Vote 4 ABBA!

By: July Hodara, Robert Picciano, Ray Kyooyung Ra, Tania Sarfraz

The Eurovision Song Contest presents an alternative model of the musical competition show, compared to, for example, American Idol. The differences are plenty, but both shows maintain the procedural notions of voting, participation, and trauma. Whereas American Idol’s trauma typically falls within the register of an individual’s broken American dream, Eurovision, through the foregrounding of a regional politics, associates its notions of trauma with larger geopolitical issues. 

The Eurovision’s complex voting system mirrors the region’s imagined unity versus the reality of the complexity of negotiating the meaning and empowerment of “Europeanness.” Eurovision foregrounds the regional identity of the European citizen. While maintaining the notion that voting is an essential component of the contest — perhaps in this way, instructing the individuals that they are responsible for upholding the European ideal, introducing the idea of “self-enterprise, self-reliance, and...group governance” — the politics behind the contest overwhelms individual contributions. 

As Ouellette and Hay note, “what counts and who counts for full membership and citizenship (active players in group governance) [is] a matter of knowing and mastering not only the techniques and "rules of the game" but also the hardware (the material technology) of citizenship?” (209). Thus, individual participation is tempered by an acknowledgement of the inherent ‘inequalities’ or imbalances of power baked into the contest’s structure. For instance, top contributors to the European Broadcasting Union are automatically entered into the Final. If reality TV performs the pedagogical function of tutoring citizens in the technologies of participation, then — we learn from Eurovision — it is equally invested in constructing this as a pedagogy of practicality. Individual votes don’t matter; capital does. Nationhood is as much a matter of material flows and processes of power as it is of utopic ideals. Or as ABBA would put it in Waterloo –– the1974 winning entry –– “I feel like I win when I lose.”