One of the greatest aspects of democracy is that everybody gets the opportunity to have their say, and therein lies its biggest downfall. You can’t really trust the general public with anything that involves expressing an opinion. It’s why television programmes centred on telephone-based voting are usually so terrible; there’s nothing particularly wrong with content of the programmes, just the overall outcome.
Some years ago, I gave up on watching the likes of Big Brother and The X Factor. That’s not because I suddenly realised the vapid nature of watching ordinary people arguing over what to have for dinner or watching karaoke singers believing their only way into the music industry is by getting four “yeses”. In hindsight, I suppose those were factors, even if I mightn’t have realised them then. My disillusionment with the inaccurately titled genre of “reality TV” really came down to how the shows panned out, thanks to the ever-knowledgable viewing public and their relentlessly ridiculous voting techniques.
Let’s invent an example, shall we? Let’s have the final of a singing competition contested between a somewhat disfigured woman with an excellent singing voice (let’s call her Barbara) and a young boy with a hairstyle with an average vocal somewhere in the throes of adolescence (we’ll dub him Jayke, like Jake, but with an unnecessary Y in there because people eat that shit up, obviously). Let’s also say the sometimes squeaky-voiced Jayke opts to show off his ability to make sounds by way of an Ed Sheeran slowie, whilst Barbara tackles an Annie Lennox B-side entirely in German. Can you see where I’m going with this?
Ultimately, the popular boy wins because of how popular he is and the talented lady becomes a statistic in the programme’s history. Soon after, so does he, you know, once his voice has cracked, his face has turned to grease and his rushed Mother’s Day album reaches the 10p bins in Asda. In fact the only act that could possibly beat him would a seven-inch high dog (called Sox or something), despite the fact that Sox doesn’t sing. Sox jumps through a hoop when his owner (I want to say Rosemary) holds a biscuit for him on the other side of it. This nation of dog lovers would be all over that. Except for maybe, you know, the cat lovers.
Last week’s this year’s Eurovision Song Contest saw, for the first time, a significant contrast in what people should choose and what they actually choose. From what I understand, groups of “music professionals” (in other words, Jayke, his coach from the show Melanina [Ultimate Best Female Newcomer at last year’s NACATROAWAAITBARCMs] and the writer of last summer’s hit dance track “Whoop Trumpet Rave Thang, Yeah?”) scored the competitors first, leaving the public say until last.
Through this method, we could see that a dreary ballad by a Captain Jack Sparrow/circus ringmaster hybrid from Poland fell to the bottom of one vote (the idiot professionals) and towards the top of another (the professional idiots). On top of this, it turns out that the public in Britain alone voted in immense support of the Polish representative, alongside those of Lithuania and Bulgaria. Now I’m not one to whine about foreign nationals – in fact I’d rather be caught dead of asphyxiation with the battery end of an electric toothbrush shoved up my arse than advocate a vote for UKIP – but it’s only natural to point out that having a significant proportion of a diaspora population, they’re going to favour their homeland. Here we see less of a public vote for “I like that song” and more of a popular vote for “I like that country”.
The great and wise public from across the continent (and Australia, because reasons) ultimately placed the Russian act as their highest preference. For the uninitiated, this was a somewhat bland pop song about a man trying to find a woman or stalk a woman or something a woman, which invariably sounded like intense background music from the 90s TV gameshow Gladiators. That wasn’t the key part. The main point of attraction came from the singer climbing a pseudo-3D projection screen wall as if he was a contestant on the 90s TV gameshow Gladiators. It’d be difficult to justify how a mediocre piece of music could’ve been favoured so highly if it hadn’t have had the stage production behind it. Hell, you’d probably see that same stage performance doing just as well as if it’d been accompanied by Barbara (you know, from before) belching the alphabet (backwards [in German]).
It’s a worrying state of affairs when the general public consensus is so far removed from the actual intention of the goal we’re trying to achieve in the first place. This comes a little over a month before British citizens have to make potentially one of the biggest political decisions we’ll have to make, potentially having seismic effects on our own economic stability and cultural standing, as well as potential knock-on effects of those throughout the rest of the world. I’d like to be optimistic about people making a sound choice as to whether the UK parts ways with the EU or sticks with it for longer. But knowing this lot, we’ll probably end up voting for Sox.
Let’s stick with the European theme, eh? Here’s a nice bit of dancey electronic instrumental, brought to us by Norwegian producer Lindstrøm. I haven’t just chosen this because I’m a sucker for accented variations of vowels, although the O with a line through it has always intrigued me. I mean, I understand adding dots or dashes above or below letters, but through them? What does this mean? Is the O crossed out? Do we not pronounce the O? I digress.
I’m not one for banging rave tunes, but quiet and moderate ravey head nodding is perfectly acceptable. As we approach the summer months (only, you know, without the necessary weather) I can see this becoming a regular staple of my own laid back listening habits, whilst others take any hint of warm weather as an opportunity to blast out “Damn, Sexy Trumpet Rave, Yo”, the much anticipated follow-up to last year’s “Whoop Trumpet Rave Thang, Yeah?”
Lindstrøm – Closing Shot
Jamie Walsh 
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