 1998 to 2015, we represent the vote exchange as a multivariate network: each edition is a network, where countries are the nodes and two countries are linked by an edge if one voted for the other. The different networks are taken to be independent replicates of a common latent space capturing the overall relationships among the countries. Proximity denotes similarity, and countries close in the latent space are assumed to be more likely to exchange votes. Therefore, if the exchange of votes depends on the similarity between countries, the quality of the competing songs might not be a relevant factor in the determination of the voting preferences, and this would suggest the presence of bias. A Bayesian hierarchical modelling approach is employed to model the probability of a connection between any two countries as a function of their distance in the latent space, and of network-specific parameters and edge-specific covariates. The inferred latent space is found to be relevant in the determination of edge probabilities, however, the positions of the countries in such space only partially correspond to their actual geographical positions.

Multilingualism, collaboration and experiential learning with multiple modalities: the case of Mondovision

ABSTRACT The paper documents the final project in an undergraduate seminar on multilingualism at the University of Toronto from a pedagogical perspective. The multimodal and multimedia project – centered on the idea of a fictitious festival of popular music, the Mondovision Song Contest – uses the genre of pseudo-documentary as a channel for collaborative and experiential learning. The students get engaged in multiple roles: script writer, graphic designer, film editor, actor/actress, and dancer, to mention a few. The Mondovision project serves as a medium to not only master subject matter content that focuses on multilingualism across continents, but also gives the students an opportunity to develop interpersonal and collaboration skills and to acquire multimedia and multimodal literacies. The paper provides both student and instructor perspectives on the experience, focusing on their respective roles and exemplifying what is here referred to as affirmative pedagogy of multilingualism.

Naród, gender, popkultura. Nacjonalistyczne konstrukcje płci i seksualności w popkulturowej odsłonie

The paper is a short theoretical summary of relationships between the notions of nation, gender and sexuality in a nationalistic discourse. It is also an attempt at applying this knowledge for analyzing selected artifacts of pop culture. In the first part of the paper, theoretical and research findings on the constructs of gender and sexuality in a nationalistic discourse are presented. In the second part these findings are used for a discursive analysis of gender and sexuality constructs in selected songs / stage acts presented at the Eurovision Song Contest 2014 and a pastiche cover version of one of them.

Crime and Punishment in the Cape Breton Songs Contest

Dishpan Parade, a morning women’s entertainment program, was a production of Sydney, Nova Scotia’s CJCB Radio from 1948 to 1952. Early in its run the hosts created a local song contest, rewarding lyrics on a Cape Breton theme set to known melodies. Many entrants took the opportunity to satirize current events, protected by the implied triviality of light verse. This article places two such songs—“Bootleg Coal,” set to “The Blue-Tail Fly,” and “Go Away (The County Jail)” to “Polly Waddle Doodle” — within the specific history that occasioned them and suggests the expressive and subtle subversiveness of mid-century Cape Breton women.

Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest by Dean Vuletic

Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest by Dean Vuletic

Dean Vuletic, Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest et Karen Fricker, Milija Gluhovic (eds.), Performing the « New » Europe. Identities, Feelings and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest

Dean Vuletic, Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest et Karen Fricker, Milija Gluhovic (eds.), Performing the « New » Europe. Identities, Feelings and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest

Turkishness on the stage: Affective nationalism in the Eurovision Song Contest

This study examines the Eurovision stage as a cultural space that cultivated an affective-discursive terrain forging Turkish national identity. It draws upon the media texts as a heuristic to examine how an image of ‘Turkishness’ was created and negotiated. Focusing in particular on four specific cases (Semiha Yankı in 1975, Çetin Alp in 1983, Şebnem Paker in 1997 and Sertab Erener in 2003), this study suggests that the Eurovision stage was a space where ‘Turkishness’ encountered an imagined ‘Europeanness’. In these cases, affective discourses gave meanings of national allegories of ‘Turkishness’ to performing bodies on the Eurovision stage. The affective registers generated a discursive formation shaping the contours of ‘Turkishness’ in relation to Europe. Yet these discourses did not generate fixed and stable meanings. In particular, the construction of national success was negotiated and contested in terms of the appropriateness of the national embodiment.

"I Hid Not My Face" : An Essay on Women, Their Beards, and the Promise of Isaiah 50:6

In this paper I explore the theological potential of the trans*formation of the body in popular culture, more specifically, in the performance of drag artist Conchita Wurst (Tom Neuwirth) at the Eurovision Song Contest finale of 2014. Contrary to Dana International, the first (known) trans*woman to win Eurovision for Israel in 1998, Conchita did not 'pass' as either male or female. As a 'bearded lady', she operates on the borderline of the masculine and the feminine, combining the aesthetics of both as she performed the winning song Rise Like A Phoenix. In various media, Conchita was read as a contemporary Christ figure. With her parted long hair, kind eyes, dress and beard she does indeed resemble those representations of Jesus Christ that have become dominant in the 'religious imagery of visual piety' of Western popular culture. Both the performance of the song and Conchita as a stage character play with themes of misrecognition, suffering and resurrection. Read as a 'Christ-like figure' by Eastern Orthodox church leaders, moreover, Conchita was accused of blasphemy. I argue that if we take Conchita seriously as a contemporary Christ figure, she enables us to construct a liberationist theology of uncertainty, in particular the enduring uncertainty of gender-bending. To do so, I will attempt to understand current cross-dressing performances such as Conchita’s from a genealogy of the beard, focusing on the meaning of the beard in biblical times as well as the history of women with facial hair: the archive of the bearded lady. In the Old Testament and in Christian tradition, beards have often been simultaneously one of the most important markers of hegemonic masculinity as well as the site where this masculinity might be jeopardised. In the archive of the bearded lady we find women on the margins of society (funfair 'freaks', witches, old ladies from the countryside) as well as confident queer activists who publicly claim the beard, showing how it fails as the ultimate marker of masculinity.

Zimna wojna w popkulturze. Czołówki festiwali piosenki Interwizji i propaganda sukcesu.

The aim of the article is to point out that popular culture, in the framework of which popular song contests function, although associated with the practices, needs, experiences and traditions of ordinary people, is a form of the game of power and that the shape and the character of the Intervision Song Contest were influenced by the Polish United Workers' Party. The course of the Cold War was also meaningful for its organization. The analysis of two opening credits of the Intervision Song Contests of 1977 and 1979, partially animated, allows to show that the festival was planned thoroughly and was assessed by the party which used it for the propaganda. The post-colonial perspective appears to be proper for the analyses, although the term is ambiguous and explained by numerous opinions which exclude each other. However, it enables to deconstruct and expose the models of colonial thinking and acting, demonstrating that, despite the organizers’ declarations of political neutrality, the festival was both an artistic and political initiative.

‘All Kinds of Everything’? Queer Visibility in Online and Offline Eurovision Fandom

The annual televisual spectacle, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is an international media event that is a nexus around which questions surrounding identity surface. This paper focuses specifically on the contest’s active promotion of queer visibility, that intersects through national stage performances and its international fan base. It untangles the relationship between the contest and its problematic construction as a ‘gay event’ and how fans are increasingly using social media platforms to legitimise their fan and queer identities. Mainstream social media platforms, such as Twitter are an important site where issues surrounding queer visibility may be expressed and constructed. These ESC fan practices are contextualised in relation to literature surrounding male same-sex hook-up apps which can inform our ideas surrounding queer code/space. It also suggests that fans self-regulate who or how they ‘come out’ as ESC fans which establishes an ESC closet because the ESC is prone to stigmatisation in some national contexts.

Sound recording in pop art: differencing the «remake» and «remix» musical versions

Sound recording in pop art: differencing the «remake» and «remix» musical versions

The Importance of "Buy-In" to the Culture of Safety and Injury Management: Lessons From the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest.

The Importance of "Buy-In" to the Culture of Safety and Injury Management: Lessons From the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest.

Wir sind Conchita, nicht Russland, oder: Homonationalismus auf gut Österreichisch

Abstract: This paper analyses the discursive intersection of homosexuality, Russia and Austria’s commitment to European values in the contemporary Austrian media. It focuses on discourses about the so-called “anti-homosexual propaganda law” and homophobic violence in Russia in online and print media (Kurier, Kronen Zeitung, Die Presse, Der Standard, etc.). Moreover, it analyzes reports in LGBT media (Pride, Lambda Nachrichten, XTRA) and the solidarity campaign To Russia with Love Austria. The article focuses on media publications between the introduction of the “anti-homosexual propaganda law” in June 2013 and the victory of Conchita Wurst at the Eurovision Song Contest in May 2014, since this was the period where most news examples were published on the matter. It discusses how Russian homophobic violence and the victims of such violence are discursively produced in the Austrian media as being in opposition to Austria, which in turn, apears as a progressive, homo-tolerant nation and as a genuine part of the European value system.